Teaching 'outside the classroom' is one of the biggest challenges facing art historians. Students are often shy of paintings, sculptures, and buildings because they don't know how to make sense of objects and what to say about them. This paper describes an assessment initiative in a first-year undergraduate gallery-based History of Art module which was designed to help students engage more closely with objects and to practice genres of writing that are appropriate to the study of painting, drawing, sculpture and architecture. In the assessment students were asked to devise a proposal for a gallery display, offer feedback on their peers' proposals, and then each write a piece of work for a catalogue accompanying the display, using the winning proposal as the working brief