Making Sense – Two Ways

When you start planning a museum experience for children—an exhibit, environment, event, program or even a museum for children—how do you go about understanding the children you intend to serve?

While professionals and researchers across the museum field have various methods for learning about museum visitors, they are generally not used widely with children. Even when they are, they often have a narrow focus. This is somewhat understandable. Gathering input is time consuming and requires expertise to be helpful. Familiar methods are generally less suited to engaging children. Outside of behavioral observations, methods like focus groups, surveys, and interviews rely on skills children may not have developed fully. When we do consult children, the focus is often limited. We assess their understanding of a concept or a preference for one activity over another.

Wonder of Learning Exhibit: Reggio Children

And yet, we are undergoing a change in our conceptualization of children. Advances in
neuroscience and brain development and educational projects like the Reggio Emilia schools have expanded our view of children as capable social actors, thinkers, and doers, active agents in their play, learning, and development. This provides ample reason to go beyond occasional questions about a specific activity or a focus on a skill rather than on the child to more fully understand and engage them in museums. 

To be more than a good intention, however, we must create meaningful opportunities to actively involve children and learn with and from them. There is no lack of interesting and important questions to explore. In fact, the questions we might ask for planning museum experiences can also tell us something we didn't know about children's thinking, learning, and understanding which is critical to creating experiences with greater impact. These are questions as much about children as about museums; as much about what delights them as what they are learning; and as much about our broader understanding of children as testing a prototype.

Familiar Steps in an Open-ended, Iterative Process. We can explore these questions using familiar steps and methods in evaluation and research and draw on approaches like the pedagogical documentation used in the Reggio schools. This blend creates an open-ended, qualitative, descriptive, emergent, and exploratory approach which offers a broader, richer, more comprehensive view of children's engagement with their world while helping us glimpse what we couldn't otherwise see.

Reggio Children

Like a series of small studies unfolding over time, one study builds on another, fueled by new questions. We don't know just where such studies will lead. We do, however, know that this iterative process of framing questions and thinking and discovering together, will build our understanding of children and contribute to authentic experiences that engage their potential. 

Framing Questions, like developing research questions, brings focus to our interest in better understanding how children make sense of themselves and their world. Questions about children's interests and understanding need to be generous, not reduced to one activity or behavior while ignoring the richness of the context. A question about how children explore a natural setting, for example, can look at how they navigate undefined spaces, are curious about mud, and develop a connection to the natural world. We might even notice something germane to siting the museum building itself or an outdoor nature play area.

Designing for Engagement, like designing a study, considers a promising focus and how to investigate it: the children, their ages and groupings; the setting, the nature of the engagement, and appropriate methods. Here, engagement is understood as children's activity—behavior, movement, conversation—as well as their attention, interest, and its intensity. The study itself is an opportunity for children to interact with materials, the setting, other children, an artist, animals, and ideas in ways that maintain the complexity of the real world. This approach is necessarily open to the unexpected happening.

Watching and Listening, may appear to be less orderly than data collection typically does, but it is no less intentional. An approach that centers on children, their capabilities, agency, and potential follows their interest, attention, actions, questions, hunches, and conversations. Methods like video, photos, recording, drones, drawings, and mapping capture dialogue, movement, play, and transformations of space. Data collection literally follows them, bringing in multiple points of view and ways of capturing their encounters. A debrief immediately following gathers what has escaped the eye and ear to produce multiple snapshots and sequences of the children's explorations.

Reviewing and Reflection, much like analysis, is concerned with thinking about what we are

Photo credit: Vergeront

seeing in the information and impressions we have gathered. Multiple passes of videos, photos, recordings, or drawings by different people capture what we think might be happening. With careful consideration, we arrive at possible interpretations. We work to locate the meaning making in the child and then in ourselves. And we do it again. Why? Because in suspending our certainty about what we are noticing, what the child might be feeling, paying attention to, or doing, we are also learning about how we see. We are making sense in a way that is provisional both for the child and for us in understanding the child.

Relaunching, much like results, considers where exploration might lead. While a study might be a starting point for understanding a child's interests, questions, and ideas on a potential exhibit topic or activity, it should also help us make sense of how children work with others, set their own goals in play, or view their capabilities and accomplishments. The genesis of an exhibit can come from observing and listening to children rather than from exhibit planners, marketing, school curriculum, or funder interest. A Relaunch invites exploring alternative meanings, pursuing another line of inquiry, and shaping questions around a museum's long-term interest in children. 

