I believe a successful teacher is primarily a matter of…

I believe that being a successful teacher is primarily a matter presenting and demonstrating a range of materials and techniques, and properly scaffolding students as they learn these skills. Especially at the elementary level, students need to be exposed to lots of mediums and processes. Many of the things presented they’re seeing for the first time and have never practiced. Even if the student doesn’t care for a medium or process, it’s still valuable for them to practice, even if there isn’t a lot of success.

Every class has a range of student ability, so it’s critical to differentiate instructions for students. Some students need to see a process multiple times to understand, where others may understand after a simple verbal description. It’s important to recognize the ways that each student learns best, and provide a range of instruction and examples.

Properly scaffolding students through their learning is also an essential part of being a successful teacher. If students are struggling, they can easily get frustrated. Noticing those struggles and helping the student improve without doing the work for them is a tough balance. Encouragement is very necessary during proper scaffolding. Most of the time, the students are more than capable of overcoming their problem. If they can solve the problem on their own, that is the best situation for learning. Encouragement can be that extra motivation that a student needs to get past their frustrations and find a solution.

Necessity for support in your first year of teaching

In what ways do you foresee a necessity for support in your first year of teaching? From where and how do you expect this support to come? i.e. district, school, fellow teachers…

In my first year of teaching, I expect I want a lot of feedback on improving the success of my teaching. Even after student teaching, I’ve still had so little experience working in a school environment. I’m positive that every day I’m going to have a new list of questions I have about improving the success of my students and the success of my lessons. The teachers in the building have a lot of experience teaching, and have real-life examples for nearly any question or problem I may have. Hearing those true examples and discussing the solutions make me feel more confident, knowing what sort of problems might arise and knowing I have at least one solution. With their combined experience, my co-workers can also anticipate problems I might not have foreseen. Having another teacher check lesson plans or procedures, they can point out things to look out for so that I can prepare myself with some potential solutions.

A lot of schools have a new-teacher mentoring program, where an experienced teacher shadows and observes the first year teacher. I think this is a great program, because sometimes it’s difficult to observe problems yourself when you’re so focused on teaching. Those observing teachers get a student-like perspective to the lesson, and that can provide a great deal of helpful insight. Having multiple teachers observe my classroom will also give me some variation of feedback. Most teachers will probably be busy with their own classes, but if possible a school administrator, specials teacher, or another teacher who has free prep time could also observe my teaching, providing me with different points of view.

The other faculty members in the building are going to be very knowledgeable about the student population. The other teachers and staff have worked with most of these students for several years, and know how students might be instructed differently. If I ever am having difficulties with a student or apprehensions about their progress, I’ll likely being talking to their other teachers and expressing my concerns. It’s possible that other teachers are having similar difficulties, or have encountered them in the past and have some possible suggestions or solutions. The school guidance councilor would also be a great resource for solutions for social problems that could potentially arise.

I also anticipate needing a lot of support from the maintenance and janitorial staff. I always try to keep my room organized and clean, and I don’t want to provide them with more work than they already have to do. The art room does go through a lot of cleaning supplies, so I try to be mindful and not wait until those supplies gone before asking for more.

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving through Art

How is problem solving/critical thinking taught through art? What are some different strategies you have used to promote problem solving/critical thinking?

Problem solving and critical thinking has been much more apparent to me while teaching at the elementary level compared to secondary. These young students are still learning the essential elements of art and its production. There’s a lot of basic discovery and exploration of medium

The main way that I try to promote problem solving skills and critical thinking is by giving students the time and opportunity to explore these mediums. As students work with new materials, they will encounter various new problems or difficulties. Students should be provided with adequate time to try to find solutions to these problems or struggles. Even working artists sometimes have to practice a new material or subject to anticipate any problems. It’s important that students understand that mistakes are okay to be made, and are an important part of everyone’s learning.

When we look at slides of artwork in class, I like to ask some basic open ended questions to think about how the work is made and its purpose. How do you think this artwork was constructed? How long do you think it took the artist? How would you do this project differently? These are all simple, open questions to get the students thinking. There are no right or wrong answers, but the questions target specific essential questions for them to be thinking about while working. With a question about the construction of an artwork, students will come up with their own solutions, hear the ideas of their classmates and also hear about the solutions the artist chose. I think students really understand some of these skills better when they’ve considered the struggles famous artists had with their work. Students need to see that they’re not alone in these struggles, and that age or ability has nothing to do with success.

Lastly, as students come to me during projects with questions, I will share some of those problems with the class, and ask for possible solutions. Students respond differently to seeing the struggles of their peers, I think it’s much easier for them to relate to their friends’ difficulties. This group problem solving is also great for establishing a stronger sense of community in the art room. Students should be helping each other and have confidence that there’s a big group of people who can collaborate and help them with their problems.

Professional Development

I haven’t had much experience with professional development, but the few times I have gone to a meeting, I’ve found it extraordinarily helpful. As a student teacher, it allowed me to get to know some of the other teachers in the building and what they were teaching, and really gave me a great sense of the community I was working with. In my future occupations, I think this will be a great opportunity for me to make those important connections with my peers.

