What I Wish My Students Had Learned in a TAB Studio

What Art Studios Can Teach About Observation, Decision-Making, and Engagement

By: Jillian Hogan, professor of child development at Siena University, a former music teacher, a professional development provider for arts teachers, and coauthor of Studio Thinking from the Start. Visit Jill at jillhoganinboston.com. , and coauthor of What Artists Do: TAB Pedagogy and Practice for K–12 Choice-Based Art Classes.

Relatively recently, I entered my 40s. I’m learning that, to my surprise, there is a lot to like about the relative calm and self-assuredness of this decade for me. At the same time, I have sometimes been catching myself looking at my undergraduate students and realizing that my face is furrowed, clearly sending the message of “what in the world are you saying?” My ability to relate to Gen Z has worsened as the age gap between me and my students widens. Shockingly, I find myself regularly thinking, “Kids these days!”

But actually, I’m not the only college professor these days looking around her classroom and periodically scratching her head. Maybe it’s not just me losing relevance, but also a change in student engagement in higher education at large. In recent years, professors (and some students) have been trying to sound the alarm about their concerns about student capabilities to engage with and apply themselves to what has traditionally been college level work (Hall, 2023; Horowitch, 2026; McMurtrie, 2024). There are lots of possible variables to blame—COVID quarantines; the ubiquity of phones and their impact on attention (Haidt, 2024); competing and sometimes contradictory perceptions of what college is for (Fischman & Gardner, 2022); K–12’s reliance on standardized testing over emphasizing true, applied understanding (Kohn, 2000); AI’s ability to mimic evidence of human learning; and so forth. There’s strong evidence to support the impact of many of these, and we can undoubtedly make more speculations between characteristics of the changing world and the behaviors observed in Gen Z as a whole. Whether we view these behaviors as problematic deficiencies or simply as changes that organically occur over the passing of generations, it is becoming clearer to me that there is often a mismatch between professors’ understanding of what’s needed in college and the expectations of students for engaging in their college experience.

Fortunately for me, many of my students are thoughtful, mature, and dedicated learners who don’t fulfill these emerging stereotypes. Additionally, my research brings me into environments where skilled art teachers provide learning opportunities where many of those important skills for college can be cultivated among younger students. These environments are Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB) studios, havens for intrinsic motivation, student agency, and scaffolded creativity in PreK–12 visual arts classes (Douglas & Jaquith, 2018).

TAB is a grassroots approach to visual arts education that dates back to the 1970s. The movement has grown from the classroom of a single teacher (Kathy Douglas in Massachusetts) to an approach now seen in schools all over the planet. At the center of TAB is the teacher’s role in providing opportunities for students that allow them to act as artists. The students are the creators—they find inspiration, envision plans, express a message or emotion, gather materials, explore the capabilities and limitations of an artistic medium, collaborate with others, improve their plans, decide when to stop, and describe their product and process to share with others. Students are afforded the benefits and the obligations of making all artistic decisions, and TAB teachers create environments that allow their particular students the confidence and autonomy to do that. In practice, walking into a TAB studio often appears as organized chaos (or just chaos, to the untrained eye). Students are working on their own or in small groups in a variety of artistic media and there are as many themes, messages, and artistic points of view as there are humans in the room.

When I’m feeling frustrated by the impacts of brain rot on undergraduate behavior (or sometimes, of my own after spending too long on TikTok), it makes me wish that all K–12 students had the opportunity to learn that they are capable, agentic decisionmakers who can produce meaningful products and engage in worthwhile processes, as other students do in TAB studios. Below, I describe the three most important ways of thinking that I wish college students had more opportunities to learn during their earlier years.

1. How to Observe

I teach psychology, which depends on the scientific method. But before psychological researchers ever design an experiment or identify any variables, they should have been observant, curious explorers in order to create a good, logical question. This is how penicillin was invented—Sir Alexander Fleming noticed a mold in his petri dish that was avoided by bacterial colonies. Rather than simply saying, “huh, that’s weird,” and throwing the dish away, Fleming was observant of the qualities of the mold on his dish. He maintained curiosity, carefully noticed, and stretched the possibilities of what he was looking at to identify one of our most common antibiotics (History.com, 2010).

