VTS Sample Lesson*

Preparation

• View the art work you have chosen for your 1st VTS discussion
• Memorize the three key questions
• Is your equipment ready, the room dark and the seating arranged?
• Think about how to introduce VTS to your audience?

Discussion

• BEGINNING Introduce VTS to your audience. Tell the group that this lesson is about viewing images together. It is all about their viewpoints, their observations, and their ideas. Take the participants’ fear by telling them that there is no right or wrong answer. All what counts is their viewpoints.
• PROJECT THE SLIDE. Ask students/patients to examine it silently.
• QUESTIONING. Begin with: What’s going on in this picture? When an interpretation is given, ask:  What do you see that makes you say that? Throughout the discussion, ask: What more can we find?
• RESPONDING
  Point precisely to what participants describe.
  Be supportive as you listen.
  Paraphrase each comment  / Stay neutral and use conditional language Link related statements
  Whenever it is needed use: “What do you see that makes you say that?”
• CONCLUDING THE CLASS
  Compliment the students/patients on their discussion (do not summarize the discussion).

* Cooperation, connection and communication is the hallmark of the Visual Thinking Strategies as developed by Abigail Housen and Philip Yenawine, cofounders of Visual Understanding in Education. Their pioneering work has inspired the development of the Institut für Visuelle Bildung and some parts of worksheets or other materials may include language and information that is courtesy of VTS New York