Success with VTS

I want to write more about my use of Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) with my English students at Nagoya University of the Arts and elsewhere. VTS is an approach to teaching critical thinking skills using visual images that was developed by Abigail Housen at Harvard and Philip Yenawine at MOMA to help museum visitors get more out of their viewing experience. The approach has been expanded and adapted to teach many subjects at many levels, including me.

I was coteaching a course called "Art Through English and English Through Art" with Professor Chimako Maeda at Nagoya University of the Arts and she told me about VTS. I was immediately hooked. In VTS students answer three questions about an artwork, "What's going on in this picture?," "What do you see that makes you say that?," and "What more can we find?" The VTS facilitator doesn't give his or her opinion regarding the artwork at all and doesn't even provide students with feedback regarding their observations. Instead, the facilitator paraphrases students' comments and tries to find links between their ideas. Language teachers will see the attraction!

My background is cooperative learning, so I adapted a pair-share-compare activity in which students in a four-member group share their own observations with a partner, then share their partner's observations with the other two students in the group, and then each student in the group of four goes off to meet with a representative from another group. In a class of 20 this means that every student hears every idea. Having to report their partner's and their group's ideas means they have to listen, understand, and repeat what they hear several times.

In my dissertation I also write about how Paul Nation's Four Skills Approach and his and Stuart Webb's Technique Feature Analysis fit in to my adaption of VTS, but maybe I'll leave that and more details about other tasks I have students do (word clouds, for example) for later. I will also share my progression from the worksheet I used in my research to the one I'm using now, and will finish with the one I will probably end up with. My topic this time is about success with VTS!

Today we are in the 7th week of our semester and students have been practicing my adapted approach since the beginning of the semester. Today it was very gratifying that students in both of my classes were making an effort to share their ideas. Most of them had submitted their ideas ahead of time using Google Classroom, and they all understand that they have to write keywords rather than whole sentences (I want them to remember and process--not just read) both for their own ideas and for the ideas they hear, and while some "cheat" by writing out longer sentences and even peeking at their smart phones (I actually make a list of all of their ideas available sorted by ID number, so I'm a bit of an enabler), most of them made a good effort today.

Todays topic was from the weekly Visual Thinking Strategies page on the New York Times. The NYT posts a picture from the newspaper and ask students around the world to answer the VTS questions, and a representative from VTS moderates the ideas. The image I used this time was from May 1st, 2017.

VTS NYT 5/1/2017

Today's vocabulary included words like celebration, ritual, punishment, adorned(!), decorated, flowers, costume, and more. And, as always, there were some observations I had never heard before, this time one student observed that she was interested in the woman's expression, but she wasn't sure whether the woman was happy or sad or enjoying the experience. Pretty perceptive! One group in the 3rd period started giggling and I walked over to see why. It wasn't anything bad--they were just having a good time sharing their ideas.

Anyway, a long blog. My main take away is people love sharing their ideas and having others listen, react, and share them with others, and that includes "quiet" Japanese students.