How did the Thinking Museum® Approach come about?
Back in 2011 I discovered that museum educators and guides were struggling to meet the demands of leading inquiry-based guided experiences with art and objects. They didn’t know what questions to ask, how to get the group participating and how to share their knowledge in a way that engaged everyone to want to find out more.
At the same time, I found out that teachers weren’t getting what they wanted from museum programmes either. In a focus group with school teachers, they told me that they wanted guided programmes that engaged students fully with objects in the museum, encouraged deep observation, fostered group discussion, collaborative learning and (crucially) involved “less telling”.
These two issues had something in common: engagement, or rather, the lack of it. Museum educators were struggling to fully capture the attention of their audiences, while teachers were finding museum programmes uninspiring for their students.
There was an ‘engagement deficit’.
This realisation inspired me to start designing an approach with engagement at its core, for educators to easily use on guided experiences.
My aims at the outset were simple: to address the concerns I heard from educators about designing and facilitating inquiry-based guided experiences, and to create an approach that was effective, simple and practical.
What is the Thinking Museum® Approach?
The Thinking Museum® Approach offers a flexible structure for exploring museum and heritage collections, and their stories.
It allows museum and heritage educators, guides, docents and teachers to confidently design and facilitate inquiry-based experiences with art and objects, for any audience.
The Thinking Museum® Approach is a way to engage audiences with what they are looking at, who they’re with and where they are. It fosters meaningful connections: between educators and participants, amongst the participants themselves, and with the artwork or object being explored.
3 Foundations and 8 Practices
There are 3 Foundations at the heart of the Thinking Museum® Approach – observation and noticing, shared visual inquiry and personal discovery. These three simple concepts are the crucial ingredients for engagement on guided experiences and the building blocks that support the Thinking Museum® Approach and make it effective.
There are 8 Practices that are core to the Thinking Museum® Approach: questioning, facilitation, multimodality, creating a community of collaboration, practice and coaching, reflective practice, intentional information and deliberate design. Each of these practices plays an important role in creating and sustaining engagement. It’s the combination of these 8 practices together that makes this such an effective approach.
THE ART ENGAGER: REIMAGINING GUIDED EXPERIENCES IN MUSEUMS
My book The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums explores the Thinking Museum® Approach in full.
You will learn how to give your discussions a flexible structure and substance using my 10 Questioning Practices designed specifically for use on guided experiences in museums. You will also discover how to share information as a tool to engage your audience and how best to engage and connect with your group, and much more.
Full of practical steps & helpful advice, this book provides you with everything you need to create engaging guided experiences in museums.
The Art Engager: Reimagining Guided Experiences in Museums will be published soon as an e-book and a print edition too.
If you want to hear more about it and be one of the first to get your own copy, sign up below!