The Big Picture: My Program Experience

When critiquing a visual art piece, there are various approaches.  Generally, one describes the piece, identifying the individual elements that make up the whole.  Next, one can formally analyze the whole piece and the way the individual pieces flow and work together.   This, I believe, is a good way to approach analyzing any situation. Specifically, I will be using this method to synthesize and reflect upon my experience in the Master of Arts in Education (MAED) program; by first looking at three courses and reflecting on their impact before evaluating the whole experience.  When I first applied for the program I chose to focus on Mathematics because that was what I was teaching at the time, but I always held a tiny hope that I would eventually be teaching art again. My wish came true, and next year I will be teaching middle school art. Due to my change in goals (which you can read about in more detail here), I am going to take a look at the courses that are not subject specific and can be used in any content area, that is “The Psychology of Classroom Management”,  “Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology”, and “Accommodating Literacy Learners.”

 

Classroom Management

 

When I experienced my student teaching at an elementary level, my mentor teacher told me that each student teacher she had came to her with a gift.  She identified classroom management as my gift, a rare one for a beginning teacher. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand what I was doing, whether it was right or wrong, and when I began teaching on my own, I struggled to establish the same management of the classroom because the school cultures were vastly different.  I student taught in fairly urban, average poverty level schools. My teaching experiences since then have been in rural, extremely high poverty level areas, with little to no established curriculums. For this reason, when the opportunity to choose my classes came around, I jumped at the chance to take “The Psychology of Classroom Management”.  Looking back, I believe it was one of the best choices I could have made. 

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While I had a general sense of how to act as a teacher, this course provided practical ideas that I can implement to make an environment conducive to learning and explained the reasoning behind these practices.  One large reason why students misbehave in the classroom is not because they want to be “bad” but because they are unsure of the expectations required of them. For this reason I have created specific expectations and procedures for multiple time periods during math.  These include beginning of, and end of class procedures as well as what to do when students are absent or tardy. In my new position as an art teacher, I will be continuing this idea by developing specific procedures for studio work, particularly for taking care of the studio space and cleaning materials and tools.  These procedures will be displayed and presented to students multiple times to ensure they understand them.

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Furthermore, the course provided ideas on how to target misbehavior using positive reinforcement rather than punishing a student.  Since I took this course during the summer, these methods were beneficial to me in many ways over the next year of teaching. There were many instances when I implemented ideas that helped clean up behaviors.  For example, when I was having an issue with off task behavior and students getting out of their seat without permission, I created a point system to receive a reward once they could show me the behavior I expected.  Per the class's suggestion, I did not require them to make it through the whole class for a point. Rather, for every five minutes that everyone remained seated, I rewarded a point. When they reached ten points, they got the first reward. From there I increased the amount of points they needed to reach and increased the level of reward.  The results were promising in that I never had to ask a student to sit down after the second award. This was just one of the many methods offered by the course and I can imagine will not be the last I use as every class has a different chemistry to work with. I do know that I will forever be an advocate for positive behavioral interventions over the traditional authoritative approach.

 

Technology

 

I was born in 1991 and grew up alongside many of the technological advancements that we now utilize daily.  However, unlike my brother and most of my peers, I was stubborn in my acceptance of anything new. When they played video games, I read books and drew.  When they had the newest touch screen, I made do with older models. When I started teaching, I noticed the interest of administrators about teaching technology.   Likewise, as early as first grade, there is the standard for visual arts to “explore the computer as another tool for creating art.” I found myself struggling to meet the requirements which highly influenced my decision to take “Teaching School Subject Matter with Technology.”  I found that I was not the only one lagging behind. Education as a whole is lagging behind the technological advancements due to the sheer pace and quantity being produced. Many teachers, like myself, feel overwhelmed by the amount available and lack the training with which to use it.  

