Programs we offer
Monthly Online Public Programs
Get Started with VTS: Learn it this week. Use it next week.
Getting started with Visual Thinking Strategies is simple. Our hands-on, evidence-based methods are practical, easy to learn, and immediately usable—no special materials or prior experience needed. In response to growing global demand, we offer monthly online trainings at cost. Whether you’re working in a K–12 classroom, museum, university, or medical setting, you’ll gain skills you can apply right away—and join a dynamic community of learners committed to making education more engaging, inclusive, and effective.
We offer regular professional development in VTS, from beginner to advanced facilitation, practice with coaching, troubleshooting office hours, and a selective train-the-trainer pathway. Less frequent programs include Housen’s Aesthetic Development research, or milestones in visual learning, image selection, facilitator coaching and VTS in science.
In these programs, you’ll participate in live VTS discussions led by expert facilitators, practice leading your own, learn relevant research, reflect with peers, break down the methods, and receive individualized feedback from experienced coaches. This hands-on approach builds the skills and confidence to bring VTS into your own teaching environment.
Educators are often expected to be inclusive, flexible, engage every learner, and improve outcomes — without clear strategies for how. VTS offers research-based, practical ways to engage students and make learning happen.
We offer customized online training worldwide and in-person training through private consulting. How can we support your learning? info@vtshome.org
VTS Beginner Practicum
- Understand inclusive, learner-centered facilitation
- Learn the elements of the Visual Thinking Strategies method
- Begin facilitating and reflecting on VTS image discussions
- VTS Beginner Practicum is offered online 11 times/year
VTS Advanced Practicum
- Practice advanced facilitation techniques
- Identify how facilitation choices support & impact the discussion
- Understand the influence of several key theorists on the method and stance of VTS
- Consider the ways facilitation might shift with a non-art “image”
- Identify some tools to re-frame comments rooted in bias and assumption
- VTS Advanced Practicum is offered online 4 times/year
VTS Coaching Workshop I & II
- Deepen understanding of VTS coaching methodology
- Develop skills for 1-on-1 and group coaching
- Practice, reflect on and refine coaching skills
- VTS Coaching Workshop I is offered online 3 times/year
- VTS Coaching Workshop II is offered online 2 times/year
VTS Image Selection Workshop
- Learn criteria for selecting images for VTS discussions for any subject area
- Practice developmentally appropriate image selection specific to your context
- Sharpen learner-centered facilitation and program design skills
- Understand how VTS can broadly support teaching/learning
- VTS Image Selection Workshop is offered online 2 times/year
VTS Learning Milestones Workshop
- Introduction to the research by Dr. Abigail Housen that laid the groundwork for VTS –mapping the development of visual learning. Visual literacy is not innate, but learned through practice.
- Consider the stages of Aesthetic Development, the growth of Visual Cognition, and what learning with VTS looks like, through actual viewers comments as they look at art.
- VTS Aesthetic Development Workshop is offered online 2 times/year
VTS in Science Workshop
- Apply VTS facilitation skills to non-art objects and inquiry-based contexts
- Sharpen learner-centered facilitation skills
- Learn how VTS can support science teaching/learning broadly and build student skills relevant to understanding science
- Program design science modules using VTS, focusing on how to structure the different fact-based and discussion-based ways of learning.
- VTS in Science Workshop is offered online based on availability
Other Services
VTS Look Club Online
VTS Look Club Online is an experimental, monthly, one-hour program, for anyone to join via Zoom. VTS Look Club Online is an opportunity to come together as a community, to practice looking, talking, listening, and engaging with art and each other.
Consulting
VTS offers consulting services tailored to your objectives –whether you are a K-12 school, museum, university, medical center, not for profit organization or corporate institution. Consulting services include staff workshops, professional development, image/curriculum selection support, team building experiences, curriculum and program development, whole school or district implementation and facilitator coaching.
School Programs
VTS school programs are multi-year professional development relationships between classrooms, schools, and districts. Our model includes a mix of full-staff trainings, grade-level or content-area group debriefings, and classroom co-teaching sessions each year. Both our professional development training programs and image curriculum are sequential and developmentally based to reflect student and teacher growth in critical thinking, language and art-viewing skills over time.
Implementing VTS at your school!
Speaking Engagements
Our staff of experienced Trainers have been teaching and learning with VTS for many years all over the United States and internationally. To arrange a speaking engagement, keynote, or introductory presentation with a VTS Trainer, please contact us.
Deepen Your VTS Experience
Curriculum
Stay current with the latest resources, image sets and curriculum with a VTS Web subscription. The Visual Thinking Strategies website offers 12 month subscriptions for both organizations and individuals.
Certification
The VTS Certification Program offers credentials, recognition and benefits to our ever-growing network of practitioners around the world. Certification is awarded to individuals that demonstrate the technique and presence of a skilled practitioner.
Site Specific: The Journal of VTS
Site Specific is a window into our larger community of VTS practitioners’ depth of experience as we continue to use VTS in new environments and with new content, learning from colleagues, teachers, and students as we do.
VTS Research
Browse our online collection of research of VTS and a variety of applied subjects.