Week 6

ü Critically examine the Zander article through a VTS lens
· How might Housen & Yenawine respond to Zander’s ideas?
ü Reflect on Beattie chapters
· Share any ideas you may have regarding the application of scoring/judging strategies to VTS lessons
Share any ideas you may have regarding the use of VTS in summative evaluations

VTS could be a good model that perfectly materialized Zanger’s claim. VTS not only involves all kinds of requirements of good dialogues in art classroom but also highly develops each requirement in detail for the meaningful dialogue. Since I was a art history major student, I was shocked when I met VTS discussion first time. I was waiting for the right answer to the image, since I knew little about that image. However, when finished discussion, it just finished! The dialogue or discussion hadn’t been provided often and they were always teacher-centered. There were definitely correct answers and art teachers were often accustomed to directly delivering the artists’ intentions without meaningful dialogues. However, VTS discussion opens many kinds of possibility. It doesn’t allow teacher to be a person who is teaching but encourage them to be a facilitator. This is an absolutely student-centered discussion. In VTS discussion, participants could be taught to use “I” messages when talking about their beliefs and to avoid generalizations such as “everybody knows” or “you ought to” as Zander mentioned. In terms of that, dialogues in VTS could satisfy the requirement that the ideal dialogue in art classroom has to be about sharing, and exploring different points of view.
As London's claim that teachers should learn to speak from their heart and with a non-judgemental point of view, VTS would be a perfect instruction which could allow teacher to have to aim to share ideas rather than impose their own thinking on students.

Terry Barratt suggests several questions which could be used for encouraging dialogue in art classroom such as “What do you see?” “What is that artwork about?” “How do you know?”, “How does art relate to my own interests?”. These are very similar to the VTS three questions. But the VTS questions would be much more efficient because each question has logical correlations one another. Besides, VTS also perfectly found a shape in rules or guidelines Zander said which are needed in order to demonstrate courtesy and mutual respect rather than to defend one’s own opinion. As Walker mentioned that current recommendations for teaching increasingly call for meaning making and discussion, VTS would be a perfect instruction which enables teachers to help students to communicate in ways that require them to listen to one another and engage in meaningful dialogue.