I had such a wonderful experience presenting about Bootcamps at NAEA 2018 in Seattle this week. The teachers who came to the workshop were amazing, from helping me set up the space in the beginning to graciously allowing me to film them presenting the content they created. The session started with a short presentation that I've linked below. In it, I talked about how I develop content, starting with the goal of providing the knowledge and practice that will support students' independent use of the classroom studio. I modeled about my thinking process as I plan and create a Bootcamp, then showed two examples. Next, participants worked in small groups to create their own Bootcamp activity, which were then shared by each table presenting to the whole room. Below is the colored pencil group presenting the mark-making exploration they created. The watercolor table came up with an exploratory set of tasks that really inspired me to include more student lead discovery in my instruction. See Kristina present what they developed in the video below. This workshop reminded me how valuable it is to collaborate with colleagues. I really appreciate the content developed in the session. It was fun and investigative and all different from what I would have come up with on my own, which gave me ideas for my own practice. It was wonderful to meet and collaborate with this group. Images of the resources the group created are in the slideshow below. In the spirit of sharing and collaboration, I've created a Bootcamp section here on the blog that I'll continue to add to as I create new resources. If you're interested in reading more about Bootcamps, check it out.
1 Comment
I've participated if in few conversations this week that have caused me to spend quite a bit of time thinking about quality in my classroom. It's a hard thing, quality, because I define it one way (I'll get to that later) and many adults define it mainly by appearance. If we judge artwork by appearance, we're missing so much. Both of these drawings were made by students in my advanced class. Both represent years of learning, both students picked challenging subjects, struggled and grew during the process of making these works. To me, they are both of the highest quality because I'm evaluating the students who made them as individuals on a journey, not in terms of an arbitrary list of qualities that advanced work should have . These are two of the most powerful works made in my classroom this school year. The top work was made by a kid who came into my beginning class oozing distrust. It took me weeks to get him to open up enough to ask for help if he needed it, to even try to work through Bootcamps with the class. The image he made was in response to the theme of "identity". He traced the hand, then spent days printing and cutting deeply personal lyrics with my dull exacto knife and proudly presented the work to the whole class, telling us it was about his life.
The second work was made by one of the most technically talented students I've worked with. No tracing here - he drew from observation, combining the portraiture he'd been working on in drawing class with arbitrary color and abstracted figures to make this image that so clearly expresses who I know him to be. Both of these images exemplify what I hope for my students to be able to do, without my help, at then end of their time with me - to have an idea and follow it to produce a work of art. Some students come into my classroom able to do this. Others, like the student who created the image of the hand, need lots of support to get there, because by the time some kids get to high school they've gone a long time without being asked to have an idea and do something with it. Quality, then, in my classroom, is students who function as artists, defining quality for themselves. To get them all to a place where they can take the risks required to do this I have to make a space where they feel safe. Part of that is the skill teaching I do in Bootcamps, part of it is making it okay for them to fail, to be less than perfect. That's why quality in my classroom is never defined by my adult expectations about what their work should look like, but by the journey we take together. Learning is work, at least the deep sort that kids internalize is. When kids get new content right away, it doesn't mean they're learning - it means that they already knew it or that it was too easy. Conversely, if work is too challenging students get frustrated and can don't make much progress. The space between these two extremes - not to easy and not overwhelmingly hard - is what I try to create for everyone of my students when I plan instruction. In mathematics instruction, the term for this sort of content, and the required searching for solutions that goes with it is "productive struggle". The idea is that students solve challenging problems independently, or in groups, where they are not given a process to use or a set of steps - instead, they use their knowledge of mathematical content to figure out how to solve the problem, often through trial and error. When I first heard this term during professional development I was excited, because it captures so much of what I believe creates a valuable learning experience. Productive Struggle in My ClassroomI plan for and support productive struggle in my classroom with open ended tasks. I use challenges and themes with no set outcome regularly in my teaching, which range from "make work that shows your knowledge of acrylic paint technique" to "create a collection of artwork that shows who you are as an artist". These sorts of tasks require students to interpret, plan and experiment. However, this is challenging stuff, and it can be overwhelming for some students. That's where support comes in I teach students how to use the Artistic Thinking Process, a decision making process for planning and creating artwork. The Development stage is especially helpful for student when they don't know where to go next. When they look to me for answers, I point them to the chart and help them use it to find their own answers. Some students need more support, however, and that's where conferencing comes in. I try to talk to each student, every day, about where they are in their art-making process. When students are stuck, I have an Artistic Thinking Process planning form that often helps. If you're interested in what that looks like, check out this article.
