Miss Art of Teaching

I've been noticing a few things in my classroom and in other art classrooms across the globe (through engaging in a number of online Teaching platforms). There is a sense that if one tried in art, then one should receive an A. On Friday, I had a student who was displeased with her B and as a result starting going through other students' artworks and loudly proclaiming that she did better than the A students. I stopped the entire class and focused on addressing the differences between an A, B, C, D E. Stopping students from working is not the ideal method but sometimes it is important to clarify a few things and in turn becomes a valuable lesson for them. I also spoke about work ethic using the two new posters that I have designed for my classroom (based on an Instagram post shared by an art teacher).  I used the hamburger analogy to explain the differences between the grades while referring to the expectations of the assessment task. A link to the 'Hamburger Anal...

Drum rolls...  Welcome to TERM 2! I wanted to look a bit professional today so I went for 'navy' colours. The outfit might give you an illusion that I am wearing a dress but I am wearing a $15 Tommy Hilfiger sleeveless blouse top and a $50 high waisted pair of pants. I have been avoiding the pants for a while as it gives me a fuller figure and it is uncomfortably tight on the top. Probably not the ideal outfit to wear when I need to sit through more than 5 hours of teacher development information sessions. Above: Outfit of the day and photos of my Shih Tzu. It was so hard to walk out the door today! For our morning session, we had a guest speaker (Paul Hewitt) come in from the NSW Education Standards Association (NESA) to talk about 'Stronger HSC Standards' (a credential awarded to secondary students who successfully complete senior high school level studies). He went through 7 new focuses. I was interested on the minimum literacy and numeracy sta...

My head teacher came into my Year 11 Senior class today to do an observation lesson. I also asked my co-worker who wanted to do a peer observation to come in at the same time. The purpose of the observations is to allow them to give me feedback on my teaching practice and for them to see the level of engagement in the classroom. At my school, every teacher must do an observation and also have someone seated in their class to provide feedback. I spent a quarter of the lesson going through the hamburger analogy. I adapted this from a shared resource on the 'Relief Teaching Ideas Community' Facebook group. I improved on this resource by using words from my own marking criteria and by picking out desirable and non-desirable behaviours exhibited from my students during the first 9 weeks of the term. After the hamburger analogy, I went through the requirements of HSC Visual Arts. I wanted students to understand why the preliminary program and assessment tasks were designed in a...