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Jennifer SpenceParticipant
Hi Ingrid – you are right about the disconnect between elementary, middle and secondary understanding of what each level should have provided. I dont’ think secondary understands how much elementary has been hobbled by the inane curriculums that keep getting thrust at them. I migrated from my K-8 school to h.s. at the same time that they were being required to sink all of their NYSTL monies into the inadequate city CC curriculum. It’s been a huge struggle and one that also hobbles the kids throughout their academic and adult lives, depending on their hoe backgrounds and available resources.
Jennifer SpenceParticipantHi Ingrid, I 100% agree. It’s been a trick figure out the right balance between the purely experiential artmaking and the vocab/history/critical thinking – some groups are right on it and hearing/reading their responses is like hearing angels singing; other groups, well, it’s like herding cats. I’ve found sentence starters almost essential for all of them. I like the read aloud/drawn response idea hat you mentioned a lot.
July 1, 2022 at 1:20 am in reply to: Session 7 Extending & Assessing Learning through Writing – Lesson & Unit Planning #3062Jennifer SpenceParticipantWhat does your current writing instruction look like? How similar – or different – is it from the type of writing instruction I’ve discussed in the lecture and outlined by Hochman & Wexler and Hanbury King?
Can you envision yourself teaching your students to write sentences, before focusing on paragraph and essay writing? How would you like to do this? List examples from the lecture and articles.
————–For context: I am the art teacher who’s been responding, so my example will be how I currently, imperfectly, and semi-successfully incorporate writing in my curriculum. For this response I’ll talk about my A.P. Art class.
The writing that we do in A.P. Art is mostly geared towards them learning to write about the their experiments, processes and experiences used within each of the pieces that they create for their A.P. Art test portfolios (where they digitally and physically submit the art they’ve created over the school year as a part of the class.) This is done slowly over the year in increments of reflective sentences and paragraphs, and is eventually compiled into a 2 paragraph statement that explains their artistic inquiry question and how they have answered it conceptually, as well as how they have fulfilled the A.P. art research, experimentation, and creation process within their work. (I believe that this falls under the “writing imbedded in content”, as mentioned by Hochman and Wexler.)
In the 2nd month of the course I teach them the specific type of mind-map brainstorming method I developed that helps scaffold each part of their inquiry question. I work with each kid on developing the question so that it is open-ended, and not able to be neatly concluded. I end up working with them individually again at the end of the course, co-editing their statement so that it is pertinent, well-formed, and concise. They are provided with exemplar statements from prior AP years and a synopsis of the information that each question should contain.
In the past I have worked with them on grammatical structures through comments and suggestions on their Google Docs; I have not included a grammar lesson or scaffolded this as part of the process. After reading the TWR article, I think that I’ll add a writing component to the upcoming Sept-October AP ART bootcamp, that will work with creating strong sentences to describe their work. I think that I will be better able to integrate grammatical ideas that way…. I may come back and update this response.
Jennifer SpenceParticipantHow do you currently do Close Reading with your students? Based on the three practices suggested by Boyle and the modifications laid out in Fisher and Frey, how would you improve on your current routine with your students? What could they benefit from to better analyze text?
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I am an art teacher, so I’m at a bit of a loss for doing written text. What I do is provide a rich image that draws the student in and, depending on whether it is the first time we are looking or the 2nd or 3rd, I use questions to introduce them to a different angle of seeing. Usually we spend a day learning about the artist first, the historical contest of the artist and their work, and looking at a variety of the work or a video about them, followed by large or small group discussion/response. I may have them return to a specific image 2 to 3 times, asking them to look at it first through low inference observation, then through things that seem to invoke a feeling of meaning, then may have them look up the piece or the historical reference for the piece and discuss that. Usually when I am doing this with a piece, it is the leading in to understanding a technique or theme that we will use as a framework to learn a technique followed by an inspired project. (Whether the project inspiration directly from something about that piece, or it provides a conceptual framework for them to create their own work depends on where it falls in the semester and their understanding of the techniques & creative processes I teach).June 30, 2022 at 11:27 pm in reply to: Reflecting on vocabulary instruction in model lesson and chapter #3058Jennifer SpenceParticipantIn this session, you read a chapter on evidence-based strategies for vocabulary instruction and analyzed a model lesson. Reflect on your own methods of vocabulary instruction and how they are similar or different to the information presented.
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As an art teacher, I’ll be honest and say that I was really tight on teaching vocab, context, content & skill when I taught in K-8…. I had a 9 grade curriculum that began the unit with 1-2 lessons building on something related to their social studies knowledge (prior knowledge) relating that to an art/craft/design skill developed within historical or cultural context. We’d learn about the basic vocab, how it was used within context, and then how to take that context & content and use that as a base to create an original piece of art.
