- How can looking at the principals of art influence how I look at my environment?
- What does space have to do with creating community?
- How can we use color to express a story or narrative about your community?
Unit Description: Starting with the year long understanding goals that Emery Secondary arts students are exploring: As artists how do we solve problems? Students will explore some of the Elements and Principals of Art and Design to help develop a vocabulary around their own artistic practice to gain better understanding the creative process. They will use Elements and Principals of Art to look and think about real world connections, such as their local community through the lens of art (Emeryville public art tour), think about their own personal community and home life (micro community), their community at school and explore how personal stories create relationships to each other and feed creative solutions. Students will use Studio Habits of Mind and thinking routines to reflect on what they learned.
Looking Back on the Process
I think in the beginning of our planning process my student felts like the process was messy and they could not clearly envision what the end result would be. They were all on a big learning curve and I don't think they realized that it would be so much work to actually create a unit that had so many connections - to the public art in Emeryville (researching, interviewing artists and writing a tour) and developing lesson plans using Teaching for Understanding was a challenge for them at first as well. But after about the 3rd planning session it all started to come together and in the end they all realized that they had learned a lot and felt like these tools were valuable for them not only in thinking about planning for teaching, but in reflecting on their own learning in school both in their secondary experience and now in college. It was revealing for them to go through this process and make those connections.
Video of my students planning session for leading students through reflection after the public art walking tour:
I love the messiness of group planning, brainstorming, coalescing, and implementing. I am glad your students got over the TfU hump. Usually when they do, they realize what a valuable framework it is and continue to use it throughout their work at CCA.
ReplyDeleteTrena, this is a phenomenal documentation. Your website is replete! Dense! and informative. I love the way you modified the TfU template to show the entire unit, using each cell as a lesson.
ReplyDeleteA couple things to think about:
1. Putting in the statement form of the understanding goal -- it would really help focus on the expertise intended to be developed through the dialogue provoked by the UG questions.
2. The problem of ongoing assessment. Remind me to send you some of the lesson plans from my students at MassArt -- I've really struggled with scaffolding their use of the ongoing assessment column so that it isn't just another performance of understanding and so that it really helps them LOOK at what their students make, do, and say to see what they've understood and NOT understood about the understanding goal(s).
Thanks so much for all this thoughtful exploration. I love the links to the artists' websites in the class website. Again, making access to contemporary art and artists easier for teachers is so important, and you do it so beautifully here.