The Arizona Viewpoints Collaborative was created by 4 art education specialists as a joint research study to evaluate the usefulness of a teaching tool called Viewpoints, Exploring How You Understand Art in docent training. Viewpoints are sets of ideas that people use to help them understand art. The original Viewpoints exercise was created by Dr. Faith Clover and Dr. Mary Erickson for the J. Paul Getty Trust's ArtsEdNet, an online educational resource (no longer in existence). The research behind Viewpoints draws on a theory by Michael Parsons.

The Arizona Viewpoints Collaborative's objective is to share information about a valuable and easily accessible tool for art museum docent training- an exercise called Viewpoints, Exploring How You Understand Art. The team believes that the exercise is a useful tool for increasing docents' critical thinking skills such as observation, interpretation, inquiry, the ability to compare and contrast, transfer skills and evaluation skills. Through the Viewpoints exercise, docents will learn about their own and other's alternative viewpoints. They will be motivated to utilize this information in their own continuing education and with tour audiences.

The Arizona Viewpoints Collaborative believes that understanding different viewpoints can help art museum docents/educators to:

• Reflect on the viewpoints you personally tend to use.
• Reflect on the extent to which your touring is and should be dictated by your own viewpoints.
• Consider what viewpoint(s) members of your tour group are likely to use before, during and after the tour.
• Consider how your choice of artworks, exhibition themes and architectural features contribute to the context of tour discussion and possible visitors' viewpoints.
• Use your knowledge of your tour group's viewpoint(s) to help you predict the kinds of artworks, exhibition themes and architectural features about which members of the group are likely to be particularly curious.
• Plan tours to challenge visitors to increase the number of viewpoints they can use to understand art and architecture.