For a number of valid reasons I have not been able to get into the same space in my high school art electives. I’m not sure how to relate this well.
What I currently do:
I tend to use artwork as primary source. My school has a specific lesson structure is wants us to employ where I’m supposed to have a 5 min entry task/bellringer, 10 min max mini-lesson (they’d prefer 5), 20-30 min of work time, and a 10 min wrap up. That obviously doesn’t add up to a 45 min lesson, so I juggle the times based on what I need to accomplish. The vocabulary is introduced within the beginning of the unit, and integrated into the lessons through writing about or discussing a facet of the artwork in the beginning of the class, tying that into the mini-lesson , and getting them immediately into the research, brainstorming, or art-making that they are doing. Further vocab usage opportunities can be provided through small group critique discussions, through teacher/student conferencing as I work with them on developing their pieces, and through the project reflections or artists statements they create at the end.Based on this course I have a lot of thinking and reevaluating to do. We are getting an increasing number of ELLS from various Latinx communities, so this will be important. In general, my teaching methods do not match any part of what has been shown to me in this course.
Jennifer SpenceParticipanthis weeks’ articles discuss the roles of phonological and morphological awareness, background knowledge and vocabulary in oral language development and reading comprehension. At both the elementary level and secondary level, teachers mostly work with published curricula that they are required to follow, and if not, then teaching to the advanced reading skills is still the requirement. As a result, not enough time is spent at the beginning of a unit building understanding of the Big Picture concepts.
Given the information in the articles, how do you believe you might be able to adapt your units to make room for developing phonological and/or morphological awareness and vocabulary to build and activate background knowledge?
——-As I was reading, i was thinking about how my current high schoolers have such varied knowledge of strategies, as I’ve found out as we’ve done shared outloud readings of texts in class while learning mini-lessons followed by discussions. As some read and encountered words they used orally but did not recognize in text, I became really aware of how limited their knowledge of morphology was even in high school. These students were mixed ELLs and native Eng speakers.
When I introduce a new visual art unit, a new artist, a new skill, i often do a 1 or 2 day “deep dive”, where we will discuss the work or concepts, the kids will do some small group research, present knowledge to the class, we’ll have small-group discussions following. These would be the areas where I can build in the vocabulary objectives, not just in learning the word in context – I have been realizing I’ve been more lax with this – but actually having the kids research the words, have them do prior knowledge webs including words they already know that visually or verbally sound similar to that word they’re learning. I may develop a little insert for their notebooks/sketchbooks as we go through each unit.
*** I NEVER RECEIVED AN INVITE TO YOUR GOOGLE CLASSROOM AS PART OF THIS COURSE. I CANNOT COMPLETE THOSE ASSIGNMENTS WITHOUT IT.
Jennifer SpenceParticipantBased on the mini lecture and the reading, how has the information in Session 2 made you think, or changed your thinking, about the role of the standards in your teaching practice with regard to emergent bilingual (and all) students? How do you see yourself implementing Language and Literacy objectives for your unit and lessons?
Article:
THe link for the article is not working. Please send me the article so that I can read it.Lecture:
I am familiar with the history of the Common Core, but as an art teacher I needed a refresher in this because I follow the NYS Arts Standards. Even though I do my best to have my units integrate essential Core skills, I still am not as fluent with ELA CCS as an ELA content teacher. None of the critique of skills benchmarks vs. age-appropriate learning needs was surprising to me, as I taught in elementary from 1999-2013, and have heard teachers frustrations regarding of all the curricula continuously forced on them by city politicians and the ed researchers.The way implementing this sections ideas would affect my planning/ teaching would be through how I choose to break down communicated knowledge, readings, discussion activities, and writing assignments. I’ll be honest and say that understanding students’ ELL needs was more straightfoward when the majority of my students were elementary English Language Learners. Now that I’m in high school, most of my ELLS language needs are not as obvious in my art classroom because their oral communication skills have grown over the years; additionally my elective courses are not text heavy, so I’m not discovering their reading capabilities as quickly. I think I would apply this information more through the way I orally communicate the lessons, break down the oral language I’m using and thinking about how the elements of my unit can connect to and activate their prior language knowledge-base and add to/supplement it it.
Jennifer SpenceParticipantHi I am Jen Spence, I am a DOE high school art teacher in Brooklyn, have taught high school students for 9 years, taught K-8 for 16. I’m taking this course for CTLE, was feeling so so (because it is sort of out of my subject), but the 1st session reminded me of both an anthropological linguistics course I took for my grad degree & my own journey as a 2nd language learning in Spanish – so now I’m psyched. 🙂
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