Some other thoughts...

I only could share some bits and pieces of my observation in the first week of Saturday Art School as I hopped into three different classes within 2 hours. I must have missed so many things that already impressed, fascinated or even frustrated you in some ways. So, please share with us on this blog. I look forward to reading yours.

I have some questions for you. If a student does not want to follow your class activity, what would you do? Did you listen to your students? What did you hear from them? How could you find the balance between speaking and observing? When do you talk and when do you let students talk? How could you improve your working relationship between co-teachers?

Abby and Christy’s class

I loved the demonstration on the big piece of white paper, on which Abby tried to remind the students of the details of facial features by using illustrations and words. “What do eyes look like?” “How to draw a nose?” “How about a month?”... Did you see from the photo that there was a cross over a dot on the paper? Oh well, Abby will have to explain what happened on this drawing. It was a fun class for both teachers and students, I’m sure.

Matt and Gene’s class

I was impressed by the rich and engaging conversation between Matt and the students during the PPT presentation of Myths, Fairy Tales, and Folklores. I was fascinated by the students, who knew so many things about those topics. During the paper making session, Genevieve was very active in teaching the students about the techniques. Yes, she is a “hands-on” person. Keep up the good work; BOTH of you!

Allison, Betsy and Erica’s class

Although it was a little bit bumpy at the beginning, the class went smoothly for the rest of it. The relationships between teachers and students, students and students started building closely little by little as time went by. The teachers listened to the students carefully and provided an encouraging environment for the students to make art. They were excited about the model magic and got very into making their own things. So, it was a great start for their unit theme: Relationships!

Look! Who is Talking?

"what do you think it feels like to be in space?"

"when we say the body is an object, what do we mean by that?"

"what does a detective do?"

...as students gather around the table in the high school studio, on the big pink rug in the preschool, in the morning briefing at the bi-focal detective agency headquarters, and in many other configurations on this Saturday morning--the students squirm in their seats as they wrestle with our questions. The hamster is really running at this point, breaking all kinds of records!

Jaxson begins to fidget in his place, leaning toward the teacher with his entire body shaking with excitement...eventually muscling out of his mouth, "it...it...fee"...but another question has emerged. Jaxson falls back on his bottom, defeated! As students in the high school begin to think about their own bodies as objects, conjuring up imagery that best reflects this particular line of inquiry, there is an immediate re-directing of the question toward the artist of the day. In the bi-focal briefing room, the detectives are quickly constructing descriptions of what a detective does, but those descriptions are only partially revealed today...another question has come to fruition.

Though our first day with students was a great success, there are many places that we might begin to look more intricately at, to take a second look...and, to take a few extra seconds...to listen. Our questions are important, but the capacity to which our students respond should have precedence in our teaching. Our students are vigorously working to provide us with their interests, curiosities, concerns, convictions, and resistant tendencies. Are we listening? Do we see these often mute exchanges? How can we become more sensitive to our own presence in the act of talking with students? How can we become sensitive to those moments where "waiting just a few more seconds" elicits a flurry of debate? Our students have incredible stories to share with us, and our questions are often the catalyst for their narrative impulse.

I have three questions for each of you today, questions that I feel might help us to become awakened to these aspects of the teacher-learning relationship: (1) What is wait time? (2) How might this be useful in our teaching this semester? (3) How does "wait time" reflect the degree to which we are engaged in "being there" with our students?

Free Sketches

Domino














Math














Characters (Garfield, Teddy bear)




Were you ready to start a conversation with students bringing different interests into their own sketchbooks at the first day when you met them?

What did you ask each of the students referring to their drawings to learn who they are?

How were the questions different to each student?

An Example of DEMO

What is a point which the teacher emphasizing in this DEMO?

Rebounding a STUDENT VOICE

As a teacher leading a conversation in a classroom, what could be a crucial attitude to have students' voices?

In a co-teaching setting, what could be roles of assistant teachers?

STUDENT INTERESTS AS SPRINGBOARDS FOR UNDERSTANDING

How do the students show us what
their interests are?

How do we use their interests as springboards of understanding?

In the preschool classroom, while the teachers read a story to introduce the students to ideas of astronauts and outer-space, Elijah sat quietly listening. "What does an astronaut wear?" the teachers asked. Elijah smiled, looked at me and pointed to his shoe. We can pause to consider what knowledge the students bring in to our classroom. As teachers, we can build the connections between the knowing that they bring with them and the concepts and ideas that we hope to develop during our time together.

Beginnings

A busy morning, with lots of new families arriving and many regulars registering late–but all was quiet in the Patterson Gallery by 9:15. As I walked around the classrooms, I was impressed by the extent to which everything seemed to be completely under control, calm, productive, and focused:  A tribute to all of the careful preparation the student teachers had done over the past few weeks.  It was one of the smoothest first mornings we have had!

It went by quickly!  Trying to spend some time in each of the seven classrooms, I caught only glimpses of what was going on there:  Enough to see that the 10-year-olds were deeply engaged in the conversation about myths, fairytales and folklore; that the preschool and kindergarten kids were excited to watch the video clips taken from inside a space ship (and to think that they will enjoy seeing those again and again as the semester progresses); that the 6 and 7 year olds had intriguing stories to tell about all of the (varied!) Model Magic sculptures they had made; that the 9 year olds made some amazing monsters on their T-shirts and then as exquisite corpse; that the single sex 8-year-old group was fascinated by the concept of self-portraiture; that the 11 to 13s were completely absorbed in completing their entrance requirements to the BiFocal Detective Agency; and that the high school group was seriously considering the possibilities of performance art.  

In every classroom, there were different kinds of performance happening, and different kinds of listening, different ways of negotiating the balance between what teachers had planned and what students wanted to know or to share or to learn.  I am curious about how each teaching team felt this Saturday about the balance between teacher-direction and student-responses in your own classroom.  Did you wish you had done or said or demonstrated more?  Did you feel the students needed more space for their own explorations and inquiries?  Did the class move too fast or too slow?  

And a second question: What do you wish you had captured last Saturday to indicate what your students learned?

With apologies to the three classes not represented here (I'll catch up with you next time!), here are some images from the day.