Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
This routine uses the power of narrative to help students make observations and encourages them to use their imagination to elaborate on and extend their ideas. Its emphasis on storytelling also encourages students to look for connections, patterns, and meanings.
Application: When and where can it be used?
The routine works with any kind of visual art that stays still in time – such as painting or sculpture. Use Beginning, Middle, or End when you want students to develop their writing or storytelling skills.
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
The routine helps students make detailed observations by drawing their attention to the forms in an artwork—its formal aspects—and giving them specific categories of things to look for.
Application: When and where can I use it?
The routine can be used with any kind of visual art. It can also be used with visually rich non-art images or objects. Like the Looking: Ten Times Two routine, students can use the routine on its own, or prior to having a discussion about an artwork with another routine. It is especially useful before a writing activity because it helps students develop descriptive language.
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
Formulating and exploring an interesting question is often as important than finding a solution. This routine encourages students to create interesting questions and then imaginatively mess around with them for a while in order to explore their creative possibilities. It provides students with the opportunity to practice developing good questions that provoke thinking and inquiry into a topic.
Application: When and where can I use it?
Use Creative Questions to expand and deepen students’ thinking, to encourage students’ curiosity and to increase students motivation to inquire. This routine can be used when you are introducing a new topic to help students get a sense of its breadth. It can be used when you’re in the middle of studying a topic as a way of enlivening students’ curiosity. And it can be used when you are near the end of studying a topic to show students how the knowledge they have gained about the topic helps them to ask ever more interesting questions. This routine can also be used continuously throughout a topic to help the class keep a visible, evolving list of questions about the topic that can be added to at anytime.
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
This routine encourages students to look carefully at details. It challenges them to develop verbal descriptions that are elaborate, nuanced, and imaginative. It also encourages them to distinguish between observations and interpretations by asking them to withhold their ideas about the artwork – their interpretations – until the end of the routine. This in turn strengthens students’ ability to reason carefully because it gives them practice making sustained observations before jumping into judgment.
Application: When and where can I use it?
Use this routine with any kind of visual art that stays still in time, such as painting or sculpture. You can also use the routine with non-art objects, such as a microscope, an animal skeleton, or a plant. The Elaboration Game is an especially good way to launch a writing activity because it helps students develop a detailed descriptive vocabulary.
Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?
This routine helps students identify the essence - or the core idea - of the topic/issue being discussed and reinforces taking notice of central themes as an essential tool in cultivating understanding.
Application: When and where can I use it?
This routine works especially well at the end of a class discussion or session when you want many or all students to succinctly summarize their thoughts. You can ask everyone for a headline that captures their impressions and key ideas about the topic/issue being explored. The routine helps students practice forming a concise synthesis and offers them an opportunity to listen to fellow students’ thinking about the topic/ issue. As you support students in developing their headlines, explain that this is not about creating the best headline; rather, the goal is for students to hear different perspectives and surface nuances.
Before you begin
Choose an art work that might speak to one or more civic themes - themes related to how we live together and how we aspire to live together. Civic topics may include issues such as climate and environmental change, migration, economic and other inequalities, gender and sexuality issues, race/racism, or any theme that addresses values, social conventions, power dynamics, institutions and systems that shape every level of community life, from the local to the global. A word about lenses: The purpose of this routine is to look at an artwork with a distinct lens in mind. A lens is something you look through. Our lenses are affected by our identities or backgrounds. For example: gender, race, ethnicity, age, culture, place, occupation, family role, and more. These identities affect how we see and engage with the larger world. They also shape what we notice and think about when looking at an artwork. This routine invites students to be intentional about looking through distinct lenses as they explore an artwork.
Facilitating the Routine
Class time needed for this routine can range from 10-20 minutes or longer, depending on your facilitation choices. The routine is designed to support individual looking, thinking, dialogue with others, and then reflection. The discussion-oriented steps in the routine (Choose and Share a Lensand Probe) can be done in pairs or small groups.