Art 309 - Heart Of Illinois Conference

PTS (2013) Standard 7. “Assessment- The competent teacher understands and uses appropriate formative and summative assessments for determining student needs, monitoring student progress, measuring student growth, and evaluating student outcomes. The teacher makes decisions driven by data about curricular and instructional effectiveness and adjusts practices to meet the needs of each student.”

​

What went well: Overall, HOIC was a very successful experience, and after both workshops I found myself both relived that it had gone well, as well as proud of my growth as an educator. I was really content with the flow of our workshop, and how my co-teacher and I were able to work together to deliver the lecture and demo in a way where each of us had an equal amount of time speaking, and when it came to the demo, we were able to split it in way where we were showing the students techniques we were personally invested in and that students would be interested in learning. We also had a lecture that was relatively short, but packed with necessary information that pertained to the workshop, which I thought went very well. Students were very engaged in the lecture, and it wasn’t too long that it cut into worktime.

​

Challenges: 90 minutes didn't feel like enough time! It was difficult to gauge when we should end our presentation, and how how long we'd been talking for. Both workshops were a lesson in time management, and though I believe that both workshops went well, it taught me a lot about what parts of the lesson need more time than others, and most importantly, how to maximize worktime while still giving students an informative lecture and demo.

​

What I would do differently: I would include more art examples from our featured artists. Where we had included 2-3 works from each artist, I believe that more selected works would better showcase the types of skills from each artist, and give the students more works to draw inspiration from.

​

What I learned as a teacher: Through this experience I learned a lot about my teaching style, and the importance of demos where students are at least somewhat involved. The document cam was a huge hit! I also learned that abstraction is an interesting avenue to continue to explore in a classroom setting, as many students would not gravitate towards it on their own, and there are many possibilities for interesting and engaging lessons when exploring this type of art. Finally, through this experience, I really enjoyed watching students let loose and create something different from their primary medium (most of them expressed some kind of paint being their primary medium) and have a lot of fun with it!