Student Teaching Reflection 8/28/19: "The Honeymoon Phase"
During the first staff meeting at Rocky Mountain High School, Principal Woodall’s words really stuck with me. He said that living your life with a positive or negative perspective is a choice, and for your own sake, you should choose optimism. In my personal life I had been struggling with issues that made me sometimes see the world through the lens of negativity and Dr. Woodall’s words snapped me out of this mindset and prepared me for my first two weeks of student teaching. He went on to introduce the school’s new mission statement which involves a focus on “self, purpose, and place.” Other staff members spoke of the stories in their teaching experiences that helped them discover their sense of self, purpose and place in the world and in small groups we discussed what these terms meant to us. As I reflect on my experience student teaching thus far, the concepts and ideas that have been circling around my head all come back to these ideas of self, purpose, and place.
When I think about my sense of self, I reflect on the experiences that have made me who I am today, how I have evolved, and who I want to become. My biggest takeaway has been the importance of authenticity. At the end of each day at Rocky I reflect on the interactions I’ve had with students and teachers and I feel that I have been trying to put my most authentic self forward. However, this can sometimes be a tough balance. I have realized that I am genuinely interested in hearing student’s and teacher’s stories, but sometimes this effects my time management. While I want every student to have a voice in my classroom, I feel the need to keep to a schedule, plan my lessons, grade student work, and still save some time for my own self-care. But the thing about being authentic is that in the long run, it should become easier and easier because you become more attuned to making decisions that are in line with your core values. I think it is just a balance between authenticity and awareness. It is important to me to show students who I truly am so that they feel comfortable to do the same, but I still need to maintain a level of awareness of appropriate behavior in a student-teacher relationship. At the end of the day, I look back on the connections I am already forging and the opportunity I have had these last two weeks to talk about, look at, think about, and create art and try to feel thankful for this experience as an exploration of my passions for teaching and art.
Sometimes when I’m in the classroom teaching, I look around at the students surrounding me, the projects I thought up that they interpreted, the art they have planned and created, and in general, the art I am surrounded by and I feel like I am living out my purpose. I’ll admit, the workload has been extremely challenging. Even now I am writing this at about ten pm after teaching all day and working on lessons and grading non-stop since I got home from the high school and my “to-do” list is still a mile long, but at the end of the day I have been looking back on my experiences and realizing that what I am doing everyday really makes me happy. Even the lesson planning and grading gets me going because I get to think about, look at, evaluate, and be inspired by art. (But talk to me in two more weeks!) I may still be in the “honeymoon phase,” but so far, I am excited about the possibilities this new career path holds for me and I feel that I have come to realize my passion and my purpose in life which is to facilitate others in creating art.
The Rocky Mountain High community has accepted me since the very start. There was a moment in the staff meeting when I no longer felt like this was a place I “had to be,” but rather that I was a part of a community that accepted and supported me. I’m not sure if it’s like this at all schools, but at Rocky the idea of community, unity, compassion, and empathy are not only part of their lofty mission statement but are evident every day in the students’ and the teachers’ words and actions. I can see that the people here are also choosing to be here and are excited every day to be coming to their job. When I think about my place in the world, I can see it is in a place like Rocky. I feel comfortable and accepted, supported and valued, and I want to foster this type of feeling in my future classroom.
One thing I have struggled with the past two weeks is maintaining a sense of personal well-being. The days when I’m teaching have felt like a whirlwind trying to keep track of all the lessons I need to plan and document, the assignments I need to grade, and the future assignments I need to begin planning while I still attempt to stay present in the moment forging connections with my students and colleagues. I sometimes feel this fear in the back of my mind that having a job that requires me to put so much effort into facilitating others creating art will prevent me from my commitment to making art myself. The reason I went into art education in the first place was because creating art brings me personal fulfillment and I don’t want to lose that when this becomes my career. I find the required student teaching reflections and their corresponding artworks helpful because I feel that creating a work of art with the conceptual base of my reflections is an outlet to evaluate my experiences and also maintain an artistic life. That is why for my first art journal, I have decided to choose my favorite medium to work in, paint. I plan to complete my artwork this weekend on a fishing trip with my partner. Spending time with him and in nature are two things that have contributed to maintaining my personal well-being, so I want to document that experience by painting my surroundings during our trip.
Student Teaching Reflection 9/20/19: "Trying to find a balance"
I think the honeymoon phase is over. Week five of student teaching is coming to an end and looking back I can see many areas I’ve improved in and many areas I still need to work on. As I return to Rocky day after day the reality is setting in that this is no longer school, it is a full-time job that happens to be the last leg of my journey to becoming a licensed educator. It’s a great feeling to be so close to having a solid career, but it is also scary when I realize just how hard it is to be a teacher. I always knew it would be challenging, but I didn’t know it would feel so much like juggling chainsaws with balloons for hands. The most challenging thing so far has been balance; keeping track of the varying needs of the class while looking at the class progress, maintaining personal relationships, and maintaining my own self-care. I’ve realized that teaching is one of the most selfless jobs because you are not only constantly attempting to solve others’ problems but trying to teach them to solve them on their own.
I have always considered myself a somewhat selfless person, but teaching is really testing my compassion. I’ve realized that it is important to find a balance between your student’s needs and your own. For example, I have been giving up an hour before school, lunch, an hour after school, and sometimes even my planning period to assist students that are falling behind in my classes. I feel this obligation to make sure they have the help that they need, but I realize that in total I am giving up about four hours of time that I could be using to handle my work load to help others. While, I see the merit in doing this, I have been trying to get better at setting boundaries and putting my own oxygen mask on first when the plane is going down. I realize that when I get overloaded with grading, lesson planning, or my own work, I get extremely stressed and have trouble being authentic and investing myself in the moments that make me really enjoy teaching. I became a teacher because I loved talking about art, facilitating its creation, and forging connections with students and I can see that when I get overly stressed I start to lose sight of why I am doing all this in the first place.