The professional development meeting I sat in on was really discussion based. This was really great because I got to not only get to know a lot about the teachers, but I learned about their teaching styles and different techniques they us in their classrooms. The questions that lead our discussion brought up a lot of critical points, most of which I was familiar with. Those ones I wasn’t familiar with though were really relevant to what was happening in the school and education in general. It was nice to hear the topics I had previously discussed, because it brought those ideas to the front of my mind and made me truly reinvestigate them.

I haven’t observered much of this, but I’ve often heard that professional development in schools can often focus more around core academics. This can make it hard to relate topics because art education is such a different type of learning environment. I’ve also noticed a lot of teachers don’t take professional development seriously. I was very excited to go to professional development at my observing schools, but was kind of disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm. All of the topics we discussed were relevant to bettering everyone, and it felt like some teachers didn’t feel that way and didn’t participate much.

Classroom Technologies

The major technology I use in my classroom is the Internet. I like to provide my students with a PowerPoint for each project with a lot of examples. Most of the time, surfing the web comes up with more than enough images and information that I have to cut slides to save time. It’s much easier and quicker to whip up a presentation using the Internet than organizing slides or writing an elaborate written explanation. I’ve been lucky that I’ve had access to a digital projector in classrooms I’ve worked in, and I really hope that I have one in my future classroom. A projector is pretty essential for viewing presentations as a group rather than individually on computers.

I think students respond well to PowerPoint presentations. I try to provide a lot of diverse examples to get the students thinking, trying to show a wide variety of abilities, styles and techniques. Without the Internet, I have to rely on textbooks and examples I have made. This can really limit student’s understanding of their options, because too often students try to copy elements from the examples.

The Internet is a great resource for students too because they can quickly research reference images, textures, techniques and information about other artists and movements. Sometimes students abuse this ability and trace or copy an image from the Internet exactly. This is probably the biggest problem with the Internet, other than students wasting time. But if the student is struggling to find a specific photo or piece of information, as long as they’re still searching, they’re filtering a lot of information. Filtering out bad info versus good or helpful info can be just as much of a learning process as rendering an image.

I was also recently introduced to Artsonia.com, where teachers can upload images of student work that anyone can access online. Combined with email, this is a great way to reach out to parents, faculty and the community and share the great work the students are doing. Students can also look at work from other schools and get ideas of what other students are doing and what artists their age are capable of.

Arts Advocacy

Being an art educator and being an advocate for art education are essentially dependant upon each other. If you want your students to have access to a variety of materials and supplies, you have to work hard for that funding. If you want your students to be recognized by the community for their efforts, you have to go out of your way. If you want your students to have complete freedom to express themselves, you have to fight for that too.

But without educators, there’s no point in being an advocate because students won’t learn. Successful, likeable teachers are essential to furthering student learning. Arts education relates to a lot of other subjects (history, politics, science, mathematics…), and creating artwork is a great way to learn concepts from these other fields.

Getting student work on display is probably the easiest way to show advocacy for art education. Many students work really hard on their art, and displaying their work around the school shows the student body, faculty, school district and community how hard the students worked and that they are valued. My supervising teacher works hard to be constantly cycling artwork out of the display cases, keeping the work new and fresh. There are always students in the hall looking in the cases at the artwork. The artists have the opportunity to show their peers their work, and those who aren’t art students have a chance to see what the art classes are doing. I’ve even had students ask what classes do specific projects they’ve seen because they want to register for those classes.

Another important aspect of arts advocacy is that educators are engaging with the local artistic community. Knowing other artists, gallery owners, art critics and buyers has a great benefit to the students. Not only are you learning new techniques and practices, but also you’re staying up to date on the relevancy of the modern art world and building access to further sources of help/information.

Student Assessment

In my ideal classroom, I would never have to give someone a grade. In art making, so much more value comes from communication and exploration of the success of the artwork. Self-reflection and peer-reflection are two of the best methods for improving upon work. I spend a lot of time hovering around tables, observing the students working. I use this time to talk individually with students about their successes and struggles with the project. The majority of my assessment of student progress and content knowledge comes from these short dialogues. When I get asked questions like “Do you think this looks right?” I usually respond, “What do you think?” The students know that I will tell them how I feel, but they won’t get a response unless they provide me with some insight and self-reflection. Most of the time the students have the same opinions and conclusions as I do. Having the students talk first gives them the opportunity to show me their content knowledge and contextual solutions. I think this encourages students by showing them that they are thinking about the right problems and crafting realistic solutions.

Classroom critiques are also an important layer of assessment. To students, the opinions of their peers matter a lot. These critiques are very truthful and telling about the progress within an artwork. Fostering a positive, constructive critique allows for students to reflect on the qualities of their work and the work of their peers.

As much as I’d like to not give grades, realistically I will have to give grades to all of my students. There are sometimes students who need a tangible grade to understand their progress in the class. Though I don’t believe there is much value in a grade, to others it can be more important to them than the work of art itself. When assessing students, I like to give them a self-evaluation where they can explain their successes and struggles. Students are more critical of themselves usually, and it’s nice to read the thoughts of the students because they don’t always reflect upon what we’ve already discussed. Occasionally the things students write on their evaluation questions give me a much better insight to understanding why a student may have struggled. It’s also a way for students to defend their decisions if they don’t necessarily follow the requirements, sort of a last chance to express their intentions.