Before We Interpret a Student’s Hesitation, Understand the Whole Child
Whole-child creative learning, confidence, and the value of showing up.
By Jules McVey, organizational psychologist and co-founder of Wicked Rae’s
Vesper came to paint with us every Sunday for eight months.
She was eight years old. In the photograph accompanying this story, she is holding her artwork: bright orange, textured, with blue and pink shapes reaching across the canvas.
What the photograph cannot show is the time behind it. The returning. The growing familiarity. The relationship that developed across those Sundays.
Around month four, her parents and grandparents told us something we had not known: Vesper had been struggling with dyslexia. They shared it because they were excited about the changes they were seeing.
Her confidence was growing. Her family later told us she was earning better grades and that reading was no longer the struggle it had been.
Those are meaningful changes in a child’s life. We take them seriously.
We understood our work with Vesper as a bridge between the challenges she was experiencing and her capacity for self-expression. Her academic progress was reported by her family; our part in her wider educational journey was sustained creative work and a relationship in which she could keep exploring.
Eventually, her family moved to another state for work. We still keep in touch. She is still thriving.
I think about those Sundays when someone asks what creative learning can contribute to a child’s development. I also think about how much we might miss when we expect the whole story to reveal itself in a single visit.
A student brings a whole life into the room
Schools reach out to Wicked Rae’s for one-to-one work with students who are struggling for many different reasons. We become part of a wider circle supporting their learning, confidence, and, for some, their healing journey.
My approach began years before the studio, while I was leading organizational change initiatives in the federal and private sectors.
When someone was struggling, I wanted to understand what the environment required of them and what they had available to meet those demands. Their job title could not answer those questions. Neither could a performance label.
I brought that foundation into the work I taught Oakley. Today, we use it together to explore possibilities and design experiences and pilot programs.
A student’s hesitation deserves that same depth of attention.
Before deciding that a child needs more motivation, we should understand the instructions, relationships, expectations, and conditions surrounding the task. We should also hear what the child has to say.
Our interpretation of a difficulty influences the support we offer. We owe the person a thoughtful interpretation.
The questions that change our approach
We look at the person’s ecocultural context: the relationships, routines, cultural expectations, resources, and everyday conditions that shape their experience.
That means asking:
What is this like for you? The student’s perspective belongs in the conversation from the beginning.
Where do you already feel capable? Interests and strengths give us somewhere meaningful to start.
Are we communicating clearly? A demonstration, different wording, or an opportunity to practice may make an unfamiliar task more accessible.
What does the environment feel like? We consider sound, light, texture, movement, space, and the company of other people.
What has changed? A new routine, relationship, or expectation may carry more weight than we realize.
Who is available to support you? With appropriate permission, families, educators, and other trusted people can help us understand the larger picture.
These questions require us to examine our own assumptions. They also help us make practical decisions: where to begin, how to explain an activity, what materials to offer, and when a student may benefit from individual attention.
Understanding the whole person becomes useful when it changes how we work.
Creative learning belongs in a serious conversation about education
There is substantial reason to take arts education seriously.
In a randomized study involving 10,548 students across 42 Houston schools, researchers examined expanded arts experiences delivered through school-community partnerships. The 2019 report found a 3.6-percentage-point reduction in the share of students receiving disciplinary infractions, along with improvements in standardized writing achievement and compassion for others. [1]
This research gives school leaders evidence that arts partnerships can contribute to academic and social development. It also gives us a more productive question to ask: What kinds of experiences are we designing, for whom, and toward which goals?
A second randomized study, published in 2021, explored that question with adolescents in museum-based drawing courses. A course focused on facial expressions improved emotion-recognition accuracy. A course exploring people in different social roles produced changes in how participants represented their self-concept; those effects depended partly on their initial characteristics. [2]
The educational implication matters: the design and instructional purpose of an experience can shape what participants learn from it.
These studies evaluated their own programs. They provide a research foundation for purposeful arts education, while our own programs require their own evaluation.
At Wicked Rae’s, that is why consultation, observation, facilitation, and adaptation belong alongside the creative materials. We consider the person, the goal, and the experience together.
What the hands and body bring to learning
Embodied, sensory creative learning gives a person opportunities to explore through movement, touch, sight, sound, and the physical act of making.
A student working with a material can make a choice, notice what happens, adjust, and try again. We can use that experience to invite reflection: What did you notice? What do you want to change? What helped you continue?
The activity creates something concrete to discuss.
In our work, we use painting, texture, movement, rhythm, and creative construction as different ways into participation. The choices depend on the individual and the purpose of the experience.
We pay attention to moments such as a student expressing a preference, asking for help, beginning something unfamiliar, or returning to an idea after difficulty. Those moments can become useful goals for a program and useful observations to discuss with families and educators.
They also help us recognize the person’s agency: their ability to make choices and influence what happens next.
Eight months gave us something one afternoon could not
Vesper’s story holds a lesson about continuity.
Returning gave us opportunities to know her over time. It gave her a familiar place to create. It allowed conversations with her family to develop and brought information into view that we did not have at the beginning.
Her story makes me ask what we might learn if we gave more educational partnerships that kind of continuity.
A single experience can be valuable. An ongoing relationship gives us repeated opportunities to observe, respond, practice, and adjust. The value lies in what we do with that time.
We can ask whether a student is becoming more comfortable expressing preferences. Whether they are approaching unfamiliar materials differently. Whether the family or school sees changes elsewhere. Whether our current approach still fits.
Vesper’s reported progress deserves celebration. Her story sits alongside the wider research as an individual example of growth during sustained participation - not a controlled test of what caused her reading improvement. For students with dyslexia, creative support can work alongside evidence-based literacy instruction. [3]
There is room in a child’s education for both direct instruction and experiences that support expression, participation, and a developing sense of capability.
What a whole-child partnership asks of adults
Looking at the whole child asks us to remain learners, too.
We may discover that instructions we considered obvious were unfamiliar. That the activity we expected a student to love does not interest them. That a strength appears in a setting where we had not thought to look.
We have to be willing to use that information.
For schools, this means giving a partnership a clear purpose and space for review. For families, it means including their knowledge of the child. For us, it means bringing our professional judgment while staying attentive to the person in front of us.
At Wicked Rae’s, we design one-to-one creative experiences and school partnerships around that responsibility. We bring organizational psychology, experiential learning, creative movement, and expressive arts into conversations about what students need and how we can contribute.
Before asking a child to try harder, we need to understand what trying takes - and help create conditions in which their effort has somewhere to go.
If your school is looking for a thoughtful creative partner, we welcome a conversation about your students, your goals, and what meaningful support could look like over time.
Research and further reading
Bowen, D. H., & Kisida, B. (2019). Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences: Experimental Evidence From Houston’s Arts Access Initiative. Rice University, Kinder Institute for Urban Research. https://repository.rice.edu/items/7e1257ad-6082-41bc-881f-5aeae938e2f7
Kastner, L., et al. (2021). Designing Visual-Arts Education Programs for Transfer Effects: Development and Experimental Evaluation of (Digital) Drawing Courses in the Art Museum Designed to Promote Adolescents’ Socio-Emotional Skills. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 603984. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.603984/full
International Dyslexia Association. Structured Literacy: Effective Instruction for Students with Dyslexia and Related Reading Difficulties. https://dyslexiaida.org/structured-literacy-effective-instruction-for-students-with-dyslexia-and-related-reading-difficulties/
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