Matric Art Lesson

 

The Grade 12s had to research resistance art - each were given an image of an art work and they had to present their work to their fellow students.

They had to research their artwork and artist, and place it in the context of the socio-political issues of the time, e.g. one student researched The Butcher Boys by Jane Alexander - resistance art (picture above)

Students were given an outline to anchor them:

• Description: Describe what you see?
• Analysis: How is the work organised?
• Interpretation: What is the artist trying to communicate?
• Judgment:  Is this a successful work of art?

Concern:

• Students were not well prepared - they did not research their individual art works well. They made excuses that they could not find any information or did not make the effort to analyse their artwork in depth at home.
• The student who was assigned the The Butcher Boys described it in terms of  the Apartheid Era.
• But her interpretation of the artwork was in total contrast to the intention and point of view of the sculptor. The images, according to her, represented black people who were treated as animals.

Yet:

• This sparked a lively conversation, as another student commented that the artist of Butcher Boys meant the sculptures to present the oppressors, thus anti-Apartheid art. The title refers to the people who were sympathetic to the cause of apartheid. The casual stance of the figures in the statues show that they don't care. They don't have ears, as they are not sensitised to what is happening to the oppressed people. Hence the title  Butcher Boys - they are acting in an inhumane way, condoning the butchery, by doing nothing. Their demonic heads add to this meaning.

The Teacher:

• Challenged students to study their sources critically to ensure that the intention of the artist is well understood before presenting a point of view to the class.
• Asked good guiding questions, e.g. by leading a student to an understanding of the connotations of the title of the artwork Bulldoze the Black Spot.

 Strategies to help students:

• Teachers who observed the lesson felt that strategies could be put in place to help students cope with exam questions such as these which require knowledge of an entire artistic movement
• Knowledge: students should draw mind maps and summarise the characteristics of the different movements and eras in art and their representative artists
• Skills: analysing art works should be practised and reinforced until students get it.

 Planning the next lesson:

• Students were asked to do in-depth research about the same artist.
• They have to bring their research to class.
• Each student must set a lower order and higher order question on their art work - with a memo
• Students must be well prepared in order to ask questions and to field questions from other students.

Engaging senior Art Theory students with PPT

Our newly configured group is made up of: Ronelle, Elize, Thea, Sandra, Martinette and Amanda. We discussed the following in our group this afternoon:

• "Method in our madness" - how we are going to move forward, as we have a mix of Science, DT, Art,  Music, Afrikaans and English teachers in our group.
• This could prove to be an advantage, as we could focus more on refining techniques (praxis?) and less on content (more of the same: planning lesson, observing, etc.)
• Thea identified a specific challenge: How to keep a small group of 6 matric students engaged when doing an Art Theory lesson?
• She has tried something different: for Wednesday the matrics each have to prepare a presentation on a specific genre (period) of art and present it to the class.
• She will record the lesson and then the group will discuss the lesson next Monday.
• She does not want members of the cell group present in the class, as she feels the students will react differently when there are five teachers in class.
• The question of PowerPoint presentations came up and Sandra suggested a way to keep students engaged. Each group of students come up with two multiple choice questions relating to the slide/s. They have to email them to the teacher, who will collate and use them as a CFU (check for understanding).
• Amanda and Ronelle felt that they would rather require students to set one lower order and one higher order thinking question, as Languages do not lend themselves to multiple choice questions.
• Ronelle, Sandra and Thea will all circulate their versions of Bloom's taxonomy - for us to see what works best for each of us.

All in all it was a positive, fruitful discussion and we agreed that the present way of doing Staff Development is much more appealing to us, as we became bored with the previous process.

Elements of Music - Audiovisual Analysis

In the Arts cell, we have tried to come up with a template or document that might help us to direct and structure our feedback sessions better. Thea, Gareth and I were alone last week and the discussion was around how to structure feedback sessions in such a way that we all feel we benefit from watching the video material. This week, Thea and I constructed a feedback template to trial at the feedback session next week. The lesson plan was presented and the feeling was that we want to shift focus on HOW and WHETHER learning took place, rather than to invest most of our time on planning collectively. There is a general feeling that we can learn more from analysing the video material with direction and structure, than to just have an open, rather random discussion about what is happening in the classroom.

Grade 9 Music lesson will therefore be videotaped tomorrow and with this document and an edited version of the video of the class, we hope to have a much more focused discussion around what we observe in the classroom.

