Today in the classroom we began by walking around
the high school and doing studio visits to each of the students in place of
their class critiques so each student could get more work done. The students were moving along pretty well,
but I was able to give a couple suggestions for each of their pieces. I found there to be two main problems with
how the students were moving along with their work: either they were not confident in their abilities or they didn’t have enough drive to work up to
their potentials. I tried to work with
each student individually to push them in the right direction for where their
work was going.
We later
headed over to the middle school where we began by helping Mrs. L. take
down student work in the display cases and then grading some of the masks from
the week prior. The bell rang and fifth
graders came in. Mrs. L. had us make
our own project sample along with the students of a clay slab fish that bends
into a shallow bowl. The students used a
hodgepodge of cardboard scraps, pen caps, and empty thread spools to create
patterns and designs on the fish. The
fish slab was then flipped upside down over a paper bowl to give it a bowl
shape and then the students put a coil foot and their names on the bottom.
The next
class was sixth graders who were working on finishing up their metal masks and
writing a response to go along with it. The
students were still taping leather onto the back of the metal masks and adding
string and beads to decorate it. There
were also a few students working either glazing or writing a response to their
ceramic animals.
Seventh graders worked on their still lives,
finishing filling them in with neutral, warm, or cool colors of oil pastels and
colored pencils. They were also
finishing up their ceramic houses. Some
of the students were still glazing while others were writing reflections on who
lives or works in the building and what they like about the piece.
The eighth graders worked on their
still lives as well, but they fill them in with patterns and designs using
different types of lines. They then
continued to fill in these patterns with six or seven colored markers of their
choice. This class also was working on
finishing up their ceramic shoes. Some
were glazing and others were just getting out of the kiln. Mrs. L. showed the students their
finished pieces once the room calmed down enough.
We asked Mrs. L. about
how she assesses her students artwork.
She gave us a lot of examples of grading rubrics that she uses and also
had us try grading some the students work on our own, and said we did a pretty
good job with it. The only problem with
our grading is that we didn’t take each student’s abilities into account
(mainly because we don’t know each of the students and their abilities and/or
disabilities.) The students also write a
small paragraph or a couple sentences responding to a prompt she asks about a
learning objective from the piece. She
looks at each student individually and grades him or her on whether or not they
worked up to their potentials. She
brings each of the students up to her desk as they finish filling out their
assessment and goes through the assessment with them to make a personal
connection and talk to them about what they did well and what they could do
better next time. I really like this
personal touch that she adds with the students, and it is an experience I have
never had before in my art classes in middle school or high school. I think this really helps students look at
their artwork more.
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