Overview+of+TEAM

Greetings to TEAM Participants,

Welcome to **TEAM--Thinking Experiences in the Art Museum: A Partnership Program for Schools**. The next two years will be a learning experience for all of us, and we look forward to embarking on this journey with you and to the discoveries we make together along the way.

TEAM emerged from a series of many meetings and conversations among us here in Student and Teacher Programs at the Art Institute as well as with our peers and colleagues from other arts organizations and from CPS. Through these meetings and conversations, we affirmed our strong and shared belief that visual art, as well as other arts disciplines, have a vital role in a child’s education. The arts certainly inspire creativity and imagination, but in TEAM we are going to focus on how working with visual art might ignite a whole range of higher order thinking skills. We see these connections being made everyday by the students and teachers we work with in the museum and we know that you see them as well in your classrooms. Through the TEAM program, we hope to spotlight components of thinking and focus on the ways in which working with the visual arts can strengthen critical thinking skills in many curricular areas.

Thank you for joining us in this work and here’s to a great partnership!

Department of Museum Education, The Art Institute of Chicago
 * Sarah Alvarez, Robin Schnur, Karin Jacobson, Grace Murray**