Hi, Marvin. I'm pruning the tail on this message, so I hope people can keep
track of the discussion at this point.
Student-generated questions are a great idea--I should work towards trying
that. Recently I've been keeping it simple. Last week while introducing the 'ART
RULES' to my new sixth grade wheel, I went down the list explaining the first
few, then got to rule #5, "Respect all students' art work, including your own".
I asked for a show of hands how many had known a student who was always
saying "oh, I'm no good art art this is UGLY my art s--ks!" as a way of getting a
response of "Oh no, you're REALLY good, I wish I could draw that well".
Big grins on their faces as an overwhelming majority of hands shot up. Okay,
you have sixty seconds to discuss this quickly in table groups. Why shouldn't I
be able to disrespect my own art work if I want to? Scribble it out or ball it up
and throw it in the wastebasket? Who am I hurting?
In any given class there will be between 6 and 8 tables of kids and it doesn't
take long to go around the room, letting whoever's emerged as leader of that
group explain with what they've come up with. Most of the time the response is
that someone who's always trying to get praise is annoying, and that crumpling
up your paper or doing a silly, not best-effort drawing wastes art supplies. Both
responses are fine because they reinforce other art rules about being a class
community and respecting materials. But usually there will be at least someone
who responds that when you don't respect your own art you work yourself into a
negative frame of mind, and occasionally a student will hit on the response that
I'm REALLY aiming at, which is that when you X out or throw away a work that
isn't going well, you lose all chance to learn from your mistakes. If they don't
arrive at that by themselves, a couple more quick questions will bring it home
and we move on.
The few minutes it takes to do this is worth it because it gets them engaged in
the "rules" and practice working as a table team even before the art supplies
come out, not to mention introducing them to the concept of working to
improve art skills . In my last wheel rotation, they remembered this mini-lesson
for the full six weeks and whenever someone lapsed into negative thinking,
they'd pipe out "Rule #5!".
Other questions I've sent around are "What is value?" (a lot of math answers
come back, which in addition to engaging them in EOA gives you an opening to
talk about the differences between art and their other subjects), and "Why are
stick figures inadequate for drawing people in art class?"
This is the quick and dirty way of doing it and none of the above questions is
truly open-ended, but if you respect all thoughtful answers, make a game of it
and don't put a single student at risk of giving a 'wrong' answer, they respond
eagerly. When you need a more thoughtful response, you give them index
cards, call a silent exercise, and have students jot down their own ideas first.
I've done this with "The color blue reminds me of..." (you know, it's on that 'I'm
finished what do I do now?" drawing drawer that Judy has on IAD).
It begins with each student thoughtfully writing ten responses to the phrase.
They discuss within table groups and prune the list to five, writing one per index
card. As theys post the cards for everyone to see, you sort into clusters of
descriptive, expressive and symbolic uses of color. I've used this activity to lead
into an expressive self-portrait exercise but obviously the possibilities are
endless, including back into creative writing with the original response lists.
Our district's head of secondary ed uses index cards and this kind of individual-
to-collaborative response in staff training exercises and we're all getting used to
it. It's great for art because you cut down on the amount of non-art paper in the
classroom; you get student writing without a lot of checksheets to grade, and
you are encouraging them to share artistic ideas at whatever level of risk-taking
they feel up to.
Linda
>Linda,
>Excellent thoughts. Could you expand just a bit with an example or two of
anticipatory questions? Are these teacher generated or student generated
questions?
>Marvin
>
>>group work shakes them out of the passivity that
>>they've all been trained to by this point. After a couple of rounds of
>>[EOI] training by the district, I now routinely have them discuss the
>>anticipatory questions in table groups and then go around the room calling
on
>>tables for a response. ..
