Strategies & Ideas

Reading Art Across the Curriculum

Reading Art Across the Curriculum is a course from Focus 5, Inc, that encourages the use artwork, especially portraits to develop literacy and critical thinking skills.

Portraits are often viewed as a mere depiction of a person when in actuality they can be read as visual texts that communicate information without words. The goal of this approach is for teachers to learn how powerful portraits can be in the classroom, to feel more confident looking, thinking and talking about portraits, and to use artworks as a regular component of all instruction across the curriculum.

Visible Thinking Routines (VTR)

Visible Thinking Routines developed by Project Zero from Harvard University, researched and defined visible thinking, as “ practices that help make thinking visible: Thinking Routines loosely guide learners’ thought processes and encourage active processing.

Visible Thinking Routines’ purpose and goals are described as:

“Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students’ thinking with content learning across subject matters. An extensive and adaptable collection of practices, Visible Thinking has a double goal: on the one hand, to cultivate students’ thinking skills and dispositions, and, on the other, to deepen content learning. By thinking dispositions, we mean curiosity, concern for truth and understanding, a creative mindset, not just being skilled but also alert to thinking and learning opportunities and eager to take them”

https://www.kidsmart.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/16-17-AXIS-Arts-Integration-Cookbook.pdf