Making Sense of Children Making Sense. The involved and evolving nature of a process concerned with making sense of children making sense of the world is challenging both in practice and in making the benefits concrete and concise. Brief descriptions and photos from 3 museum projects follow, each highlighting various aspects of this approach.

•    Planning for the recently opened Louisiana Children's Museum (LCM) in New Orleans involved groups of children and parents in a set of activities and conversations that informed the design direction, exhibit development, architectural design, and graphics. Development of LCM's 2011 museum strategic master plan began with a visitor panel of a dozen children, 5 - 10 years, their parents and caregivers that met 3 times. Sessions focused on what was fascinating to children in LCM's Julia Street exhibits, how parents and caregivers saw their child's thinking and learning, and what was important and interesting to the children about water in their everyday lives. Children's drawings, discussions, photographs, and words not only expressed their ideas and interests, but also inspired planning. 

Photo credit: © Gyroscope Inc.

One boy's drawing of his ideal exhibit showed a giant chessboard overlaid with a map of New
Orleans and sounds collected from across the city. Moving a chess piece would activate a city sound on that square. His drawing inspired the Jackson Square entry experience in the Make Your Mark gallery.

Recognizing how this first round of conversations and drawings brimmed with children's ideas and parent observations, dialogue sessions were held throughout the 8 years of planning. They were incorporated into camps, one-time sessions, and school projects. Sessions focused on topics about growing food, where ideas come from, water, animals and their habitats. Some focused on the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. The insights and interests that emerged from children and families inspired experiences (a crawfish boil), became gallery graphics, were incorporated into way-finding, and even appear in LCM's logo. Highlighting the role of children's contributions, use of a child's art work includes the child's name and age.

Photo Credit: Louisiana Children's
Museum

Through the team's observations and listening, members learned that these children have a sense of place, understand something about local food culture, and how water plays a role in moving food from New Orleans to the world. Relationships are important to them; they take care of things, help each other, and are careful observers. These observations and new questions are being folded into LCM's ongoing work.

•    Interest in exploring children's ideas about communities and the places that make up communities prompted a 2014 collaboration between Minnesota Children's Museum and the Reggio-inspired Network of Minnesota. As part of MCM's 2014-2017 expansion and renovation, Seeing Everyday Places was a project within a project within a project. MCM shared with educators and families in local early years programs the community settings the Our World gallery would include: a fire station, park, farmers' market, hardware store, post office, and food truck. 

Over several months, children visited one of the settings with their class, in small groups, or with their families. They met and talked with people at the hardware store; went behind the scenes at the bank; and visited the fire station. New lines of inquiry emerged: curiosity about types of mailboxes and each child's family mailbox, and how more money is made. 

Fire Station Kitchen
Courtesy Minnesota Children's Museum

Documentation panels from each of the groups highlighted connections children found between everyday places in their neighborhoods and communities. "A Story of Materials and Money" captured a family's trips to the hardware store. That parent noted that, over the course of the family's exploring hardware stores, her 4-year old's building constructions changed from spaceships and fantasy vehicles to gas stations and neighborhood scenes. Children who explored parks created Nature Park Blue Prints for the Our World park. Four-year old Oliver's blue print specified the number (6), size (s, m, l), and type (deciduous and evergreen) or trees; a button for making rain sounds; a fountain and a bench; and magnifying glasses. Responding to children's curiosity about firefighters living at the 

Fire station living
Photo credit: Vergeront

station when they work, MCM devoted more space and activities to a fire station kitchen where children could explore firefighters' daily routines through dramatic play.

 •    Planning currently underway for Region 5 Children's  Museum (R5CM) in north central Minnesota is conducting a set of small studies and community engagement based in the Museum's strategic master plan. Referred to as encounters, they are intended to engage children, families, and communities around understanding more about how children find their place in the world. They are also part of early exhibit development. The first of several encounters for small groups of children 2 - 10 years is underway in a park that is likely to be the home of the Museum.