My first drawing represents balance. Student teaching has been a lesson in balance for me, whether it’s balancing my needs and the needs of my class, balancing how much help I give students and how much I expect them to take responsibility for their own learning, or even as simple as balancing how much time I spend with each student during a class period. The figure in the drawing represents myself hovering amongst a busy assortment of rocks which represent all my responsibilities. The stacks on either side represent my ability to organize and conquer my responsibilities while being comfortable with the excess responsibilities I have yet to address while I take time to find balance.
I am trying to improve on continuously taking inventory of the needs of my individual students, the needs of the class as a whole, and my own needs. For example, I noticed that in my jewelry class the students seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace. The first project was taking forever to complete, and students were all over the board with their progress and achievement of learning targets. Mrs. Cronen could see this as well and noted that the problem may be stemming from an issue with pacing. While I was proficient at developing relationships with and assisting individual students, I wasn’t accounting for the class progress as a whole. I wasn’t seeing the big picture. To fix this, I began to set learning targets not just for the whole lesson, but for each day. This fixed some of the problems in that students were reaching specific goals in a more uniform pace, but I soon started to see that the students that were already behind were falling further and further behind. I think I started to put this issue on the back burner, thinking once they saw their grades or saw that everyone else was moving on without them, they would start working harder and take more responsibility for their learning. But I was wrong. I put them on the back burner and the water slowly boiled away until there was nothing left to boil the pasta. There are some students so far behind, I started having no idea how to catch them up. The solution Mrs. Cronen and I have worked out is to discuss a long-term game plan with each of these students and then set daily goals for those individual students and I truly hope it works. I started feeling like I was holding these student’s hands too much in the process of learning to make jewelry which I saw as a problem as well, so instead of discussing their responsibilities with them individually or developing a plan of attack I decided to let them sink or swim and they are sinking. This is the delicate balance I see once again in teaching. I don’t want to give students so much that they never solve any problems on their own, but too little that they don’t even know where to begin in manifesting their own success. The second drawing is a symbol for this concept. I chose the water cycle to represent this concept because it has many small parts that make up a whole body of water. The droplets cycle through the clouds, precipitate to the ground, become rivers, oceans, and lakes, then rise back up into the clouds. They are all in different stages of this cycle and all work independently, but they still make up a single body. In this analogy, the individual students cycle through stages of learning and growing, some of them completing the cycle over and over while others get stuck stagnant in a lake. It is my responsibility as a teacher to get better at advancing individual students through the cycle, while looking out for the class as a whole.
Before I began to pursue a career as an educator, I worked for seven years as the manager of a sub shop. I found that when I managed this restaurant, I was constantly solving people’s problems; customers, my crew, my boss. It was overwhelming at times and I frequently felt I wasn’t getting paid enough for how hard this job was. I was responsible for keeping a business operating for eight hours at a time five days a week, which may not sound like much, but there are a lot of moving parts in maintaining a business. The other night I had this dream where I was forced to return to my job at the sub shop against my will and I showed up on my first day back to realize that my crew was made up of the freshmen in my fourth period 2D class. Much to my dismay, operating an efficient business with them as my crew was almost impossible; It was like herding cats. I found myself getting overwhelmed and frustrated in the dream and ended up doing all the work for them rather than trusting them to get it done. I realized the next day that this dream was trying to tell me something about the challenges of teaching. I’ve fallen into a similar role of the problem solver, but the end goal is different. In running a business my goal was to keep the place from burning down and keep sandwiches coming out of the oven, but in teaching one of the main goals is to facilitate students in reaching learning targets. I think that I have become overwhelmed by the number and frequency of students coming to me to solve their problems and I believe that part of this issue has stemmed from setting a precedent where I was willing to solve these problems for them at first. Just like the sub shop crew, they saw that I had the answers to their problems, and that coming to me would be easier than figuring it out on their own. And now I am in this spot where I can’t keep up with all the needs of the close to ninety students in my classes. This is why my third drawing symbolizes perspective. I have been focusing on the small scope. The day to day issues my students need help with like how to dress a jeweler’s saw, how to draw a proportional face, or how to create a ceramic vessel that won’t blow up in the kiln, but I am losing sight of the big picture. When I take a step back and change my perspective it becomes evident that one of the main goals of education is to teach students how to be artists and how to think! Artists encounter a problem and they test solutions. Sometimes they fail and sometimes they succeed, but it is rare that they have someone telling them exactly how to solve artistic problems. To facilitate students in thinking like and acting like artists it is essential to let them fail sometimes because they are finding answers on their own. Honestly, it’s much harder for me to teach a student how to draw a proportionally accurate face than it is for me to just take their pencil and draw it for them, but I need to try because that is the whole point of teaching. I know how to solve these problems, they don’t, and if they ever want to come out of this experience with any transferable knowledge about making art or even being an independent thinker, I need to stop giving them the answers.
I think the honeymoon phase is over. Week five of student teaching is coming to an end and looking back I can see many areas I’ve improved in and many areas I still need to work on. As I return to Rocky day after day the reality is setting in that this is no longer school, it is a full-time job that happens to be the last leg of my journey to becoming a licensed educator. It’s a great feeling to be so close to having a solid career, but it is also scary when I realize just how hard it is to be a teacher. I always knew it would be challenging, but I didn’t know it would feel so much like juggling chainsaws with balloons for hands. The most challenging thing so far has been balance; keeping track of the varying needs of the class while looking at the class progress, maintaining personal relationships, and maintaining my own self-care. I’ve realized that teaching is one of the most selfless jobs because you are not only constantly attempting to solve others’ problems but trying to teach them to solve them on their own.
