V.critique of the practicum experience
V. Critique of The Practicum Experience
My current educational philosophy is that students learn best when they are comfortable being themselves in the classroom. It is important to me that the students in my classroom are comfortable enough in their environment to experiment and test their limits. Along the way they will make mistakes and express confusion. I think that this is all good. I believe that the classroom environment strongly influences their comfort levels and their willingness to tempt failure. This belief significantly evolved during my time at Rocky. Even when information simply needs to be presented to the students, you can effectively give students a constant presence in the classroom by making things feel like a conversation instead of a lecture. Pushing students to add to the conversation by sharing relevant questions, comments, experiences, and thoughts makes learning new content feel much less daunting. Encouraging all students to be active contributors in the classroom at all times helps them to gradually get to know each other better, allowing the classmates to serve more like a support system for creativity and less like competitors fighting to create the best artwork. Not every student I work with will become an artist, or stay in an art related field. However, understanding how to engage in the creative process and communicate an idea visually will help each individual succeed no matter what they end up doing with their lives.
Personally, I am a strong believer in the psychological benefits of creative activity. In my opinion, engaging in creative activities promotes a reassuring feeling of self-awareness that is hard to come by in non-creative fields. Art activities can be easily structured to indirectly support the development of important life skills like problem solving, flexibility, planning, and perseverance. Life skills such as these are best developed through working on projects as well as learning how to find the resources to best complete the project. It is hard to foster these skills by just lecturing, especially during their developmental years. Art class creates a safe environment for students to learn important skills while also seeing that their peers are struggling too. The students should feel OK with what they have accomplished, if they have worked hard at it. It is my personal belief in the psychological benefits of creative activity and creative problem solving that motivates me to pursue the field of art education through a Master’s Degree in Art Therapy. Ultimately, I would hope to teach an elective art course that focused on students who often fall beneath the radar. What I ultimately want to do is find new, more effective way to help students who struggle with social, emotional and experiential issues that interfere with their confidence and academic success. I want to work on developing skills that will help them become successful in their own lives. I believe that structuring developmentally conscious art activities has the potential to reach many problem students in a new, more effective way.
My belief about assessment is that generally, it has a necessary and unavoidable place in the public education system. Assessment is really the only way to assure that there is some type of continuity among all schools in the public education system. No matter what a school’s philosophy on education is, or who their teachers are, each school is part of the larger public education system. It is the responsibility of this system to ensure that all students leave with the baseline of knowledge and skills needed to be more successful members of society once they finish school. The inherent need for standardization of such a large system makes assessment an unavoidable part of public education.
My views on assessment may be biased by my content area but I think that too heavy an emphasis on assessment can get in the way of student learning. This is especially so when lessons are planned around collecting data on their students’ learning development. The underlying intention behind a lesson plan to help students learn as much as they can. Yes, information on the teacher’s teaching effectiveness and the student’s development need to be collected, but not at the expense of the student’s education.
Maybe this is only in art classrooms, but I have often seen more being learned from aggressive but unsuccessful experimentation than successful project completion. With such a huge emphasis on assessment in all the academic settings, students restrict their creativity out of fear of failure. Students are much less inclined to learn about new mediums and processes because they associate academic success with their ability to follow strict instruction and turn in a flawless project. In reality, the projects that allow for the most intellectual development are often the ones that at some point have hit a dead end. This means that the student was confronted with an unexpected problem that they needed to solve. The problem forced the student to draw upon prior knowledge of materials and processes and call on their classmates and teachers and innovatively use the knowledge gained in a new way. In art, it is the difficult situations that end up teaching you the most.
As a teacher, planning assessable lessons that reward students for combating and ultimately overcoming a measured degree of failure instead taking the quick and easy path to success is extremely difficult. As I gain experience as a teacher I will learn how to plan lessons that encourage creative risk and develop methods of assessment that foster growth in independent thought, creativity and problem solving. I feel that a demonstration of the development of these skills should rewarded in areas like art, as the skills learned here can reinforce a student’s ability to succeed in a wide variety of disciplines. I recognize that dynamic in myself and in many of my most inspiring peers.