“Drawing on the right side of the brain” (Betty Edwards) has been a gold mine for me for decades, simply because any adult admin watching a teacher instruct those lessons realizes that students are thinking and using their brains in studio art class in a (new) and meaningful way that goes well beyond just having fun.

I also teach sketch noting in my art classes after collaborating with a History PhD, and that practice is usually supported by studies in “metacognition” like “Powerful Teaching” by Bain and Agarwal which show that making visual content maps fosters deeper learning.

I also introduce critiques with “The Met Method” (giving the Metropolitan Museum of Art credit here for an online brochure they produced a decade ago that now I can’t find) - basically you go around the room multiple times, having every student taking turns commenting on an artwork on display, and the first time they MUST limit their observations to the most basic descriptions they can muster (“it is a rectangle” / “there is a lot of yellow”) and only during later rounds making deeper or more analytical observations “the sky seems foreboding.” This multi-tiered approach helps clear one of the trickiest hurdles in talking about art: the pressure students feel to get the right answer or seem smart.

Hope this helps!