Dive in slowly - Do research (part 2)

I had my reservations about a complete and immediate switch from my teacher-directed and skill based art programme, to a student-directed one http://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/

So I moved slower - for 2 reasons.
One was to have the time to reflect on the effect that degrees of choice had on a range of students, giving me time to observe, be observed, interview students, adjust, create support as needed and research.
The other was to build confidence gradually in the students who had already been learning in the conventional teacher-directed method.

With students who moved from experimentation at Kindy the year prior, I used a 50/50 combination of teacher-directed mini lessons and students directed choice sessions that I alternated with. This year group probably had the most influence on me.

Due to their, as yet, uninhibited approach to creating in visceral, haptic (active exploration) and tactile ways, their level of engagement, independence, free collaboration and detailed explanations were second to none.

In comparison, when I engaged the same group in teacher-directed mini projects, their neediness multiplied tenfold and the words "can you help me", "I can't do this", "mine's not good", "I made a mistake", etc. were continually repeated. Self-criticism rose and confidence seemed to diminish rapidly when students were expected to conform to the same outcome, at the same pace. In hindsight, I believe these clues were always there but I just didn't know to look for them.
Yes the skill level shown in the teacher directed pieces seemed more developed, but when they returned to independent work, this 'learnt skill' seemed to evaporate.

Last year, I compiled some points that emerged from observations, in this table. Green boxes are the positives I noted at the time.

I also rewatched one of my favourite TED talks - https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity/transcript?language=en

Sir Ken Robinson - Do Schools Kill Creativity?

And came across this amazing video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFRfJb2ONk&t=24s

Cindy Foley - Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist?

I was feeling nervous about the innovations I was contemplating as it opposed the reality of current practise in our classrooms. I had been fortunate to attend an inspiring key note talk by Professor Welby Ings from AUT at a previous art teacher conference, and was glad to find that in his book - Disobedient Teaching, he argues that positive disobedience is a fundamental teaching behaviour among successful practitioners, and excellent teachers show the ability to change learning programmes and learning environments to suit their students.

Here is his TED talk from 2013  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aumxbgOdkRU

Welby Ings - Disobedient Thinking:  at TEDxAuckland

Books that opened my perspective still further included:

Ings, W. (2017). Disobedient teaching: Surviving and creating change in education. (Kindle Edition). Otago, New Zealand: Otago University Press.


and

Jaquith, D. B., & Hathaway, N.E. (2012). Learner-directed classroom : Developing creative thinking skills through art. New York, United States of America: Teachers College Press.

and articles by:

Gaw, C. (September 05, 2016). What is an ethical pedagogy? Retrieved 12 August 2017 from http://clydegaw.blogspot.co.nz/search?updated-max=2017-02-28T16:44:00-08:00

Jaquith, D. B. (2011). When is Creativity? Art Education, 64(1), 14-19.

Purtee, M. (2016). Teaching skills for the 21st century: Creativity. The Art of Education. Retrieved 7 August 2017 from https://www.theartofed.com/2016/04/20/teaching-skills-21st-century-creativity

Social and online media also played a big part:

The TAB website http://teachingforartisticbehavior.org/ was a minefield of ideas,

Block paper Scissors podcasts by Clyde Gaw and Clark Fralick
and their personal blogs which can be found at:
http://clydegaw.blogspot.co.nz/  and    http://sceart1.blogspot.co.nz/

And the Facebook pages for Teaching for Artistic behaviour are great places to ask questions.

All this research and reflection takes a lot of time but is well worth it. You need to feel confident in your deeper levels of knowledge and not run merely on superficial impressions. The chances are you will be challenged - by supervisors, colleagues, students, parents and members of the on-line teaching community.

http://clipartmag.com/research-clipart#research-clipart-20.gif

If you are also wrestling with these issues or have some great resources to recommend, I would love to hear from you so please comment below.

Thank you for visiting,
With Love, Te Aroha

Timea

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A better way - Reflecting on the start of my journey to TAB principles (part 1)

Post Mindlab - a retrospective

It is so interesting how much your perspective changes about education, the minute you step outside of your single cell classroom.

As a classroom teacher for many years, I believed that I knew best what my class of students needed to progress their learning, and to some extend that was true. But it is only when I moved into a specialist role, teaching across 7 age groups that I got a much wider indication of some of the traps I fell into in the past.

