CTQS Standard I
Teachers plan and deliver effective instruction and create an environment that facilitates learning for their students.
Element E:
Teachers provide students with opportunities to work in teams and develop leadership.
A finished group coil pot where the group decided to go with a fruit theme!
Durable Skills Focus: Collaboration
I envision my ideal classroom as a collaborative studio space where students are learning from and with one another. Fostering collaboration and community is a durable skill that stretches beyond the bounds of school. It is my belief that so many of the things we learn in the art classroom are done through the medium art but tie to something much bigger. For this semester I introduced every project with a collaborative skills building or group thinking activity so students would begin to feel more comfortable with each other.
Although group projects can be difficult in the art classroom with a broad spectrum of skill levels and creative ideas, we did have one beginning group mini-unit (3-5 days) that was focused all on skill building in a group to introduce coiling. Coiling is a integral technique to hand building ceramics, however it takes a lot of trail and error. Successful coiling comes with both practice and play! Since there are many ways to roll, build, and decorate with coiling working collaboratively helped build students of all skill levels. Students who were having successes could show other students what was working for them if they were struggling. Upon building skill level students were asked to problem solve as a group how to form all their individual pots into one piece that was easy to load into the kiln in it’s most fragile state.
Artifacts
This was the powerpoint I used to guide students through the introduction of this group activity.
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However in the future I think I would do this very differently. The purpose of this kind of collaboration was not to make a beautiful coil pot, this was not meant to be about product. This kind of collaboration nurtures the process of creating in a group setting. That is why if I were to do this over I would probably not even fire these. Students would be challenged to build the tallest pots, or the most decorative, or the widest with coils and then we could reuse the clay another day. I think students would have an easier time engaging in failure due to newness of the skill if their product was not finalized with a firing.