Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO

Artful Literacy: Communicating, Writing and Reading About Art is a one-hour experience in which participants look, think, and express their verbal and written ideas to create Art with Words. This visual skills tour, developed for grades three to five, has components adaptable to levels as high as college. During the session attendees will have the opportunity to explore the training manual for this program and participate in some of the narrative and descriptive activities and the integrated art activity.

Presenters: Sharon Rouse and Honey Goldberg

Theme Category: Communication

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD

Ancient Engineers to Modern Innovations uses artifacts in the Walters Art Museum's collection to introduce middle and high school students to ancient engineering discoveries. Participants will be invited to consider how their museum's art and artifacts can be used as a springboard for discussion of STE(A)M content. A sample of the interactive discussions and activities that students experience on the tour will be provided. Participants will also be offered a model for the strategic development and introduction of a new tour and an approach to making complex content accessible to students. Participants will also learn how the Walters education staff collaborated with the Maryland Science Center and NASA.

Presenters: Carol Doctrow and Sheila Vidmar

Theme Category: Successful Tours for School Groups

Des Moines Art Center, Des Moines 

In this Breakout Session a set of practical strategies for designing tours to encourage student engagement will be presented and will cover managing groups during transitions and anticipating and responding to challenging behaviors. Presenting docents will demonstrate techniques for supporting positive behaviors using examples from Des Moines Art Center tours. Session participants will be encouraged to share successful strategies for supporting positive behavior. The opportunity to problem-solve challenging situations will be offered to participants. This session will feature tours for pre-school, elementary and secondary students.

Presenters: Deborah Hansen and Sally Case

Theme Category: Successful Tours for School Groups

Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio

Art & Selfie is an identity & art tour program for students in grades 6‐12 that explores sexuality, gender identity, body image and race in art, highlighting artists in the museum's collection such as James Gobel, Cindy Sherman & Robert Colescott.

Presenters: Patty Falls and Mary Jo Worthington

Theme Category: Successful Tours for School Groups

Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo Ohio

This breakout session presents activities to help students develop the ability to look closely at and describe an object. Students use descriptive vocabulary to describe an object during the activities on the tour. The activities are designed to meet Common Core Literacy Standards CCSS.ELA-Literacy.CCRA.R.7: Integrate and evaluate content presented in diverse media and formats, including visually and quantitatively, as well as in words.

Presenters: Ann Strickler and Helen Kirk

Theme Category: Successful Tours for School Groups

This presentation tracks Carnegie Museum of Art's progress to incorporate writing and sketching into gallery-based school programs and explains the collaborative process among docents, education staff, and classroom teachers to create program content, train docents and prepare teachers.

Institution: Carnegie Museum of Art
Presenter: Hattie Lehman, Co-Presenters: Merle Culley and Joke Slagle

A Training Program for Stepping Up Effective Docent Engagement with Youth

Distractions that disengage youth on school tours have escalated and are taxing docents' abilities to make museum experiences meaningful for students. A university educator/docent and the Museum's Director of Education will offer insights that will help docents step up their skills for engaging adolescents and youth effectively. They will present a humorous blend of strategies that build docents' confidence in their abilities to overcome these challenging distractions.

Presenters: Dr. Teri Evans-Palmer, Assistant Professor of Art Education and school docent who has researched engaging students with humor and heart; Kate Carey, Education Director and developer of Docent Training Programs

Learn about and practice engaging, open-ended, student-centered gallery activities you can use to teach skills addressed in the Common Core English Language Standards, while helping students make personal connections to museum objects.  These skills include communication, critical thinking and evidential reasoning.

Institution: Walters Art Museum
Presenter: Jan C. Thorman