A THINKING ROUTINE FROM PROJECT ZERO, HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

Beauty and Truth

A routine for exploring the complex interaction between beauty and truth.

Can you find beauty in this [image, story]?

Can you find truth in this [image, story]?

How might beauty reveal truth?

How might beauty conceal truth?

Purpose: What kind of thinking does this routine encourage?

This routine fosters students’ critical analysis of information (news, images, stories), revealing the nuances
and complexities of an issue, event, or concept and how it is represented.

Application: When and where can I use it?

This routine aims to slow down students’ thinking, inviting them to reflect on the ways works of literature,
art, and journalism, for example, use beauty to engage us and motivate us to learn more about an issue and
seek truth. The routine also invites a critical analysis of the ways in which beauty can mislead.

Launch: What are some tips for starting and using this routine?
This routine invites you and your students into a broad and deep conversation about an image or story. .
Allow time for individual students to share ideas of beauty and truth – constructs they are unlikely to have
explored explicitly in their past learning experiences. (When focusing on photographs with this routine, be
alert for the misconception, held by many students, that photographs by their very nature reveal truth.) In
Questions 3 and 4, the terms “beauty” and “truth” can be inverted.

Share your experience with this thinking routine on social media using the hashtags #PZThinkingRoutines and #BeautyAndTruth.

PZ
This thinking routine was developed as part of the ID Global and PZ Connect
projects at Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education.
HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
CONNECT Explore more Thinking Routines at pz.harvard.edu/thinking-routines
© 2022 President and Fellows of Harvard College and Project Zero. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND). This license allows users to share this work
with others, but it cannot be used commercially. To reference this work, please use the following: The Beauty and Truth thinking routine was developed by Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.