Teaching Strategies
These teaching strategies not only create effective art lessons but allow connections between the students as well as between the teacher and students and the students and the material. Strategies allow students to interact with the materials, their classmates, and the world around them. These nine strategies were selected based on how well they lend themselves to interactions between students, teachers, and all the materials involved. The ten strategies I highlight in this unit are: anonymous questioning, check in and out, conferencing, cooperative learning, differentiation, First five-next five-last five, formative assessments, graphic organizers, inquiry-based learning, and sketchbooks.
Anonymous Questioning
Anonymous questioning is a strategy that allows students to anonymously submit questions and concerns to be addressed in class. Equity in schools, especially for students who don’t have the materials they need to succeed, can be a tough subject and students don’t always want their peers to know about their personal concerns. Anonymous questioning not only lets students get their concerns across but has the potential to show students that they’re not isolated in their concerns. Structured photography is new to most, if not all, of my students and the ability to be able to ask questions anonymously is a game-changer for confidence and questioning in the studio.
Check In/Check Out
Check In/Check Out is a teaching strategy that allows teachers to figuratively take students' emotional temperatures when they arrive and when they leave the classroom. This can be done in a variety of ways, through entrance and exit tickets, warmups and wrap ups, or even verbal or eye contact as students enter and exit the classroom. Gauging where the students are both before and after class is important not only with this photography unit, but with high school students in general.
Conferencing
Conferencing is exactly what it sounds like, both allowing students to conference with one another, and the teacher to conference with individual students or student groups. In person conferencing allows ideas to flow more openly than having written comments and allows the teacher and the students to better understand the concepts being discussed and assess the level of understanding. Conferencing is a great form of assessment that is low pressure for the student and allows the teacher to get a clear picture of what the students understand and what still needs to be ascertained. With this unit, conferencing is key as students will be creating their own images and photographs and will likely get easily frustrated without adequate individual and team guidance.
Cooperative Learning
Cooperative learning has students working together in pre-planned groups to investigate materials as a team. This allows students to learn from one another and use each other’s strengths to create the work that they’re dreaming about and aren’t sure about the technical creation process. Students will look at photographs and galleries together, explore and observe, and make design choices about their own work in conversation with classmates.
Differentiation
Differentiation is one of the most important strategies used in the classroom, allowing all students to succeed to their maximum potential. Differentiation is designing lessons, work, and assessments for students to address their individual needs. Having multiple options for how students can organize themselves or complete work allows students to create work that can show what they know without being confined by restrictions that might impede their ability to get across the knowledge and information they’ve gained during the lessons. The assignments and assessments in this unit are open-ended, allowing students to take them in any number of directions and still be successful.
First Five, Next Five, Last Five
First five, next five, last five is a strategy I developed for looking at art. Students get one minute to write down the first five things that come to mind when they first look at the art work. They then get another two minutes to write the next five things they see/notice. Then students share their answers, each student deciding whether or not they want to share which section their answer came up in. Finally, students will choose five words that they feel best encapsulate the art in their opinion. They can use the words they wrote, words other students said during share out, or words that they’ve come up with in the interim. There are no right or wrong answers, so this encourages students to let their minds take over and just go with gut feelings on what a piece of art says to their subconscious mind before really delving into the art.
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment is using markers along the way to assess student learning, not just using the final product at the end of the unit. It often includes using student notes, student-teacher conferences, graphic organizers (see below,) and student observation to give student feedback (or grades in some cases) on the work they’re doing and insight into how they might proceed. Final products are still important with formative assessment styles, but the process is deemed the more worthy and weightier focus for the unit.
Graphic Organizers
Graphic Organizers are often at the heart of my instruction, giving students a concrete place to pull their thoughts and ideas together before beginning an assignment.Graphic organizers go hand in hand with sketchbooks (see below.) For students who have trouble focusing their ideas, graphic organizers are one of the best things they can do to get everything down on paper before embarking on a large project. New topics can be challenging for anyone, and having a structured way to take notes and keep all the new information sorted out is important to understanding and memory. Even for students who are skilled at organization, graphic organizers allow all group members, and the teacher, to see what students are thinking and where their assignments are headed so specific conversations can be had to address any potential concerns before any work is completed on the project. This unit will have teacher-generated graphic organizers for students to use, as well as options for students to create their own.
Inquiry-Based Learning
Inquiry-based learning is when students research, conference, and create to solve problems that they have posed. This strategy brings high-level thinking and real-world problem solving into the studio, and allows students to be more creative than simply recreating art technique. Not to say that making expressive art doesn’t have its place, which of course it’s a huge deal and a major focus in my studio, but there is also a place in the studio for inquisitive and curious students who want more critical thinking skills than mixing colors and refining skills they already have. This leaves space for the activist students, the ones who want to make a statement with their art. Inquiry based learning allows these students to pose their own issue they want to represent in their photos, and experiment with different techniques until they can get their point across in the desired manner.
Sketchbooks
Sketchbooks are going to be one of the most heavily used items in the studio during this unit, as a key strategy to taking notes and keeping track of thoughts and feelings on a daily basis. Students would be creating sketches of objects in the classroom at the beginning of each class, as well as making sketches of their work at each step of the process. This allows students to look back and reflect on their work as the unit progresses, as well as in the future. Students will draw thumbnail sketches of photographs they’ve taken in their sketchbook for reference, and will be able to tape actual printed photographs into their sketchbooks as materials allow.
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