Co-Teachers: Isabel Fernandez and Delaney Kjellsen
Friday, October 1st, 2021 at Lopez Elementary
On Friday, October 1st, 2021 I was apart of a more experimental and risky lesson, that ended up paying off very well. My students were asked to work together at their tables to create an abstract 2D artwork out of choice materials.
Once again, my biggest worry going into a new lesson was having enough time for students to engage, ideate, and create, especially for it being my first ever group project that I've taught.
Specific to the first time teaching this lesson though, I was worried that maybe students may struggle to work together.
What went well:
Overall I am super happy with the outcome of this lesson's success.
More specifically, based off of the final pieces each table group made, the expectations were clear and students were successful in meeting them. I think the most important influence on this success was all our discussion on who we are as friends, abstractions, and the use of line/color/shape with intentionality. Without the class's engagement with our probing questions, the successful could've been poorly impacted.
What did not go as planned / Needs work:
The management in this lesson takes a lot of understanding and patience. Students were so excited and the lesson requires that they communicate throughout the majority of their class. However, I don't think that this is a problem, I just might be more prepared with some classroom management tactics the next time I teach this lesson.
For example, when students needed to pause studio time and listen to instruction they had a hard time stopping working, so I had to ask them to show me their fingers and that was more successful than "class class".
We have a slide in our presentation that might have been useful for us as the teachers, but was not successful in defining abstraction and actually might have made it more confusing. To better our conversation about abstraction, we plan to take that slide out and just talk about three abstract arts as a class, because that was way more successful.
The last thing I want to mention, is the risks that come with free choice medium and experimentation of medium. I think that there were some cases where a few students got excited about using medium and forgot about creating meaningful mark making that represents their friendship. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however, I think if we make sure to be as clear and concise about the meaning behind line, shape, and color in abstraction that this may be more rare of a problem.
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