Ngee Ann Secondary School (Singapore) is committed to strengthening the profession of education and helping to raise student achievement through improved classroom practices by exploring new ideas and innovative pedagogy. To this end, the school has adopted Artful Thinking - a model developed by Project Zero, Harvard University Graudate School of Education over 2 years, in collaboration with the Traverse City, Michigan Area Public Schools (TCAPS) for integrating art into regular classroom instruction - as its anchor programme for its Arts Education.

The goal of the Artful Thinking project is to develop a research-based approach to helping teachers regularly use works of visual art and music in their curriculum in ways that strengthen student thinking and learning. The program focuses on experiencing and appreciating art, rather than making art. There are two broad goals of the program: (1) To help teachers create rich connections between works of art and curricular topics; and (2) to help teachers use art as a force for developing students’ thinking dispositions.

The Artful Thining project seeks to improve areas in the curriculum that will strengthen students’ thinking and learning through the use of “thinking routines”. Thinking routines are short, easy-to-learn mini-strategies that extend and deepen students’ thinking and become part of the fabric of everyday classroom life. Thinking Routines are designed to be used flexibly and frequently.

As the first of its kind in the world, Ngee Ann Secondary School is working with a local media design company called Figment to bring the Artful Thinking pedagogy into the very engaging and compelling Second Life social networking environment for students to experience deeper art learning in the virtual world.