As I gained more experience and developed as a teacher, a discovered some of the major elements that help create a predictable, caring, and positive learning environment. One of the first elements that I discovered helps with building a classroom culture is consistency. Being consistent with classroom rules and routines, assessment, and expectations will make a huge difference in the way students feel in the classroom. I also believe it is crucial to always be receptive and open-minded in order to be open to hearing student opinions and giving students choice when they ask to make their own decisions. With both of these elements also comes being aware; noticing everything that goes on in the classroom is also crucial to fostering a positive learning environment, including noticing student behavior and reaching out to students in need. High school students especially can be quiet and hesitant to tell you how they are feeling, so just checking in with them every class can make a big difference. If I wouldn’t have checked in with a few students this semester regularly, I wouldn’t haven’t noticed some issues that were important to be addressed.
To respect and acknowledge diversity, one of the main strategies I have developed while student teaching is giving students choice, even if the choices are minor. For example, in the grid-drawing project I taught, I implemented student choice my giving students the power to decide what they were going to draw. This tactic also helped me implement social justice by having students chose images related to social issues that were important to them. Choice is one of the best ways to respect student diversity and it naturally brings out the uniqueness and perspectives of students.
Regarding my own self-growth throughout my student teaching, my art reflexive practices revealed that I improved significantly in my classroom management and confidence in my teacher presence throughout the semester. Some of my journal entries specifically talk about being able to understand the “flow” of a lesson and make connections between concepts and what I directly say to students. Additionally, I think I grew significantly in incorporating social justice, multiculturalism, and identity into my instruction content and art projects. This is very significant to me because I focus on my identity, my culture, and social issues affecting my culture in my personal artwork and autoethnographic reflections. Being able to get students to do the same was rewarding and exciting to see.
To help my students engage in reflexive practices throughout their art projects, I incorporated regular written reflections as well as guided reflective activities to guide students to reflect on their art-making processes. One example of this is the reflection questions I asked my students to answer about their social justice topics and the photos they chose to represent the topic. Students answered questions to articulate their opinions about the issue and how the issue relates to them. This strategy worked well because it seemed to help students work through their thoughts and opinions on the subject. Another example of a reflexive practice was the reflective activity that students did when they completed their social justice grid drawings. Students first reflective individually to questions about the making process and their personal growth, after which they did a gallery walk to see the artwork of their peers. After making observations, students left comments on drawings using anonymous sticky notes. This activity seemed to effectively foster student reflection while creating a way to share ideas that was not too intimidating for students.
As a reflection of my entire student teaching experience, I created a larger artwork to act as a representation of my self-growth in classroom management, my teacher voice, and my overall presence in the classroom. Coil-built from brown stoneware clay, this sculpture represents my physical presence and growth in the classroom, as well as an experience I had coil-building along with my advanced pottery students during their anthropomorphic vessel project. I plan to glaze this piece with designs of blue glaze so that it can also represent Ms. Blue Arm.
