ARE 496

Dr. Mary Stokrocki

WELCOME & INTRODUCTION

As we venture along this journey together, I am pleased to be your guide, and in turn become enlightened by your viewpoints while taking this course. Teaching is a dialogue and exchange of views. whereby the instructor provides the models and interprets the theory. Students respond with interpretations. Eventually we develop a common understanding. Please be flexible and patient as we improve the course.

You will be using many of these assessment tools in your teaching. The spaceman/sociogram helps you tract your students' behavior: who is most popular and who is not, who are the students not working and who are more independent. You can use prequestionnaire/post questionnaires from the sample study to get to know your students preconceptions about art and then to determine if they have changed. Your students can use art criticism as self evaluation of their own work. You can determine their art orientations by observing them work. If photographs and video are permissible, they also are assessment tools. All this material will be arranged in a process portfolio of what you learned about teaching/learning and shown to your principal or for background information for a grant.

You will document one teacher [or yourself] in action instructing one art lesson lasting about 6 class sessions. I have broken the course assignment into segments to help you. See course assignment. Teaching is complex and this project uncovers many dimensions and problems.

Start with a prequestionnaire of students. You can ask more specific questions-no more than 10. If you are covering a ceramics class, instead of asking what is art, ask what is ceramics. See assignments under ARE 496 as a guide.

In order to assess what was learned, you must reconstruct the lesson or what was taught. You will rewrite it adding your own ideas and resources. See guidelines. These tools together are termed authentic assessment of a real life situation and problems.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: You learn from your cooperating teacher as well as from myself. I extend what you learned with examples from my 34-years of teaching background , 10 years as a classroom art teacher in New York, Massachusetts (including Chair of the Art Department) and my 24 years of documenting teachers-in-action in inner-city Cleveland, on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations, and in other countries (Holland, Brazil, Croatia, and Turkey).

For extra help and suggestions, see my participant observation research web-pagefunded by the National Art Education Association Foundation. You will find a link on my home page.The research shows "Cooperative Struggles in Teaching Architecture to sixth graders.