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Standard 5: Professional Responsibilities for School and Community

Professional Responsibilities for School and Community

Overview

In addition to ensuring that students achieve at high levels, a teacher is reponsible for supporting the larger learning environment within the school and community. The teacher exhibits an awarness of the school's stategic plan in instruction, assessment, and classroom management. By contibuting to positive changes in school policy, the teacher exhibits leadership. The teacher also actively supports student learning and the broader mission of the school by collaborating with calleagues, parents, and guardians. To meet the goals of this standard, the action research project that I implemented at East Fairmont Jr. High School sought to draw connections between WEST Test scores and the Art curriculum.

Relevant Decription: Action Research Project(see attachments)

My action research project examined the impact of Art criticism on student motivation and DOK levels. My content area is Art Educatin and I have noticed that many times Art is underestimated in its potential as a learning tool. Art not only has great potential to enrich learning, but also for motivating students. I believe what students love about art is that it tends to be more learner directed; they get to make lots of choices and create work that they design themselves. When I was thinking of a topic for action research, I wanted to incorporate a learning need, art criticism, student choice, and motivation. When I put it all together I decided to measure the potential of art criticism to increase student motivation related to higher Depth of knowledge levels. I measured student progress by comparing DOK levels of promt questions chosen in written responses following group critiques

Results

The answer to my guiding question: can art criticism be implemented to motivate students to engage willingly in higher depth of knowledge levels? seems to be “yes”. I saw improvements in both formative (DOK records) and summative data (class notes and informal student feedback) Over time, students began choosing prompt questions that required them to make connectins, form arguments, and make supported evaluations rather than prompts that merely asked them to list or describe. I also saw great improvements in student attitudes and interest level.

Reflection

The results of my Action Reseach indicate that Art Criticism has great potential for increasing student motivation and interest in the content and for facilitating higher Depth of Knowledge levels. However, it is apparent to me that although the sucess is valid, it is somewhat superficial. For lasting gains, this strategy would be better implemented long term and supported in other areas of the art curriculum.

I believe that this project designing and implementing this action research project enriched my understanding of Standard 5: Processional Responsibilites for School and Community because it gave me an awareness of the schools strategic plan and the broader mission of the school, especially in the area of Standardized testing. The project also gave me opprotunities to collaborate with my host teacher, principal, and other collegues at East Fairmont. Also, by comparing my reseach to other professionals in my field, it introduced me to the variety of resources of research available and how it can be used to inform and improve teaching. I learned how important it is to test your own strategies as a teacher.

Plans For Improvement

In the future, this strategy would be better tested through long term analysis, since it deals with building motivation and skills that take time to develop. In the future, I will implement it over the course of the whole school year, for all grades. Art criticism is a great way to teach art vocabulary, history, and content, but it needs to be built up gradually and supported in other areas of the instruction. I would recommend vocabulary games and reviews to keep the content fresh in the student’s minds. I would also recommend making sure the works of art discussed are related to the students’ in class projects to make connections stronger.

Also, it would be ideal to take the students to see the works of art in person some of the time. I had a lot of students who were conviced the images I showed them were photoshopped. To prevent this, it would be ideal to take them to see the works as they were originally designed to be viewed, especially public art, in person.

This action reseach has impacted my teaching not only because I now know how effective a tool Art Criticism is and will be using it in the future, but also because I am sure that this is not the only Action Research project I will do. In the future, I will use the format I learned in this project to test strategies for effectivness and use the resouces of my collegues and teachers outside of my community for updated research and ideas about education. In doing so, I hope to contribute not only to the environment within my classroom, but also the school, community, and the educational world at large through the sharing of strategically tested teaching practices.

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Author: Kitty Dixon
Last modified: 4/30/2013 6:49 AM (EST)