Photo credit: R5CM

With an interest in understanding more about how children engage in open-ended exploration and child-directed play in an outdoor setting, the Museum's team set up 2 conditions, a park playground area and a natural area, both with loose parts the children could carry, build with, pretend with, and investigate. In one session, an extended play experience laster nearly 25 minutes. Captured on video, a group of children ages 5 - 9 from a summer day camp program worked collaboratively at the climb-on play equipment. Using 50-feet of rope and moving back-and-forth between two structures tying the rope between them, from 3 - 6 children worked to make a zip line. 

They tied knots and tested their strength. When knots loosened and the rope—and the child—dropped, they tied new knots. They lowered the height of the rope at one end and raised the other end by shimmying up poles and boosting each other up to reach higher bars. Working with an apparent hunch about reducing friction on the zip line, they found a length of PVC pipe and slid it over the rope. Like good problem solvers, they tested, revised, rethought aspects of the problem, and improved their design.

From review and discussion of this and other videos, photos, and notes, the team has been thinking about what the children are doing and what their engagement might mean to them. The team noticed the children's extensive and innovative investigation of materials; how they were collaborative and managed their interactions; had hunches and persisted in exploring them; and that they socialized easily. The child-directed curriculum of everyday STEM the children developed was rich.

The first set of encounters has laid a groundwork for the next which will focus on the natural phenomena at the park the children notice and how they use their senses and imaginations to explore and represent them. The team has yet to see where that will lead.

More Like a Milkweed Pod Than a Pocketful of Rye. Where we place our attention is where we begin to see what is happening. When we follow compelling questions and when we wonder, think, and discover together, we deepen our understanding of the thinkers, doers, and learners in our museums including ourselves. We push on safe ideas, shift perspectives, fold new insights into everyday choices, and create new touchstones within a group working together. Each person takes something of that shared understanding into a new setting, fresh possibilities, and a new set of questions.

My thanks to Lani Shapiro, Tom Bedard, Cheryl Kessler, Mary Weiland, Jim Roe, Peter Olson, Maeryta Medrano, and Julia Bland

Related Museum Notes

• Observation: Seeing, Un-seeing, Re-seeing:

• Listening to Children's Thinking:

 

   

In Between Research, Practice, and Theory

Habitat Series by Alois Kronschlaeger

I have had a long, strong, although not necessarily steadily-worked, interest in a closer connection between theory, research and practice in schools and museums. I’m not sure where this came from although I do recall that in graduate school the separation of these three areas felt artificial and unproductive to a young, inquiring mind.

Action Research

A seminal experience I had before I worked in museums was working in professional development with the Madison (WI) school district. In my last few years, I facilitated several groups of K-12 grade teachers engaged in year-long action research projects. Teachers in these action research groups spent the school year questioning, observing, introducing new strategies, reflecting, and changing their practice in areas of importance to them. They were invigorated by formulating research questions that mattered to them and critiquing their own classroom practice in order to change it. Modest as it was, these studies laid the foundation for a 25-year action research program in the Madison schools.

Sometimes called collaborative (or participatory) action research, this interactive inquiry into one’s practice is a reflective, collaborative process with a goal of a deeper understanding of practice and change. It moves through stages of looking at current practice, planning and gathering information, taking action, critical reflection on the findings, changing practice, and informing subsequent inquiry. When teachers, or designers, direct their inquiry into their own practice, a new space between research and practice opens, bringing context and relevance to research and experimentation in daily practice.  

Moving into museum work, I carried a strong sense of what pursuing an extended inquiry with others could do for a community of learners and for growing a museum. Along the way I found some practices and a few projects using this approach–just enough to keep the possibility alive.

In an early project at Minnesota Children’s Museum we used action research to investigate exhibit safety. With its rapid, iterative inquiry process, prototyping also brought research and practice together Sometimes small research studies around museum practices (design, visitor experience, interaction, learning, or play) were grounded in learning frameworks. Three children’s museums used action research to continue investigating results of an exploratory study on play at their museums. I have also come across museum proefessionals exploring questions of practice using action research, here and here.

Documentation

Museums introduced me to documentation, a practice developed in the Municipal Schools in Reggio Emilia. A shared, iterative, reflective process, documentation is both a way of working (practice) and researching that starts at the beginning of a project, not its conclusion. The 4-step process begins with generating hypotheses about what teachers think they might find through the exploration. Observation takes many forms: mental (and written) notes, photos, video, transcriptions of remarks and conversations, drawings, and material explorations. Interpretation reviews and reflects on the collected record of children’s thinking, individually and with colleagues, in a generative way. Relaunch considers the most significant elements that appear to have advanced the learning process and where children's explorations might go next. Part of the daily life of the school, documentation is intent on getting at the deeper structure of learning in this setting.

