Teaching and Standards Reflection
Elementary School Placement
- Level of Accomplishment: Proficient
- Reason: For not having much prior knowledge on the technical skills of each K-5 student, I felt like I was successfully able to create technically challenging and conceptually fun projects for students that were grade level appropriate (something that was a little more of a struggle at my high school placement). Because the student population was mostly immigrant and multicultural, I embraced having students do a lot of in-class discussions for ideation and writing activities for critical reflection. Using artistic vocabulary (verbally and written) relevant to the lesson was a specific goal my mentor teacher and I had for my placement. Sometimes, this was challenging to accomplish due to time constraints. But we worked with what we had and still made it engaging. I also felt like I was successful teaching lessons that aligned with cross-curricular activities. For example, each grade was assigned a specific country to research and the art teacher had to create a lesson around that grade's country. Third grade was assigned South and Central America, so I planned my Dia de Los Muertos masks around connecting it to multicultural night.
- Evidence: Lesson plan for Dia de Los Muertos Mask and image.
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- Area of Improvement: I would like to look into how I could add numeracy into my lessons. I've never really planned a lesson that deliberately included a heavy amount of numeracy at the elementary level and I would like to push myself to figure that out. I feel that I could also develop my ideation strategies a little bit more for a lesson. During my coaching meetings with Sam Gallegos, we discussed how the first semester could focus strictly on technical skills and the second semester could focus on ideation skills (with longer lessons in a unit). We also talked about the possibility of having them do ideation-based activities during their enrichment classes.
High School Placement
- Level of Accomplishment: Proficient
- Reason: I definitely feel confident creating and instructing a lesson in 2-D arts at the high school level. My technical knowledge on drawing aligns with students' passion for making realistic drawings. My secondary placement also pushed my ideation activities so students could practice creative problem-solving. It's important for me to create lessons that have cross-curricular relations with other subjects so students are able to make a meaningful connection to the project. I was able to practice incorporating a lot more literacy and numeracy strategies to support the ESL population.
- Evidence: This is an excerpt from my powerpoint on linear perspective for my second drawing and painting lesson (the file was too big to upload). I included images to discuss how linear perspective was transferrable to other careers such as industrial design (cars), film and vlogging, architecture and digital printing (football stadium), interior design and real estate advertising, sculpture and set design, optical illusion art, cityscape art, and concept art for video games.
- Area of Improvement: I do not feel I'm as skilled in these same areas when it comes to teaching pottery and metals. Though I feel like I can come up with a pretty strong lesson for each, I don't feel like my technical knowledge for these subjects is as extensive as drawing and painting. For example, I need to have a very keen feeling of touch for how bone dry a ceramics project is before I load it in the kiln or else it will get damaged. I also need to know how to work with the metals materials well so that I can come up with strong classroom management and safety strategies. Though I felt like I did pretty well teaching these subjects during my placement, I know that I will need a little more background knowledge on these subjects if I were to teach them completely on my own.
Elementary School Placement
- Level of Accomplishment: Proficient
- Reason: Since I went into student teaching with a strong desire to work with a multicultural, inner city population, I made a commitment to myself that I would work on cultural responsiveness when it came to diverse racial backgrounds and learning styles. This required me to be very open-minded about cultural values influencing parent communication and student behavior. I also worked with students whose parents were involved in gang activity or were murdered/incarcerated for gang-related incidents. Though this was often unnerving to hear, I treated students as worthwhile individuals irrespective to their background. It was important that the learning environment that I created was structured, predictable, and safe so students had a positive place to go to if things were unsteady at home. I also used my social justice lesson plan as a way for students to advocate for anti-bullying awareness in their schools. We had a lot of honest and culturally differing discussions on how to handle bullying, but the students were excited to use their art project to advocate for each other when bullying occurred. I had a lot more parent interactions at my elementary placement than my secondary placement. I deliberately made an effort to connect with the parents of students that were problematic in class and tell them about the good things they were doing with art. This dramatically improved problematic behavior in my classes.