I have always considered myself a somewhat selfless person, but teaching is really testing my compassion. I’ve realized that it is important to find a balance between your student’s needs and your own. For example, I have been giving up an hour before school, lunch, an hour after school, and sometimes even my planning period to assist students that are falling behind in my classes. I feel this obligation to make sure they have the help that they need, but I realize that in total I am giving up about four hours of time that I could be using to handle my work load to help others. While, I see the merit in doing this, I have been trying to get better at setting boundaries and putting my own oxygen mask on first when the plane is going down. I realize that when I get overloaded with grading, lesson planning, or my own work, I get extremely stressed and have trouble being authentic and investing myself in the moments that make me really enjoy teaching. I became a teacher because I loved talking about art, facilitating its creation, and forging connections with students and I can see that when I get overly stressed I start to lose sight of why I am doing all this in the first place.
My first drawing represents balance. Student teaching has been a lesson in balance for me, whether it’s balancing my needs and the needs of my class, balancing how much help I give students and how much I expect them to take responsibility for their own learning, or even as simple as balancing how much time I spend with each student during a class period. The figure in the drawing represents myself hovering amongst a busy assortment of rocks which represent all my responsibilities. The stacks on either side represent my ability to organize and conquer my responsibilities while being comfortable with the excess responsibilities I have yet to address while I take time to find balance.
I am trying to improve on continuously taking inventory of the needs of my individual students, the needs of the class as a whole, and my own needs. For example, I noticed that in my jewelry class the students seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace. The first project was taking forever to complete, and students were all over the board with their progress and achievement of learning targets. Mrs. Cronen could see this as well and noted that the problem may be stemming from an issue with pacing. While I was proficient at developing relationships with and assisting individual students, I wasn’t accounting for the class progress as a whole. I wasn’t seeing the big picture. To fix this, I began to set learning targets not just for the whole lesson, but for each day. This fixed some of the problems in that students were reaching specific goals in a more uniform pace, but I soon started to see that the students that were already behind were falling further and further behind. I think I started to put this issue on the back burner, thinking once they saw their grades or saw that everyone else was moving on without them, they would start working harder and take more responsibility for their learning. But I was wrong. I put them on the back burner and the water slowly boiled away until there was nothing left to boil the pasta. There are some students so far behind, I started having no idea how to catch them up. The solution Mrs. Cronen and I have worked out is to discuss a long-term game plan with each of these students and then set daily goals for those individual students and I truly hope it works. I started feeling like I was holding these student’s hands too much in the process of learning to make jewelry which I saw as a problem as well, so instead of discussing their responsibilities with them individually or developing a plan of attack I decided to let them sink or swim and they are sinking. This is the delicate balance I see once again in teaching. I don’t want to give students so much that they never solve any problems on their own, but too little that they don’t even know where to begin in manifesting their own success. The second drawing is a symbol for this concept. I chose the water cycle to represent this concept because it has many small parts that make up a whole body of water. The droplets cycle through the clouds, precipitate to the ground, become rivers, oceans, and lakes, then rise back up into the clouds. They are all in different stages of this cycle and all work independently, but they still make up a single body. In this analogy, the individual students cycle through stages of learning and growing, some of them completing the cycle over and over while others get stuck stagnant in a lake. It is my responsibility as a teacher to get better at advancing individual students through the cycle, while looking out for the class as a whole.
Before I began to pursue a career as an educator, I worked for seven years as the manager of a sub shop. I found that when I managed this restaurant, I was constantly solving people’s problems; customers, my crew, my boss. It was overwhelming at times and I frequently felt I wasn’t getting paid enough for how hard this job was. I was responsible for keeping a business operating for eight hours at a time five days a week, which may not sound like much, but there are a lot of moving parts in maintaining a business. The other night I had this dream where I was forced to return to my job at the sub shop against my will and I showed up on my first day back to realize that my crew was made up of the freshmen in my fourth period 2D class. Much to my dismay, operating an efficient business with them as my crew was almost impossible; It was like herding cats. I found myself getting overwhelmed and frustrated in the dream and ended up doing all the work for them rather than trusting them to get it done. I realized the next day that this dream was trying to tell me something about the challenges of teaching. I’ve fallen into a similar role of the problem solver, but the end goal is different. In running a business my goal was to keep the place from burning down and keep sandwiches coming out of the oven, but in teaching one of the main goals is to facilitate students in reaching learning targets. I think that I have become overwhelmed by the number and frequency of students coming to me to solve their problems and I believe that part of this issue has stemmed from setting a precedent where I was willing to solve these problems for them at first. Just like the sub shop crew, they saw that I had the answers to their problems, and that coming to me would be easier than figuring it out on their own. And now I am in this spot where I can’t keep up with all the needs of the close to ninety students in my classes. This is why my third drawing symbolizes perspective. I have been focusing on the small scope. The day to day issues my students need help with like how to dress a jeweler’s saw, how to draw a proportional face, or how to create a ceramic vessel that won’t blow up in the kiln, but I am losing sight of the big picture. When I take a step back and change my perspective it becomes evident that one of the main goals of education is to teach students how to be artists and how to think! Artists encounter a problem and they test solutions. Sometimes they fail and sometimes they succeed, but it is rare that they have someone telling them exactly how to solve artistic problems. To facilitate students in thinking like and acting like artists it is essential to let them fail sometimes because they are finding answers on their own. Honestly, it’s much harder for me to teach a student how to draw a proportionally accurate face than it is for me to just take their pencil and draw it for them, but I need to try because that is the whole point of teaching. I know how to solve these problems, they don’t, and if they ever want to come out of this experience with any transferable knowledge about making art or even being an independent thinker, I need to stop giving them the answers.