From my experience, documentation inspires more than a few people working in museums. Yet, because it is a challenging practice to adapt to museum settings, documentation-inspired approaches tend to be practiced at a small scale and in limited ways. What documentation offers, and, I believe, will be increasingly appreciated, is an open flow between research, practice, and theory with discipline and possibility.

Research Practice Partnerships

A recent article in Curator, Research and Practice: One Way, Two Way, No Way, or New Way? by Bronwyn Bevan, encourages me to hope for more and stronger working connections between research, practice, and theory. Bevan, a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, sees an opportunity for museums to contribute to research about learning in informal learning settings and to inhabit a larger role in the learning ecosystem. Her brief review of old ways of conceptualizing the relationship between research and practice notes the persistent dualism around them and the limited use of research in practice. A new cultural model that deeply integrates the perspectives of research and practice is one, she suggests, that co-creates knowledge through jointly negotiated research-practice partnerships, (RPP’s). Bevan describes several approaches to RPP’s including Relating Research to Practice with a set of excellent briefs summarizing research studies for raising practitioners’ awareness of research and theoretical assumptions.

Bevan’s concern with theory helps bring this more challenging piece into a closer relationship with both research and practice. Educators and designers do work with theoretical assumptions and draw on their working theories about program design, instructional strategies, the use of materials, or staff interactions in even small action research studies. Often, however, theory is in the background (or simply missing) from discussion and thinking around practice and research in museums. Theory is needed to inform conceptualizations about meaning making, place, the role of objects, engagement, etc. in these settings. Bringing theory into framing research questions and approaches more deliberately means that research findings are more likely to be useful in that specific context as well as contribute to a broader understanding of practices across contexts.

Many of the 7 characteristics of RPP’s that Bevan identifies align with qualities of action research and documentation. These are long-term explorations concerned with a pressing problem of practice and use iterative processes that test, revisit, and inform practice. These approaches engage practitioners in habits of inquiry and reflection through observing their own and others’ work to deepen and develop everyday practice. Because the questions emerge from those most involved and their particular context, the thinking, discussion, and findings have relevance to the work and setting at hand. As collaborative efforts they build shared language and understanding across teams, museums, and networks.

Possible Encounters

Integrating the perspectives of researcher, practitioner, and theory maker allows us to step closer to theory, research, and practice and to explore possible encounters among them. These usually separate endeavors become 3 reciprocal, productive practices. Daily practice is stretched and strengthened by a deeper involvement with research and awareness of theory. Research findings are integrated into a team’s practice and supporting processes. Seemingly inaccessible theory-making presents itself as a tool at multiple scales and becomes an on-going practice like research. Ultimately, daily practice is not just a by-product of research, but is, in its own way, the ultimate objective. Any one of the 3 is a starting point for museums becoming better at their practice, deepening understanding, and building knowledge.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Thinking Like a MuseumEvaluator

• Documentation: FromReggio Schools to US Museums

• Conceptual Frameworks:Thinking Out Loud

• DIY Research Agenda

• Growing a Field-wideResearch Agenda

• Count Something

• An Invitation to Think Together 
• Listening to Children's Thinking

Related Resources

• What are useful ways to think about museum research? (Museum Questions)

• Center for CollaborativeAction Research

• Research and Practice: One Way, Two Way, No Way, or New Way? by Bronwyn Bevan

• Relating Research toPractice

Messaging With Parents and Caregivers in Mind

MoMA

Some years ago, I was writing text for a science exhibition for young children–well, actually for their parents and caregivers. I wrote, “Play is joyful exploration. Add a spirit of inquiry and building play becomes science play.” After reading it, a colleague asked whether this elegant turn of phrase was what parents were interested in reading as they watched their child hustle to the top of the climber or build ramps. His question hit home and I hit the delete button.

So often we write labels and text for what we want to say or how we like to write. While an obvious starting point, it’s one that excludes the very crucial audience for whom we are writing. Writing text is tricky. Presenting the right amount of digestible content with an appropriate and engaging tone and without jargon is a challenge compounded by considerations of length, font size, and design.