It is so easy to think only of that one year that you are teaching and to meet your targets at all cost. But once you see students develop from ages 4 to 11, you quickly become aware of the long game.

When I took on my current role as Visual Art and Digital Media specialist, I had a big learning curve ahead but was ready for the challenge. I have a passion for learning, the creative arts and technology, the rest was going to develop through research and observation.

I started with a teacher directed approach that focused on practical skill development and scaled formulaic projects up across year levels. Nothing new to see here as this is the best way to teach skills in art, or so I thought.

After pulling together the first art show (in my first year in this role), I knew there was something not quite right about this way of learning art. The final clincher was when I shows student work at a school cluster art show in the local shopping mall. Several works from a range of schools were instantly recognisable as Pinterest staples. Very embarrassing. 

I wanted more variety of work from within the year levels and started trying to modify the same recipe for each class but wanting them all to still be getting the same skill development. Basically, I was still focusing on the skills that I felt they should be developing, rather than what individual students really needed.

Some early attempts at teacher-directed differentiation across 4 Year 2 classes - Seasons using Collage technique:

Spring Winds

Summer Flowers

Winter Snowglobes

Autumn Leaves

Some early attempts at teacher-directed differentiation across 3 x Year 3 classes - Savannah Habitats using the Crayon and Liquid water colours (Dye) with drawing technique:

Zebra

Elephant

Giraffe

Some early attempts at teacher-directed differentiation across 3 x Year 4 classes - Monet using the Tache technique:

Then, I first came across Teaching for Artistic Behaviour (TAB) in one of my many online explorations.

In 2016, I discussed the notion of offering some choice options to my Year 5 and 6 students (last 2 years of primary) to see how they would cope, with my assistant principal . We were staging 'The Lion King' for our school production, so I thought - what a great opportunity to engage the students with all things Africa.

The rest of the year groups I continued to teach through directed lessons with a skill focus, apart from Kindy, who came in to explore with different media each week.

I offered Paint (acrylic, water colour), Drawing (pencil, coloured pencil, oil pastel) and Sculpture (papier mache) centres to my Year 5s to select from.

The Year 6s also had  collage, photography and clay on offer.

The only guidance I gave initially was to  show how the same concept can be created in a range of sources and I collated some Youtube videos on techniques for most of these resources. I linked these into our 'in-house' student digital resource page.

Choice centres across 3 x Year 6 classes - Africa:

Liquid water colours (Dye) and Collage

Acrylic on Canvas Board

Clay Elephant

Photography

Photography

Photography

Clay African pots

Clay Rhino

Papier Mache Rhino

Papier Mache African Mask

I also would spend 5-10 minutes in a centre to introduce or review specific skills or techniques during lessons but would roam the rest of the time to support individual students on request. While they were learning independence and building confidence in themselves, they were teaching me to let them be, to let them self discover and construct personal knowledge, and to share these learnings through collaboration with their peers. 

Yes I had my worries but was so excited to see what the students would do when given the choice to pursue personal passions. 

Te Aroha, with love

Timea

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Embedding YouTube Videos in Blogs?

How to disable related videos when embedding YouTube videos into your blog.

Hi friends,
Today I started work on my class blog, a place to curate learning objects that I find or make and consider useful tools or exemplars for the students' learning in my programme. This is in response to research I am currently working on for a literature review in my course with Mind Lab.

I started loading some videos from YouTube and noticed that after I played them on the front end of the blog (on visitor mode) the video would end on a selection of unrelated videos from YouTube, even if I am embedding them through the HTML mode. These videos are not always appropriate and not something you want to see on a website that you are creating for your school community, as you have no control over what is advertised next.

So after a quick search, I came across this tutorial that quickly helped me to solve that problem. It may help you too :)

Its 2 years old so the YouTube navigation has changed slightly but the steps are still the same.