Student Teaching Reflection 10/7/19: Student Teaching Symbiosis
The most challenging part of being a student teacher is making constant adjustments to my teaching style. It was easy to go into this experience thinking I knew exactly what type of teacher I wanted to be, but in practice, there were many realities I wasn’t prepared for. With the help of my mentor teachers and other colleagues, I learned to make adjustments for the real-world application of my art education degree, but it hasn’t been easy. I have come to see that although I will one day have the title of teacher, I want to strive to always think like a student. I want to treat my experience as an educator as an opportunity to constantly learn from my colleagues, students, and professional development and reflect, assess, and make adjustments like I am now. I think in any area of life, believing you have it all figured out or there’s nothing left to learn or improve only leads to an unfulfilled life not lived to its potential.
However, it is still important in a less colloquial sense to be seen as a teacher and not a student. While I appreciate the constant feedback from my colleagues and mentors, I look forward to a time where I am freer to make and learn from my mistakes. When my mentor teacher is watching I sometimes feel this extreme anxiety that I will do something wrong and while I believe correction is important, I think I will feel a sense of weight being lifted when I am no longer being observed so often. I also feel that taking charge of a classroom will be much easier when students see me as the main teacher and not someone learning how to teach. Although being seen as a student has done some good leveling the playing field between my students and I, I have seen situations arise where I am not taken as seriously because I am seen as an assistant rather than the main teacher. A practicum teacher once told me that you can always get more lenient, but you can never get stricter, and although I see myself as a pretty easy going individual, I am realizing the importance of making my expectations known immediately and consistently. It is important to not only be stern, but to be consistent. While it is hard for me to be stern sometimes, I am realizing that it will only make my life easier by developing a respectful classroom culture right off the bat.
For this reflection I have chosen to use a pair of earrings I made in my jewelry class as my artistic reflection. I created them to familiarize myself with some of the metalsmithing processes I had to demonstrate during the project and to show students the level of quality I expected in their final products. I thought this artwork very literally reflected on the relationship between student and teacher because I was putting myself in the place of my students to work through problem solving opportunities they might experience and develop a lesson that would counter these issues through instruction. It has been interesting teaching a class that I have little experience in myself and having to learn some of the processes along the way. I always assumed teaching would come second nature if I was an expert in the content area, but I didn’t account for how to teach when I am a novice. This is a situation in which I think this bit of vulnerability helps me relate to the students because I am learning along with them. For example, I had never enameled before creating these earrings, but I learned the process and was able to see the simplest way to communicate this learning to my students. I also found that creating this work of art was enjoyable for me because I got to express myself artistically rather than only facilitating the expression of others. I feel that it is important to continue my own artistic practice as a teacher even if it means making art for demos.
The most challenging part of being a student teacher is making constant adjustments to my teaching style. It was easy to go into this experience thinking I knew exactly what type of teacher I wanted to be, but in practice, there were many realities I wasn’t prepared for. With the help of my mentor teachers and other colleagues, I learned to make adjustments for the real-world application of my art education degree, but it hasn’t been easy. I have come to see that although I will one day have the title of teacher, I want to strive to always think like a student. I want to treat my experience as an educator as an opportunity to constantly learn from my colleagues, students, and professional development and reflect, assess, and make adjustments like I am now. I think in any area of life, believing you have it all figured out or there’s nothing left to learn or improve only leads to an unfulfilled life not lived to its potential.
However, it is still important in a less colloquial sense to be seen as a teacher and not a student. While I appreciate the constant feedback from my colleagues and mentors, I look forward to a time where I am freer to make and learn from my mistakes. When my mentor teacher is watching I sometimes feel this extreme anxiety that I will do something wrong and while I believe correction is important, I think I will feel a sense of weight being lifted when I am no longer being observed so often. I also feel that taking charge of a classroom will be much easier when students see me as the main teacher and not someone learning how to teach. Although being seen as a student has done some good leveling the playing field between my students and I, I have seen situations arise where I am not taken as seriously because I am seen as an assistant rather than the main teacher. A practicum teacher once told me that you can always get more lenient, but you can never get stricter, and although I see myself as a pretty easy going individual, I am realizing the importance of making my expectations known immediately and consistently. It is important to not only be stern, but to be consistent. While it is hard for me to be stern sometimes, I am realizing that it will only make my life easier by developing a respectful classroom culture right off the bat.
For this reflection I have chosen to use a pair of earrings I made in my jewelry class as my artistic reflection. I created them to familiarize myself with some of the metalsmithing processes I had to demonstrate during the project and to show students the level of quality I expected in their final products. I thought this artwork very literally reflected on the relationship between student and teacher because I was putting myself in the place of my students to work through problem solving opportunities they might experience and develop a lesson that would counter these issues through instruction. It has been interesting teaching a class that I have little experience in myself and having to learn some of the processes along the way. I always assumed teaching would come second nature if I was an expert in the content area, but I didn’t account for how to teach when I am a novice. This is a situation in which I think this bit of vulnerability helps me relate to the students because I am learning along with them. For example, I had never enameled before creating these earrings, but I learned the process and was able to see the simplest way to communicate this learning to my students. I also found that creating this work of art was enjoyable for me because I got to express myself artistically rather than only facilitating the expression of others. I feel that it is important to continue my own artistic practice as a teacher even if it means making art for demos.
