MO invites Lithuanian teachers to a new project: will present a method helping to work productively in the classroom
MO Museum is increasingly becoming a space where teachers meet, communicate and create joint activities. This time, in cooperation with the British Council in Lithuania, we invite Lithuanian teachers to participate in free virtual training and the project “Visual Thinking Strategy: Project for Teachers”.
About the project
The project’s main goal is to create collaborative links between the museum and the teaching community in order to learn visual thinking strategy method widely used in MO education. This method helps to develop critical thinking and dialogue competencies, creativity, communication and collaboration skills. It can also be widely applied in a variety of school fields.
The curriculum is designed for educators of various educational institutions and will be implemented remotely. The project will train more than 120 teachers who will work in separate groups of 15 people each.
Teachers will be able to use the acquired knowledge in their own classes, share their experience in sessions with MO educators and other teachers. Project participants – teachers from different schools, together will be able to forge deeper, meaningful professional ties.
At the end of the training, all teachers participating in the project will have the opportunity to join the Teachers’ Passport community organized by MO Museum.
The success of the project for students gave impetus to create a special project for teachers, thus reaching an even larger number of students. The project will also open new opportunities to gradually introduce the visual thinking strategy in the school.
Expand education at MO Museum and virtual museum
“At the end of last year, we completed an educational project for students and various communities. It was also accompanied by educations based on visual thinking strategy. We noticed that 80 % of participants felt the change during this project: they started to participate in the conversation with more confidence, to argue their opinion and listen to the other, to freely discuss not only the artworks but also the issues relevant today”, – says Milda Ivanauskienė, Director of MO Museum.
Often, even during the first meeting, a change was seen in the group of students. While working with this method for a long time, MO educators noticed extremely significant changes. Students who had communication skills problems were not afraid to speak to classmates after a few meetings, expressed their opinion more boldly. For more active students, the method helped develop other skills: creativity, critical thinking, and public speaking skills.
“The success of the project for students gave impetus to create a special project for teachers, thus reaching an even larger number of students. The project will also open new opportunities to gradually introduce the visual thinking strategy in the school. It will also enable teachers to use the method and to expand education in the museum’s physical or virtual spaces”, – adds M. Ivanauskienė.
What awaits the teachers involved in the project?
During the project, MO educators will invite to join meetings of all teachers involved in the project and meetings in separate groups. All teachers involved in the project will gain theoretical and practical knowledge about the visual thinking strategy. They will also be provided with a package of recommendations on how to apply this method in various educational activities
Visual thinking strategy is a method of education developed by MoMA educator Philipe Yenawine and psychologist Abigail Housen and has been actively and successfully applied at MO Museum since the opening. During the sessions, there is a constant dialogue between the educator and the participants, a universal system of questions is used, which encourages observation and description, argument-based interpretation and consistent reasoning.
The basis of the project is the exhibition “Difficult Age. Szapocznikow – Wajda – Wróblewski“
The project is based on the main MO exhibition “Dificult Age. Szapocznikow – Wajda – Wróblewski“. All classes will take place in a virtual exhibition tour specially prepared for the project. During the remote classes, teachers will be able to fully participate in the exhibition, get acquainted with all the works and in the future use the virtual tour of the exhibition in their lessons as another tool of the educational process.
We are implementing the educational project under the “People to People“ program in cooperation with the British Council in Lithuania.
