At a particularly bleak moment in December 1776, George Washington declared, “Desperate diseases require desperate measures.” Museums, historic sites, zoos, and arboreta, like all other

I have long lobbied for museums to avoid using numbers as indicators of their success. I note in Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact that when museums boast

Happy Valentine’s Day! As many of you know, the idiom “Less is More” is attributed to minimalist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. I am grateful to him for coining the phrase and inspiring me to adopt

When Stephanie asked me to write a post about what I have learned over the many years I have been working with museums, my brain froze. I found this a tough assignment to tackle, mostly because

Danielle Rice was our field’s determined intellectual—a deeply thoughtful museum leader and beloved educator (to her staff; visitors; and later, to her students) who always adeptly argued her point

Most museum staff yearn to affect those who visit their museum; they want to create meaningful experiences that will be remembered long after people’s encounters. Stephen Weil believed that

In this post I share how I organized Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact. Of no great surprise to those of you who know me, I approached writing about intentional

I haven’t written a post in a long time even though I promised to post one blog per month in 2018; please accept my apology. I thought I would be able to maintain an intermittent blogging schedule but

At the start of this year, I started writing about the principles of intentional practice, and to date, I have shared three principles (#1, #2, and #3). For this post, I feature the next two principles of intentional

Much of Intentional Practice work is about process, and a significant part of process work requires that we talk with each other. I realize that humans exchange ideas verbally all the time, although given

In keeping with this year’s blog series about how my Intentional Practice has evolved over the last 10 years, I will be using the next seven months to present the seven principles of Intentional Practice.

Ten years have passed since “The Case for Holistic Intentionality” appeared in Curator. On the one hand, 10 years isn’t that long ago, but on the other hand, a lot has changed in how I think about intentionality.

The Cycle of Intentional Practice is proving to be a very useful framework for planning. We have applied the Cycle to many different projects—from planning global initiatives, to developing action plans

When evaluators are called in to evaluate a program, exhibition, or museum, the first question they ask is, “Who is your primary audience?” After fully addressing the “who” question, the next question is

Yes, at first glance you might think that Yogi Berra and evaluation couldn’t be farther apart in ideology. Not true. By now everyone probably knows that Yogi Berra passed away this week at 90. Most know Yogi

For many years now, I have attended the National Art Education Association annual conference, and for the same many years, I have attended the Museum Division pre-conference—a day-long event for

With a new year upon us and all sorts of possibilities—most of them unknown at this time—our blog entries will take on a slightly different flavor. We intend to remain true to the name of this blog, the

I have the honor of writing the last blog post of our 25th year—which just so happens to coincide with the end of the calendar year. It was New Year’s Eve in 1989 when my husband and I arrived in DC

As I have shared in other posts, I value the concept and four actions associated with Intentional Practice. Of the four quadrants that comprise Intentional Practice—Plan, Align, Evaluate, and Reflect—Align is

For me, intentionality, a concept I view as essential to museum planning, emerged from two core experiences: results from hundreds of exhibition and program evaluations; and observing museum staff