Andrea Swofford

Final Teaching Reflection

Overall Teaching Surprises

As this is my first time interacting with middle level learners as an art teacher, rather than

a sister or guest in the classroom, I found the students’ maturity and interactions to be surprising

as before this experience I generalized middle schoolers as stubborn, disorganized and difficult

to teach. Working with the students on day one, their knowledge, level of respect, and visual

culture references impressed me. The students started to share personal experiences, ideas, and

personal art projects with me. Students like Nick, Laura, Greg, and Jenna shared their interests in

wood burning, animal safety, and self-advocated researching. After just three days of teaching at

St Mary School Dekalb with 11 sixth grade students, I surprised myself by changing my mind

and deciding to pursue middle level education as I found that the students are excited, responsive

and have strong visual culture references.

Best student responses: While investigating my students’ prior knowledge about

pollution, my student, Nick, became extremely passionate about nuclear waste. This was

apparent from his hand being raised consistently, and the way he shared information about

nuclear waste’s half-life; meaning the pollution created in order to power our homes would be

around for millions of years. If not disposed of properly, it would continue to damage our

environment, animals and people of the future. I found this to be one of the best student

responses because this was something I did not include in my lesson and it allowed for a

community-based teachable moment and the student to become the teacher.

Best questions and dialogue: Overall, I found my day one introduction to pollution to be

the best dialogue of my lesson. This is because I used guided questions for my students to answer
and expand upon. From this, I experienced my students becoming eager to speak, based on

consistent hand raising, and sharing personal experiences. This is important because the lesson is

based on the students’ perspectives on pollution.

Problem and Solving: At the end of day one, I reviewed all think sheets to better

understand how well they understood the project, and how they were using the topic to create

footwear. With many of my students, their sketches were not fully developed. They did not have

a topic chosen, or they were not yet understanding pollution. I researched visual aids to create a

worksheet for each student and write each students an individual note. Following the

demonstration on day two, the students completed their thinksheets as I individually spoke to

each student. I did this to build a student teacher relationship and to fully understand what my

students had planned as they may have had difficulty expressing their design through writing or

drawing. For students like Nick, who wanted to use metal and patterns that suggest violence, I

was able to discuss who to make his artwork hold a powerful meaning without using explicit

symbolism. Another great student example of this was with Laura. Her sketch did not showcase

specific symbolism. Talking to Laura, she let me know that she was not sure how to best depict

dolphin cruelty because she was not confident with her drawing ability. From my meeting with

her, I was able communicate alternate resources.

Best organization: While teaching I had bins assigned to each table. Before class, I

would organize each bin to have the students’ name tags, thinksheets, and tools needed for the

day. I found this to be one of the best choices I made for my classroom management because I

was able to limit the amount of time my students would be out of their seat. If I created any

additional handouts, I would staple them to the original thinksheets, creating a packet. This saved

me time in the classroom by not having to pass out papers.

 Best quality of student work: Looking at their completed thinksheets, all students

exceeded assessment standards by using color, labeling, connection a pollution topic to materials

and investigated meaning. Alex, Sam, Nick, Olivia, and Greg created sketches using color, line,

negative space, and emphasis, following the objective criteria of strong craftsman ship and

reflecting their perspective of pollution in the past, present and future. In particular, I found

Sam’s work of the class to be of the highest quality as he used visual culture references, like

Nike, in his artwork to symbolize fast fashion. Another example of a student demonstrating high

quality symbolism would be Greg as he choice to create frog legs using wrappers, and sketched

his patterns relating to frog eggs. Because of his background knowledge of frogs, Greg

demonstrated his perspective of frog life is damaged through chemicals in run off pollution.

Ideas for Improvement:

Student responses: At the end of each day, my students worked in teams to answer the

tweet sheet of the day. I found this to be extremely successful as the students used this time to

discuss the presented artwork and connect it their visual cultures. For students like Max, who

often needed peer support, this was a time for additional explanation in the comfortable setting of

his peers, as the question used keywords from the lesson of the day. On the second day, several

students asked me to define the keyword being used. Because of this, in future teaching days I

need to emphasize the academic language throughout the lesson both in formal and real-life

contexts for better understanding within my students. In the future, I would create guided

questions for my students and have them use the academic language when responding. This

would allow for the student to hear the language being used when the question is posed, and

directly apply the language to practice.

 Questions and Dialogue: During my Recycled Narrative Footwear lesson I found it very

difficult to limit my students’ stories as they were excited about the project. I am extremely

interested in having collaborative classroom where students can share personal stories, but as

there are many students, I would not be able to pace my lesson in order for every student to

share. While maintaining a community-based classroom where my students are encouraged to

share their personal perspective with the class to create meaningful work, I found myself having

to guide my students back to the original questions. When posing questions in future classes, I

need to ask for limited students to answer to maintain pacing. In future lessons, instead of

limiting the students who could answer, I could ask more specific guided questions to receive

more specific answers.

Problem solving: Some teaching days, I found students I believe to be advanced like

Laura or Sam finished the day’s tasks while students like Max had a difficult time pacing

themselves to accomplish the daily tasks. In future lessons, I would implement a buddy system

of students who work quickly to students who may benefit from a peer to keep them on task.

This will allow for community building and creative process for both students and implementing

leadership in the advanced students.

Organization: In the beginning of my lesson, I planned to use color-coded name tags

with assigned clean-up tasks for each color. As the days progressed, I adopted the bin method

over the name tags because my lesson increasingly required several tools and materials. Rather

than having my students retrieve the tools and materials, I decided to prepare bins for their tables

to save time. In the future I would dedicate these names tags for dividing the class into small

group critiques or lessons the required heavier cleaning jobs, like cleaning brushes, sweeping, or

passing back artwork.

 Quality of student work: In the student think sheets, many students used a single dot of

color to demonstrate the colors and patterns used for the paint portion of the project. This may

because the students either focused on the design portion of their think sheet, or they did not

choose patterns with their pollution topic in mind. To improve in the future, I would supply my

students with additional time to create more detailed designs.

Differentiated teaching: Nick, a student interested in nuclear waste and violent

symbolism, designed his footwear to represent how vital it is to protest against nuclear waste. He

chose clear plastic, garbage bags, cardboard and neon green paint to demonstrate this idea. Nick

requested to use leather to better display his footwear as boots, something needed to be worn

when cleaning up nuclear waste. I attuned my lesson to Nick’s design by seeking leather scraps;

both recycling materials, as the lesson describes, and aiding the student in their visual ideas.

Conclusion: Reflecting on my teaching, I understand my lesson followed a sequential,

interactive, and interdisciplinary curriculum. This type of teaching is the most comfortable for

me to teach as I enjoy promoting community discussions and value my students successfully

interpreting and making artwork for real life situations in their long-term careers, art based or

not. Something I surprisingly found to be extremely helpful for me was using closure questions

to end the class. I found closure questions helpful to complete the students’ understanding of the

day’s tasks. I used this time to reflection on the students’ comprehension in case they needed

additional accommodations to my lesson plan as we moved forward with the lesson. In the future

I would like to experiment with closure questions being individualized by using a QR code and

Google Forms to investigate each student’s understanding.