While true for every museum, for museums serving children, the challenges multiply. For instance, while adults are the ones reading text panels, they are reading for both themselves and their children. Only some of those children are readers themselves, but all are active, mobile learners and curious explorers. An adult reading a label is very likely also keeping an eye on a child–or several children of different ages–following each, alert to their safety, and making sure everyone is having a great time.

Clearly parents and caregivers play a crucial role in their children’s museum experience. Labels and messages are integral to this complex choreography. In spite of all our cherished hopes of how a label enhances an experience, it may also distract an adult’s attention, be ineffective delivering information, intimidate a parent or caregiver, or encourage an adult to launch a lecture.

Effective ways to message to parents and caregivers has been drawing the attention of exhibit developers and designers, educators, visitor service staff, and researchers working in and with children’s museums and science centers. An important element in advancing museum missions and meeting their goals for children, this focus also supports one of 8 areas in the Association of Children’s Museums’ research agenda: understanding and supporting adult–child learning.

A group of museums I have been following have been exploring how to communicate with and engage parents and caregivers in order to support and extend their child’s exploration. They listen to parents and caregivers about their expectations and needs and act on what they hear. Building on what others in the museum field are doing and learning, they engage in their own process that generates new questions and experiments. Often they are developing a larger toolkit of experiences and activities, images, staff training, and media to support parents and caregivers. Through this process, they find themselves refining their own pedagogy, approach, and thinking.

Inquiring Museums

•                Partners in Play has been a collaborative research project conducted by 3 Washington children’s museums, Children’s Museum of Tacoma, Imagination Children’s Museum (Everette), and KidsQuest (Bellvue). The 2013-2014 study Lorrie Beaumont and I conducted for the 3 museums focused on learning from parents and caregivers how they view their child’s play at a children’s museum and their role supporting it.

Interviews with 96 parents and caregivers visiting the 3 museums with children 2-7 years provided interesting glimpses into play and the parent and the caregiver role. Across the 3 museums, parents and caregivers saw play primarily as learning, imagining, and creating. They characterized their roles in supporting their child’s play in a wide variety of ways (observer, supporter/facilitator, family role, friend/playmate, teacher and supervisor/guardian); at the same time, they saw that they had a role to play. In playing these roles, parents and caregivers saw themselves as extending learning, creating an intimate bond with the child, and providing safety and security. Each of the museums subsequently conducted an action research project probing parent and caregiver perceptions based on the research results.

•                Chicago Children’s Museum (CCM) and Gyroscope, Inc. designed SKYLINE, (2007) an exhibit offering free-form construction experiences designed to engage families in social learning. One intention of the project was to explore approaches for increasing caregiver involvement in children’s informal science learning.

Skyline Chicago Children's Museum

One strategy in particular addressed this objective. A set of graphic panels on the exhibition walls provided examples of what a caregiver might say as part of an interaction. Using photographs of real visitors in the exhibit and actual quotes in both English and Spanish, the signs were huge. Text was kept to a single line, readable at a glance.

The approach was grounded in observations of how often families model from each other. Without lecturing or being didactic, the signs also allowed the museum to indirectly provide tips on how to use building materials. Finally, by mirroring conversations they might have with their children and modeling interactions, the panels suggested that caregivers have an important role in supporting their children's learning. Another focus of the project, creating a research platform that could contribute new understandings of family learning to the field, is still in process as the museum looks to research how the exhibit functions with and without the signs.

•                In 2013, The Children’s Museum, Indianapolis (TCM) drew on CCM’s work to test approaches to signage in their new Playscape exhibit for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers. In 2 focus groups, mothers were asked to consider 3 approaches to signs they might find in the exhibit, which approach would be most helpful to them, and how. One was a kind of parent tip, or suggestion for a parent or caregiver to think or talk about in the exhibit. Another offered basic information about child development. The third, using the CCM example, had a sample question or comment a parent or caregiver might use, noting that quotes would be paired with a photo of a parent and child playing together.

Playscape, The Children's Museum, Indianapolis

Both focus groups were unhappy with the first approach; the label copy inferred that parents didn’t know what to do with their children. The second approach received a mixed review because of text length and information available online about developmental milestones. The third approach received a positive response. Participants said they read this as a suggestion, rather than a direction, offering something concrete to use or say while playing with their children.

