Reflections and results from the distant learning artroom

I keep telling myself that it is a learning process, both for me and the pupils.  That is undeniably true.  Who would have expected at the start of the year that the education world would have been stood on its head and we would all be sat at home, staring into the webcam, launching our lessons into the homes of our pupils?

When I first entered the educational world, many years ago, I was given the advice, “Get your lesson material right for the class and the situation, and the rest will take care of itself”.  It was good advice and is as relevant now as ever.  The problem is that we find ourselves in a very new and different situation and discovering what works, what works really well, and what simply doesn’t, is all part of that learning process we find ourselves grappling with.

I have been experimenting quite a bit with different approaches in the last couple of teaching weeks as I try to understand:

1. what works well actually during an online session with a class, what engages them and gets them producing something at the time of the lesson
2. What engages them with becoming involved with creative and practical activities outside the lesson time and with the restrictions of most pupils only having limited materials available to them at home

In order to tackle these two main approaches/aims I have experimented with the following

• Straight forward drawing assignments
• Digital assignments using the pupils’ iPads or computers
• Playful remakes/transcription assignments based on art historical images
• Using the Google Art Project to visit and walk through some of the museum collections of the world
• Using the Google Street Art Project to do a research project into what street art around the world looks like and can be

I’ve had some really good lessons and results from various classes, and some painfully quiet ones where it felt like I was shooting my lesson material into outer space, with the bare minimum of response from the pupils!

But I do feel that I am starting to get a hold of what is needed to finish lessons with a feeling of some sort of success and engagement.  I suppose I am starting to understand better this new context and what the possibilities are that it offers and what the long list of limitations are as well.  The more this insight grows, the better the chance of getting that all-important lesson material right.

Having a variety of things ready and at hand to show the pupils seems to help a lot.  A film, a demonstration, a PowerPoint or some well-chosen examples all help.  They seem preferable to having to look at your teacher staring out of the computer screen! Extra preparation is undoubtedly needed, but hopefully all useful for future lessons, once we are finally back at school once again, whenever that may be!

So, what exactly have my pupils been doing?……….

This morning I had a class digitally wandering round some of the great museum collections of the world.  When they had visited a number of these they had to, amongst other things, explain which museum they would like to visit for real and motivate why that was.

https://artsandculture.google.com/streetview/rijksmuseum-second-floor/kgF3c2qIEYZR8g?sv_lng=4.885378031445625&sv_lat=52.3600409362279&sv_h=74.63&sv_p=-13.299999999999997&sv_pid=0BKlLJsKlEpjBPmIRfFvXQ&sv_z=0.9999999999999997

Click the link above to enter the gallery of honour in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

I was a little nervous about how well this would work, but it ran incredibly smoothly and the pupils responded well in the written assignments.

I have done a drawing/digital design assignment loosely based around the work of the Belgian artist Filip Dujardin.

Inspired by the artist’s eccentric architectural creations I set the pupils a task of designing their own fantastic and fictitious buildings based on a number of local buildings in combination with architecture from around the world, working either digitally or by making a drawing.

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There have been enough examples on Facebook and Instagram of people remaking artworks in their homes using any materials that are at hand.  It is something I have done before over the years in class, but this really is the situation to relaunch the idea in order to squeeze a little art history into the lessons.

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Following on from this assignment is the remaking of an artwork using the colours and materials found in the clothes cupboards at home.  Most of my pupils do not have any paints at home so this playful (at quite large scale) assignment has been set in motion this week.

If you are interested in any of these ideas, contact me, I’m happy to share materials.

Friday afternoons….

The last lesson of the week on a Friday afternoon.  Not the best moment to have to teach, but somebody has to, or are we to shut all schools on a Friday after lunchtime?  For me this year this has meant teaching H2P (13-14 year olds) as my final session of the week.  I’ve always had a last lesson of the week of course, but this one has felt a little different.  This has been the case for a couple of reasons:

• Most of my classes I see twice a week, but for H2P I only see them once, so everything has to happen in the 60 minutes that we have together!
• They are quite a jumpy bunch and come to my classroom shortly after having had their physical education lesson, making them a little extra tired, a bit more jumpy and a ever so slightly sweaty!
• Before this school year I hadn’t taught any of them, meaning I had to get to know their own little ways and of course they had to get to know mine

It’s fair to say that they are a class that you have to learn how to handle.  My teaching style is not to dominate my pupils, I prefer to sweep them along with enthusiasm…yes, even on a Friday afternoon.  Having said all this though discovering how exactly to do this in our one hour a week has been a bit of a process of experimentation and discovery.

We’ve drawn, we’ve painted, done some collage and designed for the 3D printer.  It all went OK although it did take a while before I actually had the whole class traveling with me on our artistic journey.  Some of the boys seemed to be testing me out to see if it was acceptable to do, well the absolute bare minimum.  As the weeks went by even this group started to up their game.

 

The 3D printer idea was one that I thought would trigger the enthusiasm, it did for a few, but a significant number were blocked by the intellectual leap that is needed for working digitally in three dimensions.  To be honest I was surprised, but teenagers can really be as irritated by computer software as their grandparents!

