The beginning of this school year has been chaotic and a lot of changes are happening at my school. I started out with a negative attitude and had to purposely give myself an attitude adjustment. This will be our first year at my school implementing the TLCS initiatives, so we have three full-time coaches (instructional, technology, and at-risk/success) and four new PLC leaders. We are still a one-to-one school but switched from IPADs to Chromebooks this year. I am finding little things that I did using the IPADs that don't work on the Chromebooks, but the student's websites and Google Classroom work so much better. I hope this will help with students' blogging and documentation.
The change that has had the biggest impact on my research so far is the implementation of Win-Win time instead of study halls. Rather than having study hall throughout the day, students will now all have Win-Win during 6th period. Due to the upheaval this caused in the master schedule, most core teachers had their class sizes increase, and most of the elective teachers saw their class sizes shrink dramatically. Last year I had full classes of 20 in both of my Foundations classes, and this year my Foundations section had 4! Before the first day of school, my largest HS class had five students and I was only teaching 14 total students at the HS level throughout the day. Four of those fourteen were going to be completely new students to me. An additional three have failed art classes with me multiple times because of not completing work and turning in poorly done process documentation if they turned in any at all. If most of my research data is coming from their process documentation, what happens if 25% don't turn it in?? What if I don't get any quality data? Needless to say, I was very upset and worried that this big change happened to fall on the semester that I was collecting my data. Could I even have useful data with that few students? As the week went on, schedules shuffled and I signed many independent study forms. My class sizes are still small, but bigger than they were. My biggest period of HS now has 8 students. Two of my periods will be a grab bag of students taking different classes. My 2nd hour has three students in three different classes, one Foundations, one Intermediate Drawing, and one Advanced. My 7th hour has six students enrolled in four different classes. If I wasn't already a TAB minded teacher I would have needed to become one this year to accommodate this weird situation, but my flexibility is allowing more kids to get into the art room. The kids who have added are ones I am confident will give me valuable data and be thoughtful as they document their process throughout the semester. I'm glad that I was already planning to make my instruction this year more focused on voice, artistic research and critique than on technique because I think I can still teach all of these diverse classes as a group. Since Monday is the last day for schedule changes, I plan to have my instructional coach come in on Tuesday to introduce the study and the assent forms. Their first journal will be due next Friday, and I plan to give my pre-instruction survey as soon as I get the consent/assent forms returned. During the following week, I plan to give my first lesson on artistic voice and share some artists based on a similar theme. It is going to be a crazy semester, but I am feeling much more excited and optimistic now.
1 Comment
|
AuthorMorgan Singleton is a secondary art educator with a Master's degree in art education. Archives
April 2017
Categories
All
|