Visual Thinking Strategies

Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) is a teacher-facilitated strategy originally developed for use on the floor of art museums and galleries. With a few tweaks, VTS can be adapted for use in object-based science classrooms.

VTS asks students to make claims based on their observations and then to cite evidence to back up those claims.

The three VTS questions include:

• What's going on here?

• What do you see that makes you say that?

• What more can you find?

While the three questions may seem simple to deploy, mastering the facilitation can take hours.

When using VTS, facilitators need to incorporate ample wait time. When asking the question "what's going on here?" facilitators should follow the question with the statement "take 30 quiet seconds to make your observations."

When students do make observations, one of the facilitator's duties is to reference the spot on the object or in the picture that the student is referring to. This aspect of VTS is challenging to incorporate in an online classroom. Tools embedded in the video conferencing software can help emphasize aspects of the thing being observed.

When students share their observations, follow those observations immediately with "what do you see that makes you say that?" As students explain the rationale behind their statement, facilitate the discussion by paraphrasing student responses. This is also a good time to introduce and incorporate content-specific vocabulary.

When one student's observations are exhausted, ask the group "what more can we find?" to restart the process.