In TAB classes, the exploring of materials, and careful observation of their qualities, is incredibly important. Teachers encourage students to play with materials, test those materials’ capabilities, and master their limitations. When students dream up artworks to create, they often need to come up with ways to use materials in atypical ways, and they learn that through being attentively observant to the artistic media. Consider a group of 4th graders making a diorama of their favorite hockey rink: Stymied on how to make the ice appear realistic, one remembers how he noticed what happened when a glob of clear glue had dried at his workspace table, and suggests they use glue in an untraditional way, to dry and look like ice, rather than to be an adhesive. “Discoveries” like these happen all the time in a TAB studio when students have interest in what they’re making, and a reason to be observant.

2. How to Make a Decision

College is a time for lots of decisions, all of which seem very important while they’re under consideration. What should I major in? Should I study abroad? Should I room with this person next year? If I go out tonight, will I do poorly on my math test tomorrow morning? My experience has been that this leaves many undergraduates with constant decision fatigue. One wrong decision seems perilous for a grade, a situationship, or an entire lifetime. For even small decisions about their assignments, many students panic or default immediately to what they think is best for their grade, above all other interests.

In a TAB studio, mistakes happen. Decisions have consequences (“this tape didn’t hold, we should have used the other one,” “no one realizes that this is supposed to be a person since we didn’t make the nose”), and artmaking is often a relatively low-stakes way for students to practice feeling the disappointment that might result from an incorrect decision. Students are creating, inventing, and trying to express complicated emotions, and having the motivation to try things that may not work is often easier to do when working on something self-designed. Because viewing art is laden in subjectivity, the art studio provides a space where mistakes don’t feel as conspicuous and scary.

3. How to Engage

While those of current professor-age can remember a time when you could truly lock in to write an essay at a computer without constant buzzing of notifications, many college students do not. The idea of deep engagement in an academic assignment in which they are not immediately interested can feel difficult, leading to superficial thinking or general apathy.

TAB can’t necessarily help students to like reading philosophy or analyzing a poem in a foreign language, but it can, when properly structured, provide the time and space for students to fall into a flow state (Csikszentmihalyi, 2013), in which they are positively engaged in deep concentration. TAB teachers have stories of students who have worked for weeks and weeks on just one artwork, deeply committed to their vision. Other students expand works into series exploring the same theme, sometimes over years. When students are not engaged in a particular artwork, they are allowed (and, depending on the circumstances, encouraged) to try something new that can better engage them. In doing so, TAB studios provide spaces for students to experience what it’s like to concentrate at something other than a video game or an Instagram reel.

We live in a time that can feel like it’s been overtaken by screens, and TAB studios provide an experience to “go touch grass,” as the kids say. This opens space to practice the kind of slow, thoughtful learning that many of us believe to be most important, in our classrooms and elsewhere.

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Jillian Hogan is a professor of child development at Siena University, a former music teacher, a professional development provider for arts teachers, and coauthor of Studio Thinking from the Start. Visit Jill at jillhoganinboston.com.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2013). Flow: The psychology of happiness. Random House.

Douglas, K. M., & Jaquith, D. B. (2018). Engaging learners through artmaking: Choice-based art education in the classroom (TAB). Teachers College Press.

Fischman, W., & Gardner, H. (2022). The real world of college: What higher education is and what it can be. MIT Press.

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin.

Hall, E. (2023, June 12). Prospective college students increasingly say they feel unprepared for higher education. The Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com

History.com Editors. (2010, February 9). Penicillin discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming | September 3, 1928 | HISTORY. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/september-3/penicillin-discovered

Horowitch, R. (2026, January 20). The film students who can no longer sit through films. The Atlantic. theatlantic.com

Kohn, A. (2000). The case against standardized testing: Raising the scores, ruining the schools. Heinemann.

McMurtry, B. (2024, May 4). Is this the end of reading?. The Chronicle of Higher Education. chronicle.com