I wrote an article last school year for the National Art Education Association Choice Art special interest group after hosting a student teacher in my choice classroom. IT WAS PUBLISHED THIS MONTH!!! Woot! So, now I can share it here: I have been a public secondary school art teacher for 8 years and a TAB teacher for 4 of those years. In that time, I spent a year supervising a handful of student teachers from Millersville University, but never hosted my own until this year, so my perspective on being a cooperating teacher is a bit unique. Some of my thoughts might be “givens” for more experienced cooperating teachers or might be universal across various art teaching philosophies. Nonetheless, in this column, I’m going to discuss aspects for consideration when hosting a pre-service teacher in a choice-based classroom based on my experience this semester.
Familiarity: find out how much your student teacher knows about and is interested in choice. In my particular cooperating teacher position, I knew the program and the supervisor, Dr. Leslie Gates. In a recent column, Dr. Gates outlined the various ways in which she models choice for her art education students as well as how she introduces them to choice-based pedagogy and philosophy by intentionally pairing them with choice-based cooperating teachers. Through conversation, I also discovered that my student teacher, Ms. Dominguez, was interested in trying TAB. So, all parties involved in the student teaching placement had knowledge of choice in the classroom. Our common familiarity with choice made it easier for me to introduce the curriculum to Ms. Dominguez without first explaining TAB, and her supervisor and I were able to collaborate more smoothly to help her adjust her plans and assessments. Opposition: it is your classroom, but it’s not your teaching portfolio. On one hand, I wanted to give Ms. Dominguez the experience of TAB, but on the other, I didn’t want to force her to teach exactly like me. On top of that, I would not be applying for jobs with a portfolio - she would - so why would I force my teaching style/philosophy on her? I decided that I would allow her to have CHOICE in how she taught as long as she was aware of what the students were used to with regards to choice, and as long as she taught and assessed the objectives set forth in the curriculum. On Ms. Dominguez’s first day, she came in super excited with tons of project ideas that she wanted to try with high school students. I didn’t shoot down her ideas. I had a binder prepared with the curriculum and calendar with a rough outline of the timeframe. I told her my philosophy, showed her how I structure it, and then emphasized that she had the freedom to teach the way she wanted. In the end, she chose to try TAB and told me that it was important that I shared my philosophy with her before she started teaching. She also said that she was, “very curious about TAB and would have been sad if [she] hadn’t tried it.” Sharing: get comfortable with talking CLEARLY about the “what” and “why” of what you do. At this point in my journey as a TAB teacher, I’ve had a good amount of experience in sharing TAB with others. My co-worker, Phoebe Heath, and I have spent an extensive amount of time on re-writing our curriculum to eliminate all traditional teacher-directed, project-based work, and we reduced our curriculum to standards surrounding artistic behaviors, material techniques, and concepts. After being so invested in our curriculum, and talking about it with others, it never occurred to me that it was written in a set of complicated charts, so confusing that only Phoebe and I knew how to read them. After the first lesson, and Ms. Dominguez’s justified confusion on the objectives, I re-wrote parts of the curriculum so that the objectives were more clear and described the heart of learning. Organization: the TAB teacher’s formidable friend. I think one of the most daunting things about TAB is the systems of organization involved. Organization can be even more daunting for a new “baby teacher.” While I believe there is value in struggling to solve problems, this is one problem I didn’t feel was my student teacher’s responsibility given the short amount of time we spent together. I’m an organized person so my room is labeled, supplies are grouped together under bigger hanging signs, and nearly everything has a place and a routine. Grace: it truly covers everything. Give your student teacher grace to find themselves as a teacher. Give yourself some grace and show them your mistakes along with your best. We are all learners.
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I was challenged to think about an LFS tool, The Gradual Release Model, within the realm of TAB through a blog post by one of my art teacher "crushes" on her blog here and more importantly, her article here. After reading her articles, I felt that I was leaving out a very important part of the learning process - collaborative learning, the "you do together". Since my classes are mixed grades, interest levels, and skill levels, I was also hoping that this collaborative "you do together" would help to make my students trust each other and use one another as a resource more. I was about to embark on an Observational Drawing Bootcamp, so I decided to include a "you do together" for each task. For my Observational Drawing Bootcamp, I used activities taken from Betty Edward's Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: the upside down drawing, blind contour, modified contour, and negative space drawing. Below is a list of the tasks we completed during this bootcamp: For each task, I demonstrated how to complete it, then, I had my students try it on their own in their sketchbooks. After that, I had students complete the activity together. For the upside-down draw together, I had students critique and find areas of improvement in one another's drawings. For the blind contour drawing draw-together, one student outlined all of the features on their face with their finger, and the other student followed the student's finger and drew the path that his/her finger took (below). For the modified contour draw-together one student drew a modified contour of their shoe, while their partner told them when to stop and look at their paper. For the negative space draw-together, students worked together to draw the negative space around an art room stool. Lastly, for the grid drawing draw-together, I had students draw and enlarge a complex image that involved foreshortening.
Overall, the most successful draw-together challenges were the blind contour partner portrait and the negative space stool drawings. Typically, these are the two drawings that students struggle with the most because they want their drawings to look "real" and haven't quite bought into taking the risk of drawing on the right side of the brain. By working with partners, they were more willing to take that risk and encourage one-another to follow the rules of the drawing challenges. I am convinced of the positive benefits of collaborative work and will continue to use this in my classroom. I'm currently working on my thesis for my Master's Degree at Millersville University, so most of my "extra" time has been spent dissecting and summarizing my study that I conducted over the course of last school year with my Art III/IV Honors/AP students. Here are some excerpts from my paper: "From my own experience in various art departments and through my peers’ debates during college class discussions, art teachers argue the percentage of time and the validity of student-choice. When students get no choice, students are able to replicate teacher’s work and follow directions, but have no idea how to create art without being told what to do. When students get full-choice, or free reign of the art room, often their technical skills are left under-developed...making a work of art is as much about choosing the idea/concept as it is the artist’s ability and knowledge of the materials used to create it. As an art teacher, I want my students to participate in genuine art making experiences in which they not only learn how use materials, whether it be through direct teacher-led exercises or through their own exploratory play, but also how to create a piece that is meaningful and communicates their ideas effectively. I want to expose them to what it is like to think and act like an artist and to further develop artistic behaviors as they choose to continue to make art." Since I've been investigating TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior), I've also recognized the need to become more social and collaborative with my teaching. Last week, I learned how to participate in a Twitter chat with a group of other TAB teachers. Here's some of our conversation from last weekend: https://twitter.com/missjaybar/status/663536152260014080 At any rate, that's what I'm currently interested in within the field of art education. I'm also hoping to use this blog as a place to document my artistic process. Currently, my students are wrapping up on their figure drawing assignments. I'm not a very figurative artist - it's not something that has interested me in past works; however, I've been thinking about the lyrics to a song by Anberlin ("*Fin" - for several years, actually), and I'm becoming interested in working with figures to create a piece that illustrates the images I get in my head from the song. Here is the progress so far: I'm thinking about creating an "altarpiece" of sorts for the patron saint of lost causes. I'm still working through the ideas - the "piece" on the left is my demo piece for school (that's why half of it is uncolored - so my students can see the structure underneath the drawing and the process I used to create it). It's a little more anime and emo than I am, but I'm looking at it as a sketch or springboard for the eventual piece I will create that will probably be more like the sketch on the right that I created on my phone during church today (don't judge me! this is about the patron saint of lost causes...)
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