- Evidence: social justice lesson
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- Area of Improvement: I had a chance to work with three special education students (two second graders and one fourth grader) in my ESL class. One thing I noticed was that the paras was doing all of the work for these students (though one of them slept through most of class every time I saw him). Personally, I think it's important for special education students to work on their own art and I believe each student is capable of doing that. So in the future, I would like to push my special education students to be more engaged with the class culture and the projects. I would also like to learn more about the collective group's learning pace as artists so I could really push each grade's technical and conceptual skills. Finally, I'm the kind of person that deeply cares about building a lot of one-on-one rapport with students, especially when I notice that they are dealing with a difficult emotional problem. There were times when doing this made them lose time to work on their projects and prevented me from keeping an eye on the class. I'm learning to redirect myself and the students to focus on making art and to send them to the social workers' offices if they really need emotional support.
High School Placement
- Level of Accomplishment: Developing
- Reason: I started my secondary placement (which was my first placement) with strong desire to learn differentiated instruction for ESL students. Some of the strategies I learned included making process checkpoint packets, making written instructions on the board as short and simple as possible, and miming out some of my instructions and key vocabulary words. I wouldn't say that I did it perfectly, but I'm grateful that I got the chance to practice and implement these strategies with more confidence at my elementary placement. My ESL differentiation strategies also applied to working with students with special needs. I felt that I was able to create more successful ESL differentiation because I would think about the specific kind of support a person on the autism spectrum would need. Finally, I made sure I created one-on-one rapport with as many students as I could. This was especially useful when dealing with difficult home situations that impacted engagement the classroom. For example, I had to do mandated reporting for one of my students multiple times due to suspected abuse at home.
- Evidence: process checkpoints for pottery and drawing/painting
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- Area of Improvement: I personally feel that a democratic classroom management system works the best in high school classrooms. However, this is hard to give when working with very immature freshmen and very mature seniors. This created a few moments of conflict between me and the students. Therefore, I would like to work on a system that affords the students a sense of voice while also providing structure for rules, rewards, and consequences. I didn't get many chances to communicate with families outside of school, but I would like to do more of that in the future. I think it's just as important to call families about positive behaviors as much as it is to report difficult behavior.
Elementary School Placement:
- Level of Accomplishment: Proficient
- Reason: I felt like it was a lot easier for me to manage, scaffold, plan, and reflect on the skills students learned and needed to learn between lessons because the lessons went faster and had less material management on my end. I felt like I was able to see the big picture a lot more clearly, making me feel inspired to experiment with new strategies and see what new technical skills I could push into a lesson even if it went really well. This will hopefully allow me more brain space to look into the developmental science of each grade level for more successful technical instruction (like a heavy emphasis on cutting and gluing skills for Kindergarten). My social justice plan was the first lesson I taught that encouraged students to work in teams, which developed leadership skills and social advocacy. Finally, I improved a lot when it came to separating parts of the white board and writing daily instructions/learning targets for each student.
- Evidence: picture of the white board (coming soon); feedback on teamwork for third, fourth, and fifth grade for social justice plan.
- Area of Improvement: As I stated above, I think that I could do a lot more research on cognitive development for elementary students for more effective lesson planning. This would give me a stronger sense of how I could introduce more unique art lessons into my curriculum (such as a tunnel book) and do more effective backwards planning on technical skills. I think ideation processes could be a teamwork/leadership experience for students, so I would like to work on that too. Finally, I think learning a little more Spanish could help me work more efficiently with my ECE-2nd grade ESL students. The language barrier made it somewhat challenging to make connections with them.