If you're interested in making your classroom a place of productive struggle, I recommend learning about TAB. I use Bootcamps in my teaching to support student choice. Basically, I spend a consolidated amount of time teaching skills, techniques and processes in order for my high school students to have the knowledge needed to make informed choices about media. Recently, however, I realized that my Bootcamps only explicitly taught realism and this was contributing to the value students' placed on art that was the most realistic. I want my kids to try on different modes of expression to find what works best for them, so I have to show them how. I've been re-tooling Bootcamps to reinforce a range of art-making styles as well as teaching the techniques and skills that will give my kids foundational knowledge. This week I taught a refreshed painting Bootcamp to my beginning students. I started the same way I always do - with a paint mixing challenge, although I decided to focus on only acrylic paint. The big difference was in the development stage. I used This is Colossal to show students a range of artists' styles in acrylic painting, from photo realism to different degrees of abstraction. We talked about how the artists "added more than the observable" by doing things like using arbitrary color, playing with space, adding patterning or inserting imagitave elements. When it came time for students to develop their ideas, I asked them to do two sketches in paint, each in a different style. Many resisted this - they felt like they knew what they wanted to do and didn't need to explore. However, almost everyone made discoveries in the second sketch, which ranged from finding a color that worked better to rethinking their whole plan. I noticed that the work produced was higher quality than in the past and much more expressive. The work was varied and felt original, which made the definition of success diverse and inclusive. Some students made art that was very representational, while others experimented with color and texture . Others explored symbolism. I'm so happy with how this Bootcamp turned out!!!!
I've noticed, for years, a preference towards realism in the students I teach. I've blamed this on a number of things - the way society views art, other teachers, even the kids themselves. But then I started thinking and I realized that the majority of Bootcamps I teach focus mainly on the observable. If I want kids to know something, it's my job to make sure they do. By modeling mainly making art from observation at the the beginning of the course, in my drawing and painting Bootcamps I've been the one setting the preference for realism. In trying to make sure they learned the "skills" that I felt like I should teach them I was setting a preference for realism. Suggesting or supporting other styles later was falling short for many of my students. The primary skill I want my kids to leave with is making the art they want to make. So I've come up with a new rule for myself: when I teach and model realistic art, I also have to directly teach methods artists use to go beyond what is directly observable. I can't assume students know or will try on their own. My job is to open as many doors as I can. The ChallengesThis realization came at the perfect time. My Art 3 class is working on figurative art, all proportion and sight measuring and composition so far. As they finished pieces in progress this week, I started class with three days of short challenges designed to elicit thinking beyond the observable, featuring student artists as experts. Day 1: SymbolismIn my Art 3 class I have three independent study students who excel at using the figure as a basis for abstraction. I asked these kids to share how they add to the figure as the basis of the challenges. First was the artist pictured above, who talked about how he adds symbolism to his figures, based on feelings or emotions. Day 1 Challenge: Open the social media platform of your choice and draw the first figure you see with added symbolism for 10 minutes. Day 2: Patterning and ColorFor day 2, Bre talked about how she abstracts the figure, adding patterns and bold color or value. Day 2 Challenge: Pick one image from a magazine and draw it, adding arbitrary color/ patterns. Draw with marker for 10 minutes. Day 3, ProportionOn day 3, Kayla talked about her amazing, cartoon-inspired style and how she plays with the proportions of both humans and animals. Day 3 Challenge: Play with proportions to draw a 10 minute self portrait. These three challenges were short, but, in my opinion, very powerful. They each represented a new way at looking at the figure, a possibility with potential. Potential was there for me, too. I've realized that I need to adapt all my Bootcamps to include experimenting with style and I've started thinking about how that will look as Art 1 is introduced to acrylic paint next week. I'm excited about what's next.
Drawing the figure is kind of a big deal. It's often a huge challenge, even for kids in advanced classes, to master. Plus, the figure is so central to multiple forms and styles of art. But is seems hard and it's scary, which makes figurative art the perfect place for my advanced class to start. They do, I've decided, need to start somewhere. With three teachers who all do things differently in my school, it's not feasible for me (or them) to start the course with all the doors open. We build up to that together. So, we start with figure drawing, and spend a few weeks there. I use it as a foil for introducing a variety of media through figure drawing sessions, which helps me really get a feel for who my new students are and what they know. We focus on proportion and sight measuring in these figure drawing sessions and I limit the use of pencil to help kids focus on seeing, not erasing. Here is a list of drawing challenges we start class with, typically spending between 10 to 20 minutes and having students take turns modeling.