Student Teaching Reflection 10/16/19: Using Time with Intention
Efficient time management can often make or break a new teacher. I sometimes struggle with how to use the time I have with students with intention and how to foster the acquisition of personal responsibility for time management among my students. In my high school experience, I found that I had trouble with the realities of reaching learning targets within the quarter. I realized that in the time we had there were skills and learning objectives that must be met and without proper pacing on my part and responsibility for success on the student’s part, they would not be met. To combat this issue, I began to incorporate more checkpoints and formative assessments to assess student’s progress and understanding. This looked like daily check-ins for progress on specific assignments, sketch collaborations and reflections, in-progress critiques, and class time given for work on specific assignments students were struggling with. For example, my jewelry class was all over the board with progress on their second project. Some students were almost done enameling their pendants while others were still sketching their designs. To address this issue, I incorporated daily class check ins at the beginning of the class where I would ask students to list the steps of the process of creating their artwork and gauge where they were and where they needed to be by the end of the class period. This helped unite the class in reaching learning targets at a similar pace. I also began to incorporate due dates for sketches which hinged on sketch collaborations with their table group which would earn them points in the class for completion. I realized quickly that students have many different motivations for creating artwork, and some needed more of a push to reach different check points in the process.
I have now switched to elementary where the class periods are much shorter and the students much younger. I can already see that efficient time management is essential to a smoothly operating classroom where students are reaching learning targets and learning to become artists. I am fortunate to be working with Rosalie King who has incorporated TAB (teaching for artistic behavior) into her pedagogy. TAB focuses on a high level of organization that facilitates a classroom environment where students are free to think and create like artists. Essentially, student learn the skills required to create artwork in each of the studios (drawing, painting, printmaking, collage, fibers, architecture, and sculpture) and then are free to create whatever they want in any studio. The students are in control of conception of their ideas and the medium they choose to carry them out. I have already seen that this form of classroom management is ideal for encouraging students to think and work like artists, but it takes a lot of front-loaded routine acquisition and daily organization through these routines. The students in Mrs. King’s class have already learned the daily routines like the back of their hands which results in efficient time management because they know exactly what to expect and when to expect it. The structure of the class is the same every day and they know what is expected of them and how to achieve it. Every day the class starts by gathering on the front carpet and participating in a 5-minute demo. During this time, they are introduced to the learning target (studio note) and are shown anything they need to know for the new skill they are learning. This only takes five minutes which is essential because they are so young that this is as long as we have for them to stay listening and engaged. Creating a short and sweet presentation for the five-minute demo is essential because it clearly shows students everything they need to know for the lesson. Another key to Mrs. King’s time management has to do with how she has used her classroom walls with intention. Everything on the walls serves a purpose to either visualize the routines of the classroom or identify tools and materials in the studios. Everything unessential to the student’s learning such as extra materials are hidden behind curtains so that the room doesn’t feel cluttered or busy. For example, the student’s clean up routine in Mrs. King’s class was incredible! It took students only five minutes to clean everything up and they knew exactly what to do. This is because they practiced the routine everyday with positive reinforcement. The walls have signs for clean up that show the steps (Artwork: put away the art you are working on, Supplies: put away any supplies you used in their home, and Chores: help others, tidy up studios, clean trash from the floor or wipe down tables.) When they are finished with clean up, Mrs. King inspects the studios in front of the class and verbalizes the things she saw were done well, and the things that could use improvement. The students already seemed to have garnered a responsibility for the upkeep of their studios I didn’t even see among the high school students.
I have seen so far that the key to time management is intention. This involves speaking to the students with intention, creating simple and clear visual instructions, and using the walls with purpose to facilitate classroom routines. In my classroom one day I will most likely incorporate the TAB pedagogy because I can see that it not only teaches students to think and create like artists, it is ideal for efficient time management.
For this week's artwork I decided to work with concrete and natural found objects to create a piece that talks about the passing of time and the futility of trying to "manage it." Just kidding! When I look at the finished piece it seems to me that it comments on the ever present passage of time and the natural modes of management which include decomposition and eventual death. I have used concrete to encase a number of biological objects which through the natural order of things have degraded, passed, and decomposed. Although in nature these objects would have decomposed until they became part of the Earth again, the concrete is acting to preserve them in time. To me this symbolizes the challenge of educators to attempt to manage time wisely. In the case of this artwork, the concrete represents the teacher's efforts, the decomposing objects represent the inevitable effects of the passage of time, and the work as a whole represents the beauty of the balance created by efficient time management.
Student Teaching Reflection 11/5/19: Committing to Life-Long Learning
As I get closer to becoming a certified art educator, I am understanding the importance of consistently reflecting and growing in my practice. Being an educator has always involved learning as much from my experience and students as they learn from me. Being an educator means being a life-long learner and continually evolving my teaching philosophy and realities of my practice such as classroom management and efficiency of instruction. Besides learning from my experiences every day in the classroom I plan on continuing my education of how to become an efficient and effective educator through professional development opportunities. One of the most valuable opportunities I had for professional development during my student teaching experience was attending Mrs. King’s TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) classes. In this class we discussed the purpose behind the pedagogy, it’s benefits, the realities of implementing it in a classroom and the curriculum and standards alignment. After experiencing TAB working in the classroom, it was extremely informative to discuss with colleagues and experienced teachers the pedogeological underpinnings of the teaching philosophy and brainstorm instructional techniques.