 Thank you for visiting,

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Mind Lab Week 18 - A Change in My Practice (Theme 4)

Shifting from a classroom to a Specialist teaching role recently, it became increasingly apparent that Visual Art was still being taught through a transactional model in many classes. Combined with research into TAB (Teaching for Artistic Behaviour) and noting the increasing value placed on Creativity as a desired Future Learning skill, I wanted to lead improvements for our school, starting with my specialist programme. To this end, I feel that my postgraduate journey has delivered so far. 
This image illustrates the radical change in the way that I now view my role:

https://alisonedgar.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AAEAAQAAAAAAAA1BAAAAJDEzODM2MjczLTYzMWMtNDJkNy1iY2NjLWU3YTc4N2Y2NTA4Mw-1.jpg

 
And this one represents  the approach I chose for my implementation - shifting my practice to “incorporate deeper learning approaches and engage students in critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and self-directed learning." (see class notes, week 18)

https://www.personalcareermanagement.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/change.jpg

One catalyst for this shift was this Ted talk by art educator, Cindy Foley - Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist?

Theme 4 "Changing the script": Rethinking learners' and teachers' roles, (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2012), identifies a need for shift (in thinking and approach) due to current "social, economic and technological changes, and the exponentially increasing amount of human knowledge being generated as a result, all in a world with an unprecedented degree of complexity, fluidity and uncertainty." Also, education for the ”Knowledge Age needs to prepare learners for dealing with new situations and environments." Students today can collect information anywhere and anytime, they no longer need us for that (Role of Teachers in the 21st C -  Delafosse, S. (2011)).

Rather, I found that students need guidance around what information they should be consuming, and have opportunities to apply that knowledge, to test, fail, persevere, collaborate, deconstruction, reconstruct and so on. The shift from whole class skill teaching based on the 'just in case' model - to the individual/small group 'just in time' conferencing model has been rewarding and re-energising as together we discover, trial and develop ideation strategies for all ability levels, uncover and develop students’ personal 'styles' of expression and experiment with a variety of media. It is a challenging journey as we become more familiar with ambiguity (Foley 2014), tackling problems that we cannot anticipate beforehand.

Y0 T3 - Acrylic paint

Y0 T3 - Papier Mache

Y0 T3 - Plasticine

Y0 T3 - Stop Motion

Y0 T3 - Wire Sculpture

Y0 T3 - Quiver - Dot Day

Bolstad & Gilbert (2012) noted, while teachers know that "Good learning requires active engagement in the whole game" this is still failing to occur. So by identifying my limitation, e.g. time frames, parent and school-wide expectations, I could better target my research for solutions to support my shift.

According to the The 2Revolutions LLC (2012) video, traditional school models no longer meet the needs of the marketplace as they were designed for a different time. It calls on teachers to be 'designers and see the world as a kit of parts - to reshape and reassemble the best pieces from what is already out there, and create something new and better. By exploring related resources to TAB and Choice, I integrate aspects with a focus on sustainability. If something is too difficult for me or the students to maintain - out it goes. iPads are a Godsend for accessing personalised resources and delivering digital creation options, like photography and Stop Motion. 

I regularly survey classes about whether they prefer the 'personal learning' model, the 'step by step follow me' model or both. Most students choose the personal one with some asking for 'both' option. Recently, one class was overwhelmingly pro the step by step model. On reflection, this class had the hardest time with with ideation.

I learnt over the past 2 terms that students following their own inquiry are far more engaged and require less managing than before. Yet, even in a self-directed learning programme, with all the ideation strategies one can muster, you will still have students who learn best by following structured step by step lessons. Purposeful flipped learning tools have proven successful in supporting these students as they build confidence to strike out on their own.

Twenty-first century ideas about knowledge and learning demand shifts in the traditional roles. By recognising and working with learners' strengths, and supporting the development of each learner's potential, the small shifts that we make in our practice can have exponential benefits for the lives of our students. 

References:

Bolstad, R. & Gilbert, J. (2012). Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching: A New Zealand perspective. New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

2Revolutions LLC (2012) The Future of Learning. Retrieved on November 26, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=156&v=xoSJ3_dZcm8

AJ+ (2015). 5 Technologies That Will Change Classroom Education. Retrieved on Novenber 26, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=171&v=loFL5gT_m8I

Delafosse, S. (2011). Teaching in the 21st Century. Retrieved on November 26, 2017, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=075aWDdZUlM

Ted talk for art educators by Foley, . (2014). Tedx Talks: Teaching art or teaching to think like an artist? Retrieved on November 26, 2017, from  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcFRfJb2ONk

With love, as always

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