Arts cell plans for Term 2

·         The most important issue at this point for the group is to have time to do curriculum designing (especially for subjects such as the Electives that are new)

·         We would like to have a Monday or two to work on it (on our own) and then bring it back to the group for discussion

·         As part of this we feel strongly about figuring out “How to write a rubric”. We need to get the learners involved and feel that simple is always better when assessing. Without knowing exactly what we are assessing,  no lesson plans will be successful.

·         We also feel that there should be a central space available (like the z-drive) where teachers can share resource sites.

·         Visiting other classes (outside of our subjects) and Johannesburg IEB schools - Theme based: we will pick one of the following themes to observe during these visits (video taped):

                                                               i.      Classroom management

                                                             ii.      Differentiation in the class

                                                            iii.      Assessment

                                                           iv.      Social curriculum (Values, Bullying, etc)

                                                             v.      Mentoring (Therese and her team are well into a solid programme)

                                                           vi.      Etc.

·         We will then take this theme into our own classes, video tape it and discuss with the group the following week.

·         We can also have various lesson focuses, such as IT in our lessons. Christine can come to the group and do a workshop with us on how to use the Ipad in class, etc.

·         The group can go to one of the various Creativity Conferences around the country, such as the Groot Marico or Klein Cariba ones. They are usually during school holidays and will benefit us around creativity in the classroom.

How do we know the extent to which students understand or meet the objectives we set for them?

In our study today we watched students acting out a mime to describe their own learning. Their aim was to convey their understanding of content relating to print art and the work of specific artists. We could clearly see that students often struggle to take ownership of difficult concepts, such as the concepts presented in the lesson. Even after two interactive presentations given to students, letting them do some writing, discussing the content in small groups and as the whole group, having them ask questions and answer questions, watching tutorials, asking them to role play, giving them homework sheets to check for understanding and finally asking them to convey their understanding through miming and ultimately explaining their thinking, we were uncertain that everyone grasped the concepts. We were also surprised that in the mimes, some groups have repeated mistakes that were corrected in prior presentations.

The question remains: how can we be sure that our students are learning?

There were concerns in this case about why a student whose work was brilliant was hesitant of it being shown to the class as an example of the expected standard of work. It seems this student was being teased  by classmates for producing excellent work. This led to questions about the culture of producing excellent work. These social issues are very real issues in many schools and it becomes important for us to make decisions about how to establish a culture of being proud of excellent work and to nip academic bullying in the bud.

The group has a sense that we might need to have to adjust our focus within our lesson plan study.  

Arts cell: building lessons around learning styles

This week was our reviewing and reflection time. We had the privilege to see a unit being taught over 3 lessons. The video material presented very interesting discussion points with regards to student engagement, student behaviour, classroom management and learning styles of different students.

The video material presented a chance to see at least four different ways in which students learn:

• watching and listening
• writing and taking notes
• interacting with one another and asking questions
• kinesthetically by creating a mime to explain the content in the Art lesson. 

We were intrigued to see the different engagement levels of students, the different energies and the different responses of students. They were presented with several ways to make sense of the content and this seems to have promoted a very positive learning environment. Further discussions included classroom management techniques, student discipline and behaviour management strategies. 

More feedback for Visual Arts intern

Today, we studied the final lesson plan presentation of the student intern, who is due to teach the Visual Art grade 9 lesson next week Monday, 11 February 2013. We have looked at the worksheet created for students to do as a homework assignment. The discussion ended with the student intern telling us about her experience in this process and stating that:

“It was wonderful for me to learn that there are so many ways to be creative in a lesson plan. I am fascinated by how many different things one can do to make the instruction of the lesson interesting.”

We also shared how our viewpoints of teachers have significantly changed from when we were children to actually (mostly accidentally) becoming teachers and how we feel about the impact of teaching in a child’s life right now. After we have done the review of the taught lesson, we will aim to all come up with ideas how to spend the next rotation of our CPD 'Lesson Study' sessions, focusing on the needs of the teachers in our group.

Arts cell clarifies language and returns to basics

A wonderfully creative lesson plan was presented by the intern! We are all excited to see the inter-disciplinary integration and presence of various learning styles in this Gr. 9 Art lesson. The plan allows for many elements of good teaching practice to be integrated - the cell members immediately recognized where they could give input on additional strategies. We soon discovered, however, that it was more important to find a destination in our minds for the students rather than tweaking the “getting there”, as it was harder to figure out the “getting there” without being clear about the “where it is that we want the students to arrive at”. The discussion helped us realize that we have grown accustomed to using certain terminology in our lesson planning that is clear to everybody in our cell, but not be as clear to teachers outside of Lebone. We need to make sure that we break things down clearly in order to not overwhelm a prospective teacher with input and strategies and terminology. We have found ourselves going back to basics once again by clarifying the goal of the lesson together.