To advance our thinking, we take time to reflect. A key component of learning, the process of reflection promotes critical thinking and fosters the discovery of new ideas. In our work, we reflect with purpose and intent which leads to decisive action.

Our commitment to reflection demonstrates the pursuit of life-long learning in our daily work. If we do not continuously learn through reflection, how can we respond to the rapidly changing world around us? 

“Using Intentional Planning & Evaluation to Improve Programming at the Guggenheim Museum”

For nearly a decade, RK&A has enjoyed a successful collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s Learning Through Art (LTA) program, a 40-year-old teaching artist residency program in New York City public schools. The collaboration began in 2002 with a simple question, “How can we use evaluation to improve LTA?” The answer was to help LTA staff think evaluatively and create an evaluation tool that could continuously guide program implementation. Thus began a deep, fruitful, and exciting collaboration that led to a richer, more refined version of LTA and included two multi-year research studies, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, designed to measure program outcomes related to critical-thinking skills and problem solving.

The initial goal of the collaboration between RK&A and LTA was to create an evaluation tool for program improvement. To develop the tool, RK&A and LTA identified the desired results of the program along with criteria to measure the achievement of those results. LTA then administered the tool annually to teaching artists and classroom teachers, and the administrative staff gathered to reflect on the implications of the findings. LTA focused on the aspects of the program that scored highest and lowest, as well as those areas in which teaching artist and classroom teachers differed in their assessment of the program.  Through these reflective discussions, LTA was able to identify areas of the LTA program ripe for improvement and further exploration.  Whether the program enhanced students’ problem solving skills emerged as one of these areas, and it became the focus of the second U.S. Department of Education-funded research study.

Our experience with the Guggenheim reminded us of the inextricable links among planning, implementation, reflection, and evaluation and the cycle of learning these four actions create. Integral to the success of the collaboration between RK&A and LTA was the way LTA leadership embraced and fully integrated evaluation into the program implementation cycle, rather than using evaluation solely as a tool to judge the merit of the program. The constant feedback loop created through annual evaluation, reflection, and program improvement allowed LTA to deliver a high-quality program that achieved its outcomes, which in turn established the foundation upon which to confidently embark on two major research studies.

Check out the news release, “Guggenheim study reveals importance of arts education in development of problem-solving skills and creativity” [43KB PDF].

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