High School Placement:
- Level of Accomplishment: Developing
- Reason: There were times when my lessons were a little too advanced for my introductory students. I really tried to push my students on their conceptual skills, since my mentor teachers told me that the department focused more on process than product. I think the challenges I experienced with management and artistic instruction had to do with not scaffolding down my lessons to a middle school level. I noticed that my lessons were more successful when I did so. My mentor teachers told me this was a good idea because of the lack of art exposure most students got in middle school. With that said, I really tried to push my students to engage and persist through their projects and create work they were proud of. I also made a conscious effort to learn and apply ESL strategies to my instruction. I thought that my formative and summative assessments (especially in drawing and painting) were very successful because it was heavily differentiated for each class and lesson I taught. There was some confrontational behaviors about the way I graded (mostly by slacker or social students), which caused me to be a lot more strict with communication about grades (students were not allowed to talk about their grades during class and they would lose participation points if they tried to pick a fight with me about it).
- Evidence: rubric for blind contour and surreal obstacle course
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- Area of Improvement: In all three art subjects I taught, I attest that my organizational skills when it came to materials management and instruction could've been a lot stronger. I also think having strong technical knowledge on each art subject would help me with classroom management. I learned the hard way that I need to be a very Type A teacher in all my art subjects because it screws up my management to have students be in different places with their work and be too dependent on me to know what to do next. This was especially true in my pottery class, where the dryness of clay was so sensitive that students couldn't afford to get behind. Technology use was very limited during my student teaching. In fact, the technology resources at my high school placement were so problematic that my mentor teachers and I agreed not to focus on it for my lessons. I don't have a lot of confidence integrating technology into my lessons because I'm somewhat tech dyslexic. But this is something that I'm willing to do to improve the quality of my lessons.
Elementary School Placement:
- Level of Accomplishment: Proficient/Accomplished
- Reason: I think my strongest strength as a teacher is the ability to reflect on how the teaching day went (lesson planning, instruction, student rapport, and artistic process/product). Because I know that I'm a work in progress, this is the only way I know that I am going to get better as a teacher. The level of depth that I go into is evident in my self-reflection after each lesson. I also had a lot of reflective discussions with my mentor teacher, usually right after a lesson happened. My elementary placement gave me a lot more leadership opportunities than my high school placement. I went with my mentor teacher to more art teacher PDUs, which gave me more chances to meet his cohort. Planning multicultural night with my mentor teacher was another leadership opportunity I had. Managing students during school crises (like a natural gas leak and a power outage) were a few other leadership moments I had. But the most prominent leadership experience I had was working closely with a student that was suspected to have undiagnosed autism and/or schizophrenia. Because of my prior experience working with individuals with autism, I knew how to appropriately and ethically respond to this students' behavior when he went into a meltdown and attempted to physically attack other students. My mentor teacher, the social workers, and the special education coordinator recognized my desire to help this student, my knowledge on how to handle his behavior, and knowing when to step back to let qualified faculty work with him. I read over his IEP (which I'm not going to post as evidence) so I knew what appropriate behavior intervention I needed to do to keep him and other students safe without dealing with any liability issues.
- Evidence: I personally believe that the social justice lesson was the most detailed example I have of my reflective abilities at the elementary level, though I did it for other lessons as well. Please click on the lessons for larger text.
- Area of Improvement: I don't think that I've spent enough time in an elementary school to be able to analyze student learning, development and growth to my teaching practice. However, because of the small and predictable scale of projects and behavior management, I feel like I'm doing a little bit of a better job at this at the elementary level compared to the secondary level. I think doing a lot more cross-curricular collaboration with other classroom teachers will give me a better idea of what transferrable skills students need to be workforce ready in the future. I would definitely love to do more civic participation with my students in the arts.