On Monday, I'll challenge them to add non-observable elements to the figure, like expressive color, non-human features or to abstract the body. I notice that when I directly teach realism I also have to directly teach how to use that knowledge in less realistic ways or many kids never try. We also work on longer drawings. I started the class with a short, mixed media hand study. This gave me the opportunity to evaluate how each student drew and painted, information that helped my plan the rest of the unit as well as other experiences. Next, kids spent a class or two drawing a huge image with a partner to investigate proportion, creating in whatever media they wanted. This took longer than I expected, but provided focused conversations, full of analysis about proportion, which made it time well spent. Also, this year we visited the drama class, who modeled for my students, acting out the words my kids planned to illustrate in any media. These expressive portraits are in progress and wonderful. The start of an expressive drawing. On her blog, she writes this: "We've spent the last two weeks focusing on composition and proportions, as well as using the figure expressively. I've become much more confident in drawing realistically, which is something I've never really explored. I feel much less intimidated in Art 3 and like I'm on a more level playing field than i thought i would be."
Learning about the art of the past becomes distinctly memorable when we help kids connect what they've learned to their lives today. So, what would Prehistoric art look like today? To help my art history students think about this we started by identifying limitations. Prehistoric artists, we agreed, faced the following challenges: - They were limited to materials they could find in their environments. - They had to design ways to apply these materials or use their hands. - They had limited time and resources to dedicate to artmaking, so they focused their imagery on things that were really important to them. With these limitations in mind, I asked my kids to bring in non-art materials that could be used to mark on paper, as well as a means to apply them. On challenge day we had a range of media, including pesto, carmex, hair dye and sprinkles, although the less prepared had to forage for mulch on the school grounds. There were no bison or fertility goddesses in our creations! Netflix, iphones, pets and favorite foods were popular images. Drawing with chapstick worked surprisingly well, but suspending food dye in vaseline and painting with peanut butter were less successful. This beloved pet was created with the contrasting combo of honey mustard and jelly. At the end of it all, we learned that making art is hard and sometimes messy when you have to forage for your own supplies. My kids left this experience with a new sense of how much time and skill it took early humans to form images, and how important it must have been for them to dedicate their limited resources to creating.
Also, my classroom still smells like pesto . I taught art history for the first time last winter. It's a subject matter I'm oh so passionate about but I found that teaching it sucked much of the joy away. Part of it was the hours and hours of preparation - I had no text book, like many teachers in my state that has cut the budget for materials again and again - so I was spending hours compiling my own materials and creating all my own assignment. This type of work was exhausting, but more that that, I realized that I didn't like what I was teaching. It was all about me. I was selecting the artists to focus on and doing all the heavy lifting of researching, summarizing and adding historical context so I could present what I deemed important to my lovely students, who took diligent notes. The focus of the class was on what I did and what I said. My students were, for the most part, in a passive role, taking notes. How could this create deep, lasting learning or foster a love of the subject? I realized that I needed to stop doing all the work. Instead, I started to plan how my class could look like this: I wanted the class to look like me briefly introducing the unit or topic, then students spending the majority of time working in groups to research, analyze and present content. This is giving up a lot of control, but with control comes ownership. I wanted this content to be ours, not just mine. However, I needed a way to give direction to students' research and consistently focus presentations on key concepts. I turned to the AP art curriculum framework and found exactly what I was looking for with these three essential questions. From these big ideas and the individual standards that follow, I identified six areas where my class could focus their learning: Content, Context, Form, Function, Tradition and Change. We spent the first few days of class learning about what these ways of viewing art mean, then I asked student groups to apply their knowledge by creating presentations about how these ideas were present in a range of Western art periods. This activity, I hoped, would give students a preview of content that we'd later learn in depth, but more importantly, give them an opportunity to apply what they'd learned about the six categories that make up the foundation of the class. So students watched videos from Khan Academy Art 1010 to provide an overview of their assigned period and used the Heilbrunn Timeline to research in more detail and find images to use. Here are some examples of slides one group created. As I listened to the presentations I noticed that the approach I used helped the groups take a complex subject and make sense of it. I liked how this structure allowed students to identify the information that was important to them instead of being limited to my interpretations and preferences. I also noticed that some students needed a bit more support to understand what I'm looking for in each category. To help make what I'm looking for clear, I'm planning to create a research and note taking document.