 

The true watershed in the activity of this jumpy group of teenagers came in an intense drawing session, using charcoal that we had one afternoon.  In 45 minutes of drawing each child produced a series of six to eight drawings.  Which the following week I immediately rolled into the beginning of a lino-printing project.  Suddenly there was so much energy in the class, and all being channelled into the practical activity.

The last few weeks I have presented the necessary materials at the start of the lesson, the ink, the rollers, the paper and the lino, and then I have largely stood back and manned the drying rack making sure we start loading it up at the bottom and work our way upwards (why do teenagers always fail to work that out for themselves?).  The drying rack aside we have enjoyed a series of lessons where kids have been wandering with fully loaded inky rollers, others have been head down over their lino block, whilst others are frantically rubbing the backs of their paper trying to get the best possible prints.

Yes, we’ve had messy tables, messy children and occasionally messy floors. But we have also had children standing back at the end of the lesson, the end of the week, thinking wow, did we just do that.

The challenge for all teachers is of course to try and carry this energy into the next assignment…..I still have some thinking to do about how I’ll approach that!

To bin or not to bin

Am I being over sensitive? It is the end of the school year, maybe I’m a bit worn out by it all, but this is a returning feature of the weeks leading up to the summer holiday.

The scenario goes like this. After a year of working with the various classes that I teach the chest of drawers and the shelves where I keep their work are getting rather full. The last week of term big clear up is just around the corner and so it is time to return the fruits of our art lessons back to the pupils. We normally do this in a frenzied fifteen minute session during the last lesson but one of the year. Pupils wander round the room with armfuls of drawings, paintings and collages, handing them out to classmates while I take care of the fragile three dimensional work. At the end of it all, each pupil has a small stack of their creative efforts of the past year on the table in front of them.

When I was new to the teaching business I just waited for the bell to go and the class got up and left. I’d then look round to discover a number of rejected ‘artworks’ deposited in the bin in the corner of the room. Like I said at the beginning, maybe I’m just being too sensitive and suffering from end of the year fragility. But after helping and coaxing, maybe less that talented pupils, to produce the best they could, I can’t help feeling strangely let down by the drawings in the bin…….they hadn’t even got through the door of the art room!

I kept all my artworks when I was at school, in fact I still have many of them even now! Although, I should be honest, I didn’t keep my maths, chemistry or biology books!

I can’t make my pupils keep their artistically rejected creations, I realize that. I do try to point out that maybe a mum or a dad back home may be interested in at least seeing them once. Most of the class do depart quite happily and voluntarily with their work, but for those who do plan to bin it instantly, I do have one fixed rule now, they are not allowed to leave in the bin in the art room it has to at the very least make it to the container outside our school. This way, their (perhaps overly sensitive teacher!) doesn’t have to scoop it out of one bin and then put it in another himself.

Language and colour – a CLIL warm up assignment (content and language integrated learning)

For a number of years I’ve been using an assignment aimed at stretching pupils’ vocabulary in the very early days of them starting to get to grips with English in my bilingual art room.  It focusses on trying to introduce more descriptive terms than just the most basic ones. It is also an assignment that in terms of my art lesson is about a little colour theory and learning to mix colours. The aim being to stop them relying simply on the shades that come directly out of the pot.

In a nutshell, it is all about taking a particular shade of a colour, maybe a rather ‘in-between’ sort of an example and to try and think of an appropriate name for the colour.  I encourage them to try and be creative and not go for the obvious.  Perhaps my favourite example is ‘goal mouth brown’….that shade of brown of the muddy puddle of earth and water that forms in a well trodden goalmouth of a football pitch on the school playing field!

Its a simple little assignment, that could certainly be built on or developed.  In the art room by the mixing of multiple variations of a particular shade from the colour circle for  example, and dreaming up suitable titles for them.  In the language classroom the colours that have been given these new names could become feather focus of a piece of creative writing or poetry perhaps.

A link to the small assignment sheet that I use can be found below:

Colour mixing assignment sheet

One of the reasons I am prompted to write this post is that I discovered today the ‘colour-thesaurus’ as made by Ingrid Sundberg.  She’s taken this idea so much further and her grids of names could themselves also easily to generate extremely rich and varied pieces of colour inspired writing.

Ingrid Sundberg’s Colour Thesaurus

 

First year of the iPad in my art classes

One of the motivations for starting this blog eighteen months ago was that the school where I work had decided to make the step to a more digital rich form of education with every pupil ultimately working with an iPad.  We are now approaching the end of the first year of this project and our current first years (12 year olds) have a year behind them of an increasingly light school bag and an increasingly full tablet in their bag. It’s time for a little reflection and evaluation I think.

So what have the benefits and gains been this year?

The pupils have always got their books with them.