High School Placement:
- Level of Accomplishment: Developing/Proficient
- Reason: I think my strongest strength as a teacher is the ability to reflect on how the teaching day went (lesson planning, instruction, student rapport, and artistic process/product). Because I know that I'm a work in progress, this is the only way I know that I am going to get better as a teacher. The level of depth that I go into is evident in my self-reflection after each lesson. My mentor teachers also gave me a lot of written feedback for me to reflect on too. Finally, I gave my Drawing/Painting students a chance to offer me feedback as a teacher at the end of my placement, which I wrote about in one of my art journal reflections. In terms of leadership, the only opportunity I had was having a few feedback meetings with a GT student with Asperger's for a separate online leadership program I'm creating that's tailored to individuals on the autism spectrum. Though he was uncomfortable discussing his diagnosis openly at school, I respect that he was interested in my curriculum and felt that some of the feedback I got was useful. It definitely gave me a huge amount of motivation to advocate for students with autism and the special education department, as well as art advocacy.
- Evidence: This is my self-reflection from my emotions pendant lesson in metals. Read the full lesson for a bigger view of the text.
- Area of Improvement: Once I get to know the student population at the school I work at a little better, I think it will be easier for me to improve my teaching practice by assessing how student learning, development and growth are applied to what they learned. Because of this, I don't think I've quite been able to take responsibility for student academic growth. In terms of leadership, I went to a few PDU workshops for the art teachers in the district. But I don't feel like I was involved enough in the leadership aspect of the program to add any value to it (not sure how I could have as an eight-week student teacher).
New Teacher Goals
Goal 1: Continue to work on ESL instructional skills and cultural responsiveness communication
I am immensely grateful that I got to work in two schools in two different urban districts that had a predominantly ESL population. I feel like I learned so much about cultural diversity and learning styles in education, which is something I can use no matter what demographic I work with. But I feel like I'm at the beginning stages of acquiring these skills. There are a few organizations that offer training for educators on cultural responsiveness. Not only do I think it will help me with differentiated instruction, but I'm certain it will help me immensely with conflict resolution with students and parents.
Goal 2: Combining leadership skills and art therapy principles into lesson planning, instruction, and management
I've gone through some previous training on transformational leadership for educators before starting my student teaching. I'm less interested in becoming the chair of an art department and more interested in integrating leadership skills into my lessons. For a secondary placement, I definitely want to create a democratic learning environment where students feel that they can speak up about things that are not going right and can hold themselves accountable for their actions. I also value creating collaborative art lessons because art can be a very independent and isolating experience. I care about creating a classroom culture where students feel close to each other and feel a strong sense of community. Based on my student teaching, this was a lot easier to do at the elementary level. I'm also curious about introducing a little bit of art therapy into my lessons. This is more so students feel that going to art class has some therapeutic benefit for them while also teaching them important technical and conceptual skills. There are also some art therapy activities that I think would work really well with younger elementary students. Art therapy activities would also give me a chance to understand the cognitive and emotional development of my students, giving me a chance to understand how to plan future lessons.
I am immensely grateful that I got to work in two schools in two different urban districts that had a predominantly ESL population. I feel like I learned so much about cultural diversity and learning styles in education, which is something I can use no matter what demographic I work with. But I feel like I'm at the beginning stages of acquiring these skills. There are a few organizations that offer training for educators on cultural responsiveness. Not only do I think it will help me with differentiated instruction, but I'm certain it will help me immensely with conflict resolution with students and parents.
Goal 2: Combining leadership skills and art therapy principles into lesson planning, instruction, and management
I've gone through some previous training on transformational leadership for educators before starting my student teaching. I'm less interested in becoming the chair of an art department and more interested in integrating leadership skills into my lessons. For a secondary placement, I definitely want to create a democratic learning environment where students feel that they can speak up about things that are not going right and can hold themselves accountable for their actions. I also value creating collaborative art lessons because art can be a very independent and isolating experience. I care about creating a classroom culture where students feel close to each other and feel a strong sense of community. Based on my student teaching, this was a lot easier to do at the elementary level. I'm also curious about introducing a little bit of art therapy into my lessons. This is more so students feel that going to art class has some therapeutic benefit for them while also teaching them important technical and conceptual skills. There are also some art therapy activities that I think would work really well with younger elementary students. Art therapy activities would also give me a chance to understand the cognitive and emotional development of my students, giving me a chance to understand how to plan future lessons.