Studio Habits of Mind (SHoM) empower students to articulate their learning in any subject matter, and provide an entry point for learning based on individual choice and need. They are not hierarchical, and they can be used in guided instruction or constructivist teaching modalities.

 

8 Studio Habits of Mind

1. Develop Craft: Learning to use tools, materials, artistic conventions; and learning to care for tools, materials, and space.

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

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

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

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

6. Reflect: Learning to think and talk with others about an aspect of one’s work or working process, and learning to judge one’s own work and working process and the work of others.

7. 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.

8. Understand (Arts) Community: 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. Arts is in parenthesis here as it can easily be switched with other disciplines, like science or history.

Studio Habits of Mind from Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education, Hetland, Winner, et al, Teachers College Press, 2007.

Students are creating Landscapes with a Pattern design.  Once the students draw their landscape, making certain they clearly have a foreground, middle ground and background, they fill the shapes they have created with a variety of patterns.  The final stop in the lesson is to add color to those patterns.

 

Students need to bring in moist leaves in a zipped plastic bag for a future printmaking lesso