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Regardless of the misgivings, we live in the 21st century and it is our job to equip our students for the years to come, and this means teaching technology.  While it is difficult to anticipate exactly what students will see in the future, there is no question that technology is here to stay. If I had to choose the largest takeaway from this course it is that I should continue to take the time to learn and experiment with different technology tools to integrate them into the classroom. Despite my personal feelings about technology, there are ways to incorporate the tools into the classroom seamlessly, with intentional purpose, to give my students the best foot forward possible.  According to the Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, and Redefinition (SAMR) Model, technology can be used as a direct tool replacement, or support an existing tool. When used, the technology can then improve upon the non-technological tool. With this knowledge, the tools utilized in the classroom must be done carefully with knowledge of the content it is being used to support and the pedagogy of that subject.  This is reflected in the Technology, Pedagogy, and Content Knowledge (TPACK) theory. Only when all three types of knowledge inform the technology choice can the tool be used purposefully.  

 

Upon learning these different theories about technology in the classroom and being given the time to experiment with a few of the tools available, I now feel more comfortable with integrating new technologies into the classroom.  It is from this course that I developed my goal to find a simple graphic design course to utilize in my new position as a middle school art teacher. I also intend on developing more videos of art demonstrations and project introductions as aids for students.

 

Literacy

 

I always knew I wanted to be a teacher, but I was interested in so many things that it was difficult to decide where to focus my studies.  I decided upon Art primarily because it is a passion of mine and also because to me it is a bridge that connects other subject areas. When I took the course “Accommodating Literacy Learners” I realized that literacy is also an avenue to breach subject matters.  Not only that, but

literacy should be supported within the different areas of study to benefit reading and writing skills and subject specific vocabulary.  

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When I first signed up for the course, my only reasoning was that this course was required by the state for receiving my Professional Teaching Certificate.  It was simply a course to check off, but I learned so much and have a renewed energy to incorporate literacy learning into my courses. Another summer course, I planned literacy activities to use throughout my math courses, but I always had in the back of my brain ways to implement learning in the same way in an art room too.  Some of the most versatile strategies were the strategies to help students learn subject specific vocabulary that is actually used frequently. I remember being given long vocabulary lists that we rarely used in class, but had to memorize for one week for a quiz. I don’t remember specifically working with vocabulary in any other class but language arts.  In math particularly, this is a disadvantage, because so many definitions are specific to math but mean different things in regular language. Methods like using the Frayer model, and bringing it down to the root words can be beneficial in teaching tricky words - more beneficial than the traditional word definition method. Then vocabulary has to be used intentionally and frequently throughout lessons.  Fortunately, these tools for learning vocabulary can be utilized in multiple contexts, and I intend on using them for art-specific words in the future.

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Literacy, however, is more than just vocabulary.  It also involves reading, writing and understanding the content.  Students must be given the opportunity to read and write within multiple contexts to receive the benefits of learning literacy because literacy is an important part of social development and a huge indicator of student success outside of the classroom.  It is difficult to communicate without an understanding of the words and language used. For this reason, any opportunity to develop literacy understanding within the classroom is vital. These can be simple instances, such as listening to a teacher read fluently, to reading on their own about the subject, to writing about their thinking.  The opportunities are endless and this course has renewed my interest in implementing these opportunities in the years to come.  

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While I focused on math during the course, I am preparing a way to introduce something called Visual Thinking Strategy (VTS) in my art courses.  In this process, students are presented an art image without context or title. First they must identify all the things they see within the piece, from the elements of art to the visual objects.  Then they are asked two questions: What is going on in this image? And What do you see that tells you that? Essentially, they are using visual evidence to back up their claim of what an image means as they “read” the image.  These questions are the guidelines for writing a persuasive essay or paragraph. I plan on implementing a writing activity like this every Thursday throughout my art courses. They would take up only a few minutes of the morning and allow for studio time during the rest of the class period.

 

 

The Big Picture

When I entered the MAED program, one of my goals was to learn practical tools that I could implement in the classroom to help reach a wider range of students and to develop my craft.  The program certainly delivered on that goal. I came in with a focus on mathematics due to my current teaching position at the time. I leave with a toolbox of strategies that I can use in multiple areas of study: from specific methods for integrating technology and literacy, to research strategies that will allow me to pinpoint exactly what my classroom needs, to management skills that can help build a foundation for learning in my classroom culture.  In every course I took, it was my personal goal to take away at least one idea that benefited my teaching practice. The ones discussed above provided many more for me to choose from that I will continue to look back upon and utilize. I intend to integrate multiple forms of learning into my classroom.  More than that, I intend to use what I learned to guide my thinking in the future as I continue to pursue lifelong learning to support my students.