During my elementary experience, I worked with Mrs. King Mondays-Thursdays, but Mrs. King had Fridays off so on these days I sought an opportunity to learn and grow in a different environment. I volunteered with a Waldorf School in town called Riversong on these days. I chose this school because I felt the Waldorf pedagogy was similar in concept to TAB and I thought it would be helpful to see how another school approaches a choice environment. Although this wasn’t formal professional development, I felt it furthered my knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of education and the importance of child development to formal educational practices. Waldorf pedagogy centers around providing students with opportunities for experiential learning through stories, dance, song, and visual art and supports children developmentally while allowing them the freedom to explore their imaginations and the world around them as they figure out their place in it. The biggest similarities between TAB and the Waldorf pedagogy is that they center around giving students the environment, structure, and tools to reach understanding while providing them with the freedom to learn to think independently, creatively solve problems, be comfortable with taking conceptual risks, and be flexible and confident in their place in the world. These experiences together have helped develop my personal philosophies on art education and child development.
For this artwork I did a life drawing of the tree house in the Moon Garden classroom at Riversong. On my last day with the class I attempted to do some life drawings of the room as I reflected on the last eight weeks with them. The environment of the classroom is magical and full of imagination as the children play and explore their surroundings. A lot of the time they come up with make-believe games putting on dance performances, puppet shows or plays, or cooking pretend meals. On our last day I felt heavy with sorrow for the fact that it would be my last day with the children, but I also felt ready to take the next steps on my journey to becoming an educator. Feeling quite transitional I initiated a game with the children where we built a blanket fort out of our tie dye silks and pretended it was a chrysalis that we would enter as caterpillars and emerge from as butterflies. This drawing represents a memory of that moment of transformation and my last day with the children. The colored part of the silks in the drawing will work like a pop up book and reveal pictures of the Riversong kids on our walks to Grandmother Willow. This will be a gift for the Riversong family.
As I get closer to becoming a certified art educator, I am understanding the importance of consistently reflecting and growing in my practice. Being an educator has always involved learning as much from my experience and students as they learn from me. Being an educator means being a life-long learner and continually evolving my teaching philosophy and realities of my practice such as classroom management and efficiency of instruction. Besides learning from my experiences every day in the classroom I plan on continuing my education of how to become an efficient and effective educator through professional development opportunities. One of the most valuable opportunities I had for professional development during my student teaching experience was attending Mrs. King’s TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behavior) classes. In this class we discussed the purpose behind the pedagogy, it’s benefits, the realities of implementing it in a classroom and the curriculum and standards alignment. After experiencing TAB working in the classroom, it was extremely informative to discuss with colleagues and experienced teachers the pedogeological underpinnings of the teaching philosophy and brainstorm instructional techniques.
During my elementary experience, I worked with Mrs. King Mondays-Thursdays, but Mrs. King had Fridays off so on these days I sought an opportunity to learn and grow in a different environment. I volunteered with a Waldorf School in town called Riversong on these days. I chose this school because I felt the Waldorf pedagogy was similar in concept to TAB and I thought it would be helpful to see how another school approaches a choice environment. Although this wasn’t formal professional development, I felt it furthered my knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of education and the importance of child development to formal educational practices. Waldorf pedagogy centers around providing students with opportunities for experiential learning through stories, dance, song, and visual art and supports children developmentally while allowing them the freedom to explore their imaginations and the world around them as they figure out their place in it. The biggest similarities between TAB and the Waldorf pedagogy is that they center around giving students the environment, structure, and tools to reach understanding while providing them with the freedom to learn to think independently, creatively solve problems, be comfortable with taking conceptual risks, and be flexible and confident in their place in the world. These experiences together have helped develop my personal philosophies on art education and child development.
For this artwork I did a life drawing of the tree house in the Moon Garden classroom at Riversong. On my last day with the class I attempted to do some life drawings of the room as I reflected on the last eight weeks with them. The environment of the classroom is magical and full of imagination as the children play and explore their surroundings. A lot of the time they come up with make-believe games putting on dance performances, puppet shows or plays, or cooking pretend meals. On our last day I felt heavy with sorrow for the fact that it would be my last day with the children, but I also felt ready to take the next steps on my journey to becoming an educator. Feeling quite transitional I initiated a game with the children where we built a blanket fort out of our tie dye silks and pretended it was a chrysalis that we would enter as caterpillars and emerge from as butterflies. This drawing represents a memory of that moment of transformation and my last day with the children. The colored part of the silks in the drawing will work like a pop up book and reveal pictures of the Riversong kids on our walks to Grandmother Willow. This will be a gift for the Riversong family.
Student Teaching Reflection 11/20/19:
In my first student teaching placement at Rocky Mountain High School, my biggest takeaway was a changed perspective about my role as a teacher. I found that teaching every day and being responsible for planning lessons and managing a classroom efficiently was extremely challenging. My biggest challenge was maintaining an environment where students took responsibility for their own learning. With some students it was extremely difficult to get them to do the work that would help make them better artists, so I incorporated daily check ins of progress and more simplified and frequent learning targets. In the big picture, I found that a lot of my role as a teacher was as a disciplinarian and a materials manager rather than a facilitator of artistic thought and action. While I learned a lot about the realities of efficient management and instruction, it wasn’t until I experienced teaching for artistic behavior in my elementary experience that I was able to shift my perspective of teaching to involve its more philosophical underpinnings.
To me, the purpose of art education is to facilitate students in becoming independent thinkers comfortable with the ambiguity of their ideas, confident enough to express them visually and knowledgeable enough to choose the appropriate medium to do so. They are learning to solve problems creatively in the process or their work and create a final product that communicates their ideas. The choice incorporated into the TAB pedagogy in ideation, process, and product allows students to take responsibility for their learning and truly think and work like artists. In this situation the teacher acts as a facilitator of artistic ideas and creation rather than a disciplinarian or materials manager. The knowledge I took away from TAB has enabled me to start with the big picture and work my way backwards towards the activities, learning objectives, and enduring understandings that will help me achieve understanding from my students.