All in all, I'm excited about how this new class structure will impact student learning. High schoolers hate ambiguity. When it comes to school, the familiar is safe and comfortable. But I want my students to direct their own path of learning, which is the opposite of familiar. So I start with baby steps. Things that feel like familiar assignments, like Bootcamps, that teach them the Artistic Thinking Process (ATP). Next I move on to themes with open media choice. This still feels safe because they've learned how to develop ideas with ATP. They hardly even notice that they are selecting media from a dizzying array of options and interpreting increasingly complex ideas, but they are. Here is where I've struggled. It's a big gap from where they are, interpreting themes I've set, to where I want them to be - working on 100% self-directed art. I think I've found a good bridge - the learning challenge. I've done related things before, but I made some important changes that have really improved the outcome of this challenge. The first is establishing a baseline - which involves students independently creating work before they dive into the learning of new content. To teach students how to do this on their own, I modeled what I wanted them to do through a drawing activity. This started with asking the whole class to draw an eye prior to any instruction. We looked at the drawings and kids listed things that they observed that they wanted to improve on. Next, I lead the whole class, step by step, through a demonstration on drawing eyes in graphite. After this learning experience I asked them to create a drawing, in any media, that showed what they learned. We discussed how the baseline they created compared to the drawing at the end, and how comparing the two is helpful when analyzing growth. The second important change I made to this challenge was being extremely clear about what the learning component would look like and how long it would take. Asking kids to spend multiple days with step three and giving them some example tasks helped all my kids really show growth during this challenge.
My kids are interested, focused and making %100 of their artistic decisions independently. I see reflection as an essential part of learning in my classroom but I don't always like the way I teach it. I've been doing some form of student blogs for years. When I get kids who like to write or are good at writing, the results are wonderful and reading blog posts is like having a window into their souls, highlighting both thought process and analytical ability in a particularly illuminating way. But not all my kids like to write. Not all my kids have the skills to easily write. Many of my kids are uncomfortable with technology. In fact, many of my students absolutely hate writing blog posts. Like, hate it enough to not do it, or whine about it a lot, or put it off again and again. All of these things both drive me crazy and show that what I'm doing isn't working. So I experiment with solutions, my goal being to provide options that make it possible for every student to succeed in creating a digital portfolio of work with high quality, written reflection. There two issues that I see occurring again and again. The first is that the writing of some students is low quality; general, vague and not really about anything real or of importance. The second is the negativity many kids feel about writing reflective blog post. It seems like my options are to punish poor writing with bad grades or to accept lower quality writing than I'd prefer. I don't like either of those choices. I've been trying something totally simple and easy over the last few weeks that has made my kids' writing better and resulted in much higher comfort level with reflective writing: vocabulary lists. The first time I tried this, for our optical illusion challenge, I generated a list of around ten words, with definitions, listed them on the board, then asked kids to use at least three in their writing. I did this instead of assigning a writing prompt as I typically would, like "Write about how you used optical illusion in your work". I just asked them to write about their work using three words from the list. It had a big impact on the quality of writing I received. The examples below are from a student's blog and show his writing before I tried listing vocabulary as well as after. Check out how much more specific his writing gets! Before the vocabulary listAfterPretty cool, isn't it! The next reflection I assigned was about the theme of Identity. I listed two vocabulary words: identity and symbolism. Below is a before and after of a student who loves to write but hates blog posts. BeforeAfterI've noticed pretty consistent improvement across the board with the quality of writing. I've also observed a distinct drop in whining and procrastinating. The takeaway, for me, is a suspicion that a list of vocabulary feels easier to my kids than the writing prompts I've been using. The vocabulary gives them structure for reflection and is, at the same time, open ended enough to apply to kids' diverse interpretations of the themes and challenges I use in my teaching.
I'm realizing more and more this year that I need to simplify, support and be specific with my instruction to create an environment that all my kids can be successful in. Listing vocabulary is a fairly simple step for me and supports student learning by specifically showing them what I what them to reflect on. |
Mrs. PurteeI'm interested in creating a student student centered space for my high school students through choice and abundant opportunity for self expression. I'm also a writer for SchoolArts co-author of The Open Art Room. Archives
December 2019
Categories
All
|