Assignment 6 -- VTS -- Ellen Stoltz-McGinity

discuss the implications and use in your classroom of implementing and using VTS. Add at least one website link, with a brief description about it, that demonstrates a way to use VTS in a classroom.

Overall, I can see using VTS to help students explore their own reactions to artwork, photographs, and other things they see around them. I love the statement about how children WANT to make sense of what they see, and that we, as educators, need to build on that innate desire. I am personally excited about using VTS to really help strengthen connections between the arts -- to LOOK at a piece of art or some other visual representation while LISTENING to music; or to choose a piece of music (or come up with a list of music terms --especially expressive terms-- that represents a picture we are looking at, and then justify their choices. For example, maybe we would look at a Degas of ballerinas, and choose from two pieces that we listen to. Or we would look at Van Gogh's Starry Night and choose between tempo terms and dynamics terms, maybe even choose instrumentation for a piece that would go with this work of art.

The website linked below, ACADEMY FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING EXCELLENCE, comes from the University of Southern Florida, and has a lot of areas to explore. I looked at the teacher tab, and found it to have a good basic outline of how to use VTS in our classrooms. It kind of breaks up the responsibilities of teacher vs. those of student in a step-by-step way. It also has a link to some videos.

https://www.usf.edu/atle/teaching/visual-thinking-strategies.aspx

Please copy and paste into your browser to access.

Ellen,

I really enjoyed your response. I like how you put emphasis on that it is our role as educators to allows the students the opportunity to make sense of what they see. The website you linked was very helpful. Looking through the teachers role vs the students role when facilitating VTS is important. One role I found that will be very important is using neutral paraphrasing with students, rather than using words like "right" or "wrong". This is to allow them to express themselves and there should be no "wrong answer".

Thanks for the resource!

Hello,

I also really liked the comment about students wanting to make sense of what they see. What an interesting idea! Of course we want to understand what we are seeing around us. Art can often times leave us with questions that we want to have an answer for. For example, we want to know why the people look sad or what they are eating or what it is they are celebrating. We can make predictions and dig into our own background to come up with answers. As the little boy in the video said "I think they are at a cemetery." It became clear to me that this little boy has some sort of connection to a cemetery and what happens there. He was able to apply his own knowledge and his own memory in order to interpret the image he was looking at. The website you found looks very helpful as well! Some great options to further teacher understanding and build the comfort to use VTS in our own classrooms.

I like how your article shows the questions that VTS has the students asking and shows the roles of the students. Great article.