9SK Printmaking - being resilient about our mistakes

So, Art students are shocking for this; make a mistake once, HATE the whole page, screw the page up, hide it from the teacher. Deny they have learn't anything, try again, miniscule mistake no one else can see, screw it up AGAIN, 25 minutes later, it's like they have spent half a lesson doing nothing...except they haven't. When you ask casually, they "can't do it, its way too hard..." and your help is apparently not going to remedy this, unless of course you feel like completing the work for them, so that it looks 'perfect'.

Our values are Commitment, Achievement, Resilience and Respect.

Respect is easy to teach, achievement is generally an outcome and you can get there, commitment depends on the context as to how hard it can be to explicitly manage, resilience is the hardest; that pushing past a lack of confidence.

Wednesday - we have run out of time to finish this unit the way I would like to - our final resolution is a mono-print as opposed to a woodcut print. Students have worked through a process to achieve a stylised form, learning from two examples and comparing them - Art Nouveau and Kowhaiwhai. They have lovely drawings. The rule for this lesson, was everything they stuffed up we kept. Everything they got right we kept. The expectation was that they HAD to stuff it up at least twice, and they had to try and rework a 'mistake' to make something interesting from it.

Below are the examples from this class

We will complete this tomorrow, with the students who don't have their ISLA reward. 

Year 7 & 8 Extension Progress

On Friday morning, The group of students doing extension Art will be presenting their work through their Hui. I have not been to one of these before, so this will be my first time.

We have had a go at some spray painting to create tonal and textural grounds to work on top of and painting back into these with white paint. This has been a lot more challenging for the students and they have tried really hard.

This has been an interesting learning curve for me in regards to how to manage that learning phase that is not as close to developing abstract thought. Breaking teaching sequences into smaller steps has been more important.

In working on a tonally darker ground, students had to figure out how tone worked in the first place, almost backwards to their traditional learning when it comes to drawing. they already have a mid tone or a dark tone in place, so instead of drawing their mid tones onto the surface with a pencil, pressing harder where they want an area darker, they have to reverse their thinking - applying more white paint or chalk where they want an area of their drawing lighter, leaving the ground in tact where the tone is already there. It's a little like the visual equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. Students have to ignore their natural instinct to apply more of their drawing medium to the surface to darken their tone.

Claudia

Cinnamon

Kingston progress

 

Amber

Jordan

Kingston finished

Kingston Progress

    

Mikayla Progress

Mikayla finished

Year 7 and 8 Extension Art Programme

This has been running for the last two and a half weeks. Students were selected by their J block teachers as having shown an aptitude for Art AND being deserving of the opportunity. It does not mean that students are not talented if they didn't get selected, but the numbers were kept small deliberately. The Kete system does allow for the teaching of Art, and students have done some very cool stuff this year with their teachers using the Visual Arts strands.

Students worked on developing an A2 page of drawing centred around themselves. Easy - we started with their name and then extended it out to drawing stuff about them. They took it really seriously and have worked consistently on these, some taking their work home to complete and some staying during break times too.

   

   

   

  

End Of 2014 - Using a Blog to Collect Evidence for Teaching Criteria

SO, we started using google sites just recently for creating ubiquitous and hopefully discursive teaching in our classrooms. Anna Taylor (in the photo) and I worked together to set ourselves up with a professional blog, having  started the morning with some work on our google sites. Then we located the teaching criteria and the first one listed was:

1. establish and maintain effective
professional relationships focused on
the learning and well-being of all
 ākonga2
i. engage in ethical, respectful, positive and
collaborative professional relationships
with:
• ākonga
• teaching colleagues, support staff and
other professionals
• whānau and other carers of ākonga
• agencies, groups and individuals in
the community

The first step for us was to use each other to figure out the best approach for this. I have used blogs previously, but only for Year 12 and 13 photography, rather than an all out approach to collecting evidence of being a professional teacher.

Next step, new posts, a day out during the summer holidays in which we work together as a group on blogs...