Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) / Choice Art Education

In this classroom, the child is the artist, the room is set up in centers to support his/her/their ideas, and we explore what artists do through the Eight Studio Habits of Mind (Harvard Project Zero). 

Why do we work this way? TAB/Choice Art Education and the Studio Habits of Mind are research based models that give children ample opportunities to practice the art of producing instead of consuming.

​Lifetime Creative Accomplishment Has Stronger Link to Childhood Creativity Than IQ*

In 1958, a group of 400 children in Minneapolis completed a series of creativity tasks designed by E. Paul Torrence. In one task, a child was handed a toy fire truck and asked, “How could you improve this toy to make it better and more fun to play with?” The child quickly thought of 25 improvements to the toy. Then, for 50 years, Torrence and his colleagues tracked the children, recording “every business founded, every research paper published, and every grant awarded. They tallied the books, dances, radio shows, art exhibitions, software programs, advertising campaigns, hardware innovations, music compositions, public policies (written or implemented), leadership positions, invited lectures, and buildings designed.” 

Not only did Torrence’s test become the gold standard of creativity, but it was also incredibly accurate at predicting those children’s creative accomplishments as adults.  Jonathan Plucker of Indiana University re-analyzed Torrence’s data, and found that the correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ.* 

The Creativity Crisis*

In May of 2010, researcher Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William and Mary discovered a disturbing trend. After looking at decades of creativity scores, he noticed a change after 1990: creativity scores dropped after decades of steady increases.“It is very clear, and the decrease is very significant.”. The“most serious” declines were in the youngest children - Kindergarten through sixth grade.*

With this research in mind, and knowing that creativity is an undisputed need for our economy and for solving the complex problems we are confronted with today, it is imperative that our kids have ample opportunities to re-connect with the experiences that promote creative thinking.* From The Creativity Crisis by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman, Newsweek Magazine, July 10, 2010

Resources to Learn More

TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) Website

www.teachingforartisticbehavior.org