After years of pupils regularly forgetting to bring the books they need to school, this problem seems to have instantly disappeared. For some reason the pupils never ever forget to bring their iPad! I’d like to think it was because of the lesson material that is now on the tablet and is needed in the lessons, but I’m realistic enough suspect it might have more to do with all the other uses the device has.

My lesson material has never looked so good

I’ve always written all my own lesson material. For years I have sent my booklets of text and images to our school printer to be printed out in black and white. Now though I deliver it as PDFs to the pupils, complete with YouTube films, links to websites and all of it in full colour. The pupils open the booklets in iBooks or some other app where they can make notes on the material, add drawings and so on, before saving all onto the iPad for next lesson.

It almost seems like the pupils like taking notes

Maybe it is still the novelty of the device and the apps, but all the underlining, highlighting, post-it stickers and other accessories that these note taking apps offer almost seems to make the pupils more keen to make their own notes.

Internet access

Instant internet access is really pretty handy in the art room, it really does offer too many possibilities to name!

New creative tools

Yes we still work with paint, pencils, clay and wood. But we do also now work with digital drawing techniques, painting apps, apps that help you explain perspective, ones that allow pupils to build word webs and so on. The drawing and painting apps really offer new sorts of opportunities for a freedom and rapid approach that even the most cautious of young artists seems to respond well to. Some even allow you to play back the process of the development of the image in a short film. These are all aspects that are totally new to my art room this year.

The apps

There are so many out there, the choice is overwhelming. Often the the problem is more finding the ones best suited to your class, and once found remembering to return to them on other occasions. Sharing information and finds with colleagues is crucial in this area.

I’ll post some views about the creativity, and at times pseudo-creativity offered by apps sometime in the future.

Individuality and own pace in lessons

The role of the classical form of teaching has been changing a little through the year. Yes, I do still stand up at the front and explain things to the whole class at times, but other options are coming along too. I’ve experimented with getting pupils to watch YouTube films not on the big screen at the front every time, but also on their iPads with headphones on. They watch at their own pace, stop and replay parts they want to hear again.  The level of focus at these moments seems significantly higher than when we watch as a class. Any discussion I want to have can still take place at the end.

The fact that the iPad is the gateway to so much information offers great possibilities for assignment extensions for early finishers or even alternative routes for pupils struggling with one particular approach or assignment.

So all in all a positive experience generally. It’s an extra dimension, and extra opportunity, in fact I don’t really have the feeling that anything much has been replaced or lost by the arrival of the iPad in my art lessons. That though is not to say that there haven’t been some less positive aspects and downsides to this first year.

Everyone moving at about the same speed?

It was inevitable and easily predicted, but the way that all users, pupil and staff, get to grips with the new device varies enormously. We’ve offered lots of in-school workshop sessions to guide and instruct colleagues in various areas which have undoubtedly been useful, but it is fair to say that the staff members who are making the most progress are the ones who have stopped to ask themselves “what can I do with this new device in my lessons” and subsequently have had the drive to try and find some answers for themselves.

A series of practical problems……

Fortunately practical problems are often the ones that are the simplest to resolve, but they are problems nonetheless.

I’ve lost count of the number of broken iPad screens that I have seen this year. A twelve year old’s school bag would seem to be a dangerous place for digital devices.

Memory problems have increasingly become a problem as the year has gone on. For the pupils this has often arisen because of the games and other non-school apps that have been installed. But my 16Gb iPad Air is also constantly reaching the point of being full, purely with work related material. My advice…?, buy the biggest capacity that you can afford.

One of the big potential gains of iPad supported education is being able to connect your iPad to the large screen at the front of the class, be that a beamer, smart board or large scale LCD screen. Personally I have found this to be fantastic this year, conducting your lesson from the back of the class, or from sitting next to a particularly troublesome pupil! I can draw on my iPad and it appears on the screen, I am liberated from the computer at my desk.  Or at least I am if the connection between the iPad and the computer works well, and there lies the problem. We have huge problems throughout the school with this connection this year, a frustrating business!

Attention please….

The presence of all the possibilities the iPad offers, sitting there on the desk in front of pupils, is at times difficult to resist. All teachers are in the process of having to discover new ways to keep pupils on task.  In the art room I have to say my experience of this problem is relatively small, when we’re not actually using the iPad it goes away in the bag. Paint and clay don’t mix too well with such devices, but where lesson material and workbooks are all on the iPad it is asking more creativity from the teacher.

Creativity

Maybe at the moment, my biggest disappointment with the iPad is the way that on the surface so called ‘creative’ apps are anything but creative.  So many of them offer a wealth of readymade solutions or ‘one-click wizards’ that might give eye catching results, but are the pupils actually being creative in making these digital products. This is a particularly interesting area for me, perhaps the most interesting of all the iPad developments in the classroom and it certainly warrants a more extensive post at a later date, how do we stimulate creativity with the device?

Other potential problems/issues

Time issues are a well-known problem in educationland, the arrival digital lesson opportunities requires extra work and a process of discovery that not all teachers are willing or able to embark on. School leaders should make no mistake, staff have to be facilitated in time and support is a school wants such a digital project to succeed.