•                In 2015, Kentucky Science Center (KSC) opened Science In Play, a 11,000 square foot early science learning space. Designed with Hands On!, the new permanent exhibit built on what KSC and Hands On! learned from two 5,000 square foot experimental versions. These versions allowed the collaborators to test and expand on concepts like the Shapes & Stuff Store and explore communication strategies.

Science In Play, Kentucky Science Center

The exhibit iterations allowed KSC to explore and try different approaches to communicating with parents and caregivers. More than just different drafts, this approach involved substantial rethinking and evolution. The first round focused on connecting science and play, as in, “Play is joyful exploration. Add a spirit of inquiry…”

KSC heard from parents that they “didn’t care” about the science. Rather they were interested in how to build on their child’s play behavior and support the learning embedded in it. In the next round, text focused on a child’s activity in terms of school readiness skills. This approach took a friendly tone as if an experienced friend were standing by, modeling and scaffolding interactions and conversations with a child. A conversation between the executive directors of these organizations describes the process of developing the communication strategy.     

•                Providence Children’s Museum (PCM) has been engaged in a succession of investigations into the connection between play and learning for children and adults. Interested in developing new ways to support adults’ awareness and appreciation of children’s learning through play, PCM has looked at what caregivers understand about learning through play and translated this into exhibit text.

Play Power, Providence Children's Museum

A formative evaluation focused on signs in the Play Power exhibit that describe play’s value for various aspects of children’s development. Caregiver interviews revealed that signs were perceived as somewhat vague; they reinforced existing beliefs without conveying novel or interesting information about play’s value. And even as many adults believed that children did learn through play, they were uncertain about whether children really were learning at the museum and what was learned. Furthermore, while caregivers did notice behaviors in their children that they viewed as indicating thinking or engagement, they didn’t necessarily link play behaviors with learning without prompting from a staff person.

Guided by input that indicated caregivers were interested in why behaviors they had seen in their own children were important and what these behaviors could show about children’s learning, PCM edited its signs. Play Power signs shared a consistent structure that:

• Began with, “Through play…” and identified one skill that children learn or practice by playing.

• Placed “kids” as the subject of every sentence and used active verbs.

• Used thinking behaviors that were observable in children’s play and recognized by caregivers.

• Linked a specific behavior with what children gain from it.

In a follow-up set of interviews, revised text elicited much richer responses from caregivers than the original signs had.

Worth Noting

These are the briefest of overviews of informal studies done for different reasons at museums of different sizes. All their implications can’t be discussed here. Furthermore, the focus of each study is somewhat different and none, as far as I know, have been adequately researched to really test these approaches.

Yet, a few observations are worth noting. First, consistent among these studies is a stance of being highly responsive to parent and caregiver perspectives. Also there is an interesting convergence among the findings. They cluster into 3 areas that work well together, if not actively support one another.

Parents and caregivers are interested in connections between children’s play and learning being made explicit. Both PCM and KSC heard from parents that they were interested in why behaviors they had seen in their own children were important and what these behaviors could show about children’s learning. One implication is that parents and caregivers appear to be less interested in content, such as science or child development, than is often assumed. This also came through at both KSC and TCM. By making connections between play and learning, thinking and learning, or a behavior and a readiness skill, museums are providing something both valued by parents and caregivers and hard for them to find elsewhere.

Parent and caregiver roles and interactions are supported by a clear, overarching message. Trying to communicate too many messages can interfere with communicating any one of them effectively. One basic, distilled message powerfully delivered can support multiple cues and hints. Chicago Children’s Museum’s overarching message may be: there is a role for parents and caregivers in children’s play and exploration. At the same time, CCM layered several ideas into its wall panels. Realistically, one idea, or message, will be presented and supported in many ways–written, verbal, images, and media–in briefer and more complete versions.

A corollary to this finding, supported by the interviews in the Washington study, is that parents and caregivers appear to want a role to play. Roles for parents and caregivers should be planned for and clear.

Parents and caregivers need highly readable signs. Signs are in the fiercest of competition with children for parents’ and caregivers’ attention. Adults may be reading while moving, comforting, at a distance, and (or) in a nanosecond. At their best, signs claim some of that attention, distracting them as briefly as possible. Highly readable signs need to be short and quickly read as both CCM and TCM noted. A consistent sign structure like PCM’s facilitates parents’ and caregivers quickly accessing information assisted by a predictable format. Positioned for readability places signs high on walls, as at CCM, or where children spend more time (because adults are also more likely to spend more time), as at PCM. CCM’s signs were huge which made a single line of text easy to take in. Dual language text, for instance, English and Spanish, makes messages accessible to more parents and caregivers–and also doubles the amount of text–to underscore the need for brevity. Finally, tone matters, as the two TCM focus groups indicated.

