When I think back on the development of Learning Through Art, one of the moments that stands out most clearly is the decision to articulate the Habits of Mind using the all the work of Project Zero to name the ways of thinking that teachers and students were already practicing through looking at art.
This wasn’t an external framework we borrowed. It wasn’t something handed down to us.
It wasn’t a theory someone else brought into the room. It emerged through years of teaching, reflection, and listening to teachers and the idea to identify, define, and name these habits came from me.
Not because I wanted ownership, but because I wanted clarity. I wanted a way to describe what was happening in the galleries and classrooms that was richer than “critical thinking” and more honest than any standardized outcome. Teachers were already observing deeply, interpreting generously, considering multiple perspectives, revising their ideas, and making connections across content and lived experience. And I wanted language that honored that practice.
Naming the Habits of Mind was a way of making visible the real intellectual labor of looking at art. It gave teachers something they could point to when administrators asked,
“What is the museum adding to student learning?” It gave museum educators a shared vocabulary that matched the complexity of what we were actually doing. It gave students a way to understand their own thinking, not as right or wrong, but as evolving.
The idea grew out of a simple realization: if we don’t name this work, other people will.
And they will almost certainly name it incorrectly, flatten it, or claim it.
I saw teachers doing extraordinary, subtle, complex work in the galleries and their classrooms. Work that involved patience, risk-taking, curiosity, ambiguity tolerance, and emotional intelligence. I saw how transformational it was across grade levels, especially in middle school and high school. And I knew that if we didn’t define the thinking behaviors behind that process, the museum would default to language that didn’t reflect the depth of what was really happening.
So, I began mapping what I observed. I wrote down the moves teachers made, the moves students made, the kinds of questions that opened conversations, and the ways meaning shifted through dialogue. I tested categories, refined them, threw some out, brought others back in. I sat in the galleries with teachers, listening to the way they facilitated discussions and the way students processed ideas out loud.
Slowly, the Habits of Mind emerged not as imposed categories but as discovered ones.
And once they were articulated, everything else deepened. Teachers could see their own expertise more clearly. Museum educators could describe their practice with precision.
Students could name what they were doing intellectually, not just visually. The museum could finally understand that this work was not soft; it was rigorous.
The Habits of Mind also became a kind of protection. When institutions face pressure for measurable outcomes, having a well-articulated thinking framework helps safeguard the richness of the work. It reminds decision-makers that learning through art is not ornamental, it is foundational.
Over the years, I’ve watched other people reference or even claim the LTA Habits of Mind as if they emerged from a committee or a curriculum department. But they didn’t. They came from years of teaching. From my own practice as an educator. From listening carefully to teachers and students. From the slow, deliberate work of noticing patterns and naming what mattered.
And they came from a conviction I’ve held for my entire career: that art is one of the strongest catalysts for deep thinking, and museum education is at its best when we make that thinking visible.
I didn’t link to the Habits of Mind to hold ownership. I created them to hold the work —
to protect it, to honor it, to articulate what teachers and museum educators were already doing, and to ensure that no institution could flatten or erase the complexity of the practice.
Naming the habits didn’t reduce the work. It clarified it. It gave teachers and students a framework that belonged to them as much as to the museum. And it remains one of the contributions I’m proudest of; not because my name is on it, but because the thinking it represents still lives in classrooms and galleries all over Houston.
It was a way of saying: This is what learning through art looks like. This is what it feels like.
This is the intelligence inside the work. Don’t mistake its simplicity for ease. Or its origins.
