I will admit, I am a TAB purest and sometimes I get fired up when it comes to spreading the love for TAB and helping teachers understand the philosophy and ways to implement the intricacies of the philosophy into the classroom. Now, I am a high school teacher, so the way I TAB is not going to be the same as the way an elementary teacher TABs. Heck, it won’t be the same as another high school TAB teacher. But, at the heart of the matter, we all believe the core tenets, the guiding principles if you will, of the philosophy, and we build our programs around them.

One thing that I try to combat when I talk about TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) is the misconceptions about what the pedagogy is and isn’t. About 5 years ago, I wrote this post about TAB vs. Modified TAB. I wanted to revisit the meat of that post–TAB, Modified TAB and some of the in between. Again, TAB is a philosophy, meaning it’s an art eduction belief system and is at the heart of the decisions we make when figuring out how to run our curriculum and classes. The TAB philosophy is guided by 3 sentences:

• What do Artists Do?
• The Child is the Artist
• The Classroom is their Studio

How a teacher runs their classroom and sets up their curriculum to help their students become artists (who think of their own ideas and can do all the things artists do) is called the Methodology. This typically comes in the form of choice. There are many levels to choice and why you would vary them. You can read here about the choice continuum. TAB teachers vary how much, when, and what types of choice dependent upon a variety of things. But, they don’t vary how much or how little they believe in the philosophy.

This is where semantics comes in. When someone says they are doing a “Modified TAB” classroom, I believe what they are really talking about is the level of choice they are offering–maybe opening centers slowly, or limiting materials. They are not talking about the philosophy and their only believing in 1 or 2 of the 3 core tenets. But, this becomes confusing to those just starting out as a TAB teacher or someone trying to learn a new way to continue to teach art so that they love their career again. Wording it this way also makes it seem like a Choice-Based classroom and a TAB classroom are one and the same. I like to tell my students that all thumbs are fingers, but not all fingers are thumbs. I think this 100% applies here. All TAB classrooms are Choice-Based, but not all Choice-Based classrooms are TAB. Sometimes choice-based teachers are still doing a lot of the important decisions of art making, thus not really helping their students to become independent artists. So, the semantics do become important here.

I know that some people may think this is “gate keepery” or elitist, and it probably feeds into the stereotype of TAB teachers thinking they are “better” (which is not something we actually think.) I believe that one thing that makes TAB so wonderful is that the philosophy allows for many implementations. It is differentiation at its best. The goal remains the same for all TAB teachers–creating independent thinking artists. But we realize that every student is different, so how we get them to that point will look different for everybody. Therefore, as we spread the TAB love, let’s be sure to help people new to the philosophy understand the difference between being TAB and running a TAB classroom, and our choice of words does matter when it comes to understanding. In the end, it’s okay to have varying levels of choice, but the belief in all the guiding principles of TAB doesn’t vary.