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The VALUES Project

January 25, 2006

The VALUES Project is a growing network of schools and educators learning to engage all students in deep learning and understanding through the teaching and integration of the visual arts.

The Center for Art and Public Life, the Alameda County Office of Education, and Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education are collaborating to promote and deepen arts learning in public schools through the VALUES Project.

The project works to understand and support the role of arts education in achieving high levels of success for all K–12 students.

The project piloted use of educational frameworks for curriculum and teacher development that scaffold teaching and learning to deepen understanding in visual art as its own distinct area of study and when integrated across subject areas.

This arts learning initiative encompasses more than art itself. The VALUES Project investigates creative cognitive processes and supports best practices developed from this research in K–12 education. What are the studio habits of mind that take place during the creative process? What do students and teachers experience when creating art, and how do these experiences support the development of understanding? How can these practices best be learned and applied to education at large?

The VALUES Project is a core initiative of the Alameda County Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership's strategic plan to bring arts learning to every child, in every school, every day. Now, K–12 teachers in all subjects are receiving professional development and are able to apply techniques in their classrooms. CCA students are hired and trained to create their own curricula and work alongside teachers as assistants while working to become the next generation of artist-educators. Cultural and higher education institutions are partnering to share resources and infuse the arts in teacher education and credentialing programs.

The Teaching for Understanding Framework guides teachers' lesson plan design to help their students develop dispositions to use discipline specific content and techniques flexibly in a wide range of contexts both within and beyond the classroom. The framework helps guide teachers' decisions about what to teach, how to communicate their intentions to students, and how to support students in challenging misconceptions and developing patterns of rigorous thinking.

The Studio Thinking Framework guides teachers to reflect on what they intend students to learn in relation to the Studio Habits of Mind, eight cognitive dispositions of mature artistic thinking and practice in the visual arts. Students who develop these habits become more alert to the world, more skilled at thinking about it, and more able to generate the commitment to act mindfully upon it as visual artists. In addition, the Studio Thinking Framework identifies and defines three typical classroom structures used by studio arts teachers to support students in developing these ways of thinking. These are Demonstration-Lectures (brief, visually rich lectures that convey information students will use immediately), Students-at-Work (sessions in which students work on individual or group challenges while teachers observe and offer "just-in-time" instruction), and Critique (brief, meta-cognitive pauses in which teachers and students reflect upon student work that is in progress or finished).

Studio Habits of Mind
(Copyright 2004 The President and Fellows of Harvard College on Behalf of Project Zero)

  • Develop Craft Technique: Learning to use tools (e.g., viewfinders, brushes), materials (e.g., charcoal, paint), and artistic conventions (e.g., perspective, color mixing).
    Studio Practice: Learning to care for tools, materials, and space.

  • Engage & Persist Learning to embrace problems of relevance within the art world and/or of personal importance, to develop focus and other mental states conducive to working and persevering at art tasks.

  • Envision Learning to picture mentally what cannot be directly observed and imagine possible next steps in making a piece.

  • Express Learning to create works that convey an idea, a feeling, or a personal meaning.

  • Observe Learning to attend to visual contexts more closely than ordinary "looking" requires, and thereby to see things that otherwise might not be seen.

  • Reflect Question & Explain: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one's work or working process.

  • Evaluate Learning to judge one's own work and working process and the work of others in relation to standards of the field.

  • Stretch & Explore Learning to reach beyond one's capacities, to explore playfully without a preconceived plan, and to embrace the opportunity to learn from mistakes and accidents.

  • Understand Art World Domain: Learning about art history and current practice. Communities: Learning to interact as an artist with other artists (i.e., in classrooms, in local arts organizations, and across the art field) and within the broader society.

The VALUES project is led by Dr. Lois Hetland, Principal Investigator at Project Zero, Harvard School of Education and Associate Professor of Art Education at the Massachusetts College of Art; Louise Music, Arts Learning Coordinator and Project Director, Alliance for Arts Learning Leadership, Alameda County Office of Education; and Ann Wettrich, Associate Director of Education, California College of the Arts Center for Art and Public Life.

Teachers in Alameda County apply for the Art in Education Teaching Institute.

CCA Students may apply for Community Student Fellow positions working in K-12 classrooms.

CCA Students may work towards their teacher credentials by enrolling in the SMART program Teaching Concentration.

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