The biggest transition I experienced in my student teaching experience was the switch to TAB. One of my biggest fears about being an educator was the challenge of incorporating so many elements of efficient teaching into my practice. I feel that TAB has solved all the problems I felt would prevent me from being a successful educator so I am thankful I was paired with Mrs. King as my mentor. Any problems with pacing, student engagement, accommodations and modifications, and materials management were solved by TAB. Students worked at their own pace to complete work they were intrinsically motivated to create. Students with special needs or gifted abilities were able to work at their comfort level while still being pushed through individual conferences to challenge themselves to go deeper. Materials management became a questions of replenishing materials rather than having to put out fires and assist students consistently as they learn to solve their own problems. TAB enables me as a teacher to feel that my students are truly learning to think and work like artists and through this they are aligning with the visual art standards and reaching learning targets.
One of my biggest passions in teaching is observing students make discoveries, push through challenges, and explore techniques as the create works of art. The structure of TAB has enabled me to see the imaginative possibilities of child art and sometimes I start to feel jealous that I don't get to participate in the creative process with them on my own artwork. For this reason I think it is important to continue my own artistic practice not only for the fulfillment it brings me, but because it will keep me familiar with the process of an artist. If I am working and thinking like an artist consistently, I will be able to facilitate my students better in doing the same. For this artistic reflection I decided to work on a personally relevant work of art I've been meaning to create for a long time. This is the beginning of the piece (the Grisaille or under-painting) as I plan on adding color. The content of the work represents transition as it is a depiction of my best friend's daughter and husband in nature. She lost her brother two years ago to suicide, but a year before that she expressed to me her desire to have a child. A year after her brother's passing she was blessed with a daughter. To me the artwork represents two meaningful transitions; life and death.
In my first student teaching placement at Rocky Mountain High School, my biggest takeaway was a changed perspective about my role as a teacher. I found that teaching every day and being responsible for planning lessons and managing a classroom efficiently was extremely challenging. My biggest challenge was maintaining an environment where students took responsibility for their own learning. With some students it was extremely difficult to get them to do the work that would help make them better artists, so I incorporated daily check ins of progress and more simplified and frequent learning targets. In the big picture, I found that a lot of my role as a teacher was as a disciplinarian and a materials manager rather than a facilitator of artistic thought and action. While I learned a lot about the realities of efficient management and instruction, it wasn’t until I experienced teaching for artistic behavior in my elementary experience that I was able to shift my perspective of teaching to involve its more philosophical underpinnings.
To me, the purpose of art education is to facilitate students in becoming independent thinkers comfortable with the ambiguity of their ideas, confident enough to express them visually and knowledgeable enough to choose the appropriate medium to do so. They are learning to solve problems creatively in the process or their work and create a final product that communicates their ideas. The choice incorporated into the TAB pedagogy in ideation, process, and product allows students to take responsibility for their learning and truly think and work like artists. In this situation the teacher acts as a facilitator of artistic ideas and creation rather than a disciplinarian or materials manager. The knowledge I took away from TAB has enabled me to start with the big picture and work my way backwards towards the activities, learning objectives, and enduring understandings that will help me achieve understanding from my students.
The biggest transition I experienced in my student teaching experience was the switch to TAB. One of my biggest fears about being an educator was the challenge of incorporating so many elements of efficient teaching into my practice. I feel that TAB has solved all the problems I felt would prevent me from being a successful educator so I am thankful I was paired with Mrs. King as my mentor. Any problems with pacing, student engagement, accommodations and modifications, and materials management were solved by TAB. Students worked at their own pace to complete work they were intrinsically motivated to create. Students with special needs or gifted abilities were able to work at their comfort level while still being pushed through individual conferences to challenge themselves to go deeper. Materials management became a questions of replenishing materials rather than having to put out fires and assist students consistently as they learn to solve their own problems. TAB enables me as a teacher to feel that my students are truly learning to think and work like artists and through this they are aligning with the visual art standards and reaching learning targets.
One of my biggest passions in teaching is observing students make discoveries, push through challenges, and explore techniques as the create works of art. The structure of TAB has enabled me to see the imaginative possibilities of child art and sometimes I start to feel jealous that I don't get to participate in the creative process with them on my own artwork. For this reason I think it is important to continue my own artistic practice not only for the fulfillment it brings me, but because it will keep me familiar with the process of an artist. If I am working and thinking like an artist consistently, I will be able to facilitate my students better in doing the same. For this artistic reflection I decided to work on a personally relevant work of art I've been meaning to create for a long time. This is the beginning of the piece (the Grisaille or under-painting) as I plan on adding color. The content of the work represents transition as it is a depiction of my best friend's daughter and husband in nature. She lost her brother two years ago to suicide, but a year before that she expressed to me her desire to have a child. A year after her brother's passing she was blessed with a daughter. To me the artwork represents two meaningful transitions; life and death.
Student Teaching Reflection 12/8/19: Creating a Compassionate, Inclusive Classroom
In an elementary school setting one of the most important elements to creating a predictable, caring and positive learning environment is authenticity and respect for the diverse population of learners. I strive to be my authentic self in my classroom and model the behavior of respect for differences and understanding of varying learning styles and needs. Children are one of the most underrepresented factions in society and as such their voices are frequently overlooked. I would like my classroom to be an environment that represents the opposite. I strive to create a classroom where students feel comfortable enough to explore their ideas confidently through artistic creation. I feel that when this is achieved students feel empowered to share their voice through the tangible evolution of their ideas.