This important area of inquiry for museums serving children is undoubtedly engaging other museums. I invite other museums exploring similar questions to share their word and where they have landed. On similar findings or something different? What’s working and what isn’t?

Related Museum Notes Posts

• What Do We want of Parents?

• Parent Voices, New Insights

• StrengtheningParent Engagement

Count Something

We are accustomed to counting things. We count down to midnight on New Year’s Eve. We count calories and footsteps and the days until vacation. We count museum members, new members, members at each level; and we count visitors in many different ways. Counting helps us know what’s going on and how we are doing. 

In his book, Better, surgeon, scientist, and writer, Atul Gawande delivers an intriguing message that is as applicable to the world of museums, libraries, and schools as well as to the world of medicine. He says people in the medical profession should “count something.” Regardless of what someone actually does in medicine, she should be a scientist in this world. 

This leads me to think we all should be counting something in museums as well. We should count to see whether an intuition is close to the mark, to check how an assumption matches reality, or to understand if a good intention is being confused with actual achievement.

Museum’s knowledge about themselves–the experiences they offer, the learning they promote, the relationships they cultivate, and what their audiences expect–is incomplete. Nevertheless they want to make decisions informed by evidence in order to do better.

Of course, museums do gather and monitor information about attendance and donors. They conduct audience research, evaluate programs, and prototype. These are important, organization-wide practices. But museums are complex and dynamic organizations, active, operating, and engaging on multiple fronts, with thousands of visitors, across many timeframes, at any one moment. They rely on innumerable efforts and diligent practice to do well. Captured information can tell a museum how it’s doing and how it could do better for its community, visitors, staff, and itself.

Everyone can count. Whether you are an educator, designer, developer, evaluator, researcher, data manager, fundraiser, marketer, curator conservator, greeter, guide, explainer, and cashier, volunteer, event planner, or CEO, you can count. In fact, only you can make sure that what you care about is considered and made visible by counting.

An exhortation to count something doesn’t mean launching a massive study. You don’t need to know a K-means cluster analysis from a chi-square. You can tally, time, or track; average daily totals, plot information over time, or compare groups. You can count with ticks and clickers, scratch paper; you can use existing data.  Count successes and failures and keep track of the unexpected and unanticipated. They can reveal situations and opportunities that might be significant. You can add notes and take photos. Analyze and reflect and discuss with others. You can frame another question, begin to count again, and set change in motion.

What to Count

Just start counting. Think about something that piques your interest, informs your work, guides you in making decisions,  and matters to you. Count something you have wondered about, something that challenges you. Bring your professional knowledge and experience to do better and advance the museum’s interests.

The first rounds of counting may be disappointing and somewhat messy. Carry on and count. Inevitably, one counting question will lead to another and better question. Successive rounds are likely to yield information and more insights. They will also let you be progressively more precise and systematic in what and how you count.

Counting helps in focusing and observing. When you look more closely at what you value and are trying to do, you get a realistic sense of what is happening.

Do you wonder what the museum experience is actually like? You might explore:

-        Which questions do visitors ask most at the front desk? In the museum shop?

-        How many places are visitors standing in line? At the elevator, rest rooms, an iconic exhibit? How many people are in line? Can you shorten the wait time?

-        What’s happening in the front lobby? How many people go into the museum shop? The café? Wait at the door to be picked up?

-        If you are hearing complaints from visitors about strollers, count strollers. How many strollers are parked in designated stroller parking lots? In circulation routes?

Do you want to be more confident that you are offering a safe environment?

-        How many injuries occur each month at the museum? In what exhibits or at which components do injuries occur more? Less? How many injuries occur for different age groups? What are the nature of the injuries?

Are you interested in knowing more about what happens in exhibits?

-        How long does someone watch others at a component before jumping in?

-        Which parts of the exhibit do visitors approach and then turn away from?

-        How long did an exchange between a gallery guide and visitor last? What’s the average for 20 visitors?

-        How long did a visitor stop at a component? How many ways did the visitor engage with it? Now you can ask, “What does engagement look like?”