At O’dea I am responsible for meeting the learning needs of up to 472 students, so the diversity of these students is extremely important to account for in instruction, management, and lesson planning. For me, the way to encourage the acceptance of this diversity is to model this behavior myself, and to design lessons and instruction that make learning targets reachable for students with many varying needs. Teaching for Artistic Behavior has been a godsend in this arena because it enables students to take responsibility for their learning in every step of the process. They are responsible for choosing their concept, deciding the appropriate medium to express their idea, and creating a tangible work of art solving creative problems along the way. In this way students are free to create art about whatever they are passionate about which recognizes the different interests and ideas of every student.
As my student teaching experience comes to an end, I see many areas in which I’ve grown and some areas that could still use improvement. I have reflected a lot on the appropriateness of Teaching for Artistic Behavior to my teaching style and to my personal philosophies about the purpose of teaching art. Although I sometimes miss the teacher-guided projects that enable me to think like an artist and come up with a concept I think will help my students learn to be artists, I have had to let go of that desire to take responsibility for this part of the art-making process. After observing and teaching students in the TAB setting, I have seen that this pedagogy supports students in learning to think and work like artists which, to me, is the goal of art education. They are learning how to think independently, be comfortable with the ambiguity of their ideas, solve problems creatively, and confidently express their ideas and identity through art. The idea of this is great, but the reality is where I could use improvement. For TAB to work, students need a ton of structure surrounding instruction or it becomes a mad house. I have always struggled with classroom management because I sometimes have an issue of not being stern enough. Although I believe this has to do with the authenticity of personality I try to bring to my classroom, I am seeing that for the good of the learning environment I am attempting to cultivate it is important to provide students working with this much freedom with consistant structure through an increase in sternness and adherence to routine. I am seeing even now in my last week of student teaching that in one of my classes I have let up a bit and the students are lacking serious commitment to their art making because the environment has become more about fun than learning to work like artists. Because I let up my control, it is very hard for me to regain it from the class.
Every time a student has given me a work of art in class, I have saved it in a folder. I have come to love the “kid-art aesthetic” and so I save them one, because I love them, and two because I want the students to see that I truly value the work they are making. Now that the experience has come to its end, I have a folder chalk full of art and I don’t want it to just sit in this folder forever, so I decided to make my own work of art from it. For this artistic reflection I took the artwork created by the students as O’dea and created a weaving, representing how as artists working together in a studio, our ideas, opinions, personalities, and passions are woven into the positive and caring environment we are all a part of. I may gift this artwork to O’dea or keep it to one day hang in my classroom.
In an elementary school setting one of the most important elements to creating a predictable, caring and positive learning environment is authenticity and respect for the diverse population of learners. I strive to be my authentic self in my classroom and model the behavior of respect for differences and understanding of varying learning styles and needs. Children are one of the most underrepresented factions in society and as such their voices are frequently overlooked. I would like my classroom to be an environment that represents the opposite. I strive to create a classroom where students feel comfortable enough to explore their ideas confidently through artistic creation. I feel that when this is achieved students feel empowered to share their voice through the tangible evolution of their ideas.
At O’dea I am responsible for meeting the learning needs of up to 472 students, so the diversity of these students is extremely important to account for in instruction, management, and lesson planning. For me, the way to encourage the acceptance of this diversity is to model this behavior myself, and to design lessons and instruction that make learning targets reachable for students with many varying needs. Teaching for Artistic Behavior has been a godsend in this arena because it enables students to take responsibility for their learning in every step of the process. They are responsible for choosing their concept, deciding the appropriate medium to express their idea, and creating a tangible work of art solving creative problems along the way. In this way students are free to create art about whatever they are passionate about which recognizes the different interests and ideas of every student.
As my student teaching experience comes to an end, I see many areas in which I’ve grown and some areas that could still use improvement. I have reflected a lot on the appropriateness of Teaching for Artistic Behavior to my teaching style and to my personal philosophies about the purpose of teaching art. Although I sometimes miss the teacher-guided projects that enable me to think like an artist and come up with a concept I think will help my students learn to be artists, I have had to let go of that desire to take responsibility for this part of the art-making process. After observing and teaching students in the TAB setting, I have seen that this pedagogy supports students in learning to think and work like artists which, to me, is the goal of art education. They are learning how to think independently, be comfortable with the ambiguity of their ideas, solve problems creatively, and confidently express their ideas and identity through art. The idea of this is great, but the reality is where I could use improvement. For TAB to work, students need a ton of structure surrounding instruction or it becomes a mad house. I have always struggled with classroom management because I sometimes have an issue of not being stern enough. Although I believe this has to do with the authenticity of personality I try to bring to my classroom, I am seeing that for the good of the learning environment I am attempting to cultivate it is important to provide students working with this much freedom with consistant structure through an increase in sternness and adherence to routine. I am seeing even now in my last week of student teaching that in one of my classes I have let up a bit and the students are lacking serious commitment to their art making because the environment has become more about fun than learning to work like artists. Because I let up my control, it is very hard for me to regain it from the class.
Every time a student has given me a work of art in class, I have saved it in a folder. I have come to love the “kid-art aesthetic” and so I save them one, because I love them, and two because I want the students to see that I truly value the work they are making. Now that the experience has come to its end, I have a folder chalk full of art and I don’t want it to just sit in this folder forever, so I decided to make my own work of art from it. For this artistic reflection I took the artwork created by the students as O’dea and created a weaving, representing how as artists working together in a studio, our ideas, opinions, personalities, and passions are woven into the positive and caring environment we are all a part of. I may gift this artwork to O’dea or keep it to one day hang in my classroom.