-        How many people are in a gallery alone? With one other person? In a group? How many are talking to one another?

-        How many benches in each exhibit area are occupied? Are people sharing a bench or sitting alone? Now you can explore whether galleries need more, or fewer, benches and places to sit and where they should be.  

Counting tells you about how your museum is doing in some hard-to-get-at areas. It can help the museum hit the mark where change has occurred, priorities are shifting, or where getting it right matters.

Are you curious about whether your museum is engaging a particular audience group, for Tweens, Millenials, Experts?

-        Where are Tweens spending their time? Count how many children 6-8 and 8-11 years are in each exhibit area. Where are the most and fewest children in these age groups present? What time of the day are they most/least present? Asking them what they like best about the areas they are spending time could give clues for better engaging them.

Are you interested in knowing what actually happens in a school or senior tour that you developed or that you promoted for the museum?

-        Count how many questions the docent asked. How many were open-ended? How many questions did the students ask?

-        What might you count to get a sense that the participants are engaged?

Do you wonder how the museum can better understand the intangible qualities that help describe its value? What cultivating relationships with visitors looks like?

-        How many visitors do you know by sight and name when they come into the museum, enroll in a program, join a tour, or sit in on demonstration?

-        If you ask a visitor whether this is her first visit to the museum, what could you learn? Ask what she remembered from her last visit. Why?

-        What could you learn about the impact of a visit by asking a visitor whether she went on-line, checked out a resource, or looked something up after that visit?

-        Learn more about what’s important to visitors. What is fascinating to them about a topic? An exhibit? An object? Why?

-        Interested in encouraging compassion and empathy? Walk around and listen for, observe, and record examples of empathetic and compassionate behavior among visitors.

Counting helps solve problems. Counting can help you deconstruct a situation or check assumptions to know what’s really going on. Then you can start trying to solve that problem and do better.

Are you concerned about problems with crowding or underutilized spaces? Are you planning an expansion or a new building and want to understand your current capacity better?

-        Study one space, like the atrium or lobby, during a variety of times. How many people can listen to a story or watch a performance in that space? How many are sitting or standing? How many people are too few in the space so it feels empty?

-        Where do visitors seem to congregate and what areas do they avoid? Identify high-use and low-use areas; count the number of people in each part of a gallery. Can you influence the “clumping” by locating a high-use component in a low-use area?

-        Maybe visitors are crowded in certain areas because there is more (or less) to do. Count the amount-to-do per visitor in an exhibit or area by counting the number of people who can comfortably use each activity or component at one time. Tally it to arrive at a user load. What would the user load of the gallery be?

Do staff complain about adults on their cell phones? About loose parts strewn all over the place? Look around; count to see to what extent and where this is happening before making rules or removing objects.

-        How many parents and caregivers are on their cell phone? Count this across different time periods; are there time or space-related patterns?

-        More than just tallies help decide how abundant loose parts should be at a museum. But for starters, count where loose parts wind up and compare that with where they started out.

Are some staff and visitors suggesting that exhibit repairs are taking too long?

-        Start counting. Count the number of exhibits pulled off the floor for repairs weekly and monthly; count the number of days it takes to repair an exhibit. (Perhaps, gather this information from a comparable museum, or a few.) Identify strategies for lowering the numbers; continue to count and track.

 

Counting Matters

Admittedly, lives are on the line in medicine while in museums they are not. Nevertheless, in museums, reputations, relationships, trust, and responsible use of resources are at risk.  

Clearly, counting is not just about numbers and is not the only source of information for solving problems and making improvements. Numbers with thoughtful reflection and discussion can help you act with purpose. If you keep track of what you are interested in knowing, something will be visible that wasn’t before. You can formulate questions for a survey or interview; make changes in staffing and scheduling; reduce injuries and frustrations; and smooth transitions and circulation.

Counting, tracking, and sharing information set them in motion, build connections to the interests and work of others at your museum, and help improve performance. What you count, track, and share can become part of the collective knowledge of your museum.

There may not be sudden or dramatic changes as a result of everything you and your colleagues count. It does begin to reveal, however, that change can happen by diligent attention. Counting can nourish a culture of focus and observation, solve problems, animate the museum’s values, and generate new knowledge about the museum’s visitors and services.  

Related Museum Notes Posts

• DIY Research Agenda

• Curiosity is at the Top of My List

• Following the Thread of Practice