Meeting pushed so that the department could go see the Neo Rauch show at The Drawing Center. Discussion to follow next week based on the themes and ideas presented in the work and the curation of the show.
http://www.drawingcenter.org/en/drawingcenter/5/exhibitions/6/current/1979/neo-rauch/
The dept met and discussed artistic influences that we bring to our classrooms and our personal practices. We furthered that discussion by talking through how we use those artists work to illustrate the formal elements of art / technical skills.
Science and Visual Arts met together. We focused on how we support students in revisiting and revising work in each of our disciplines (and the similarities in how we develop that skill). Kara shared a lesson from 9th grade chemistry (Does the mass of steel wool depend on the shape?), Jeremiah shared about how he is using standards and grading in his art class to encourage students to revisit their work and know “when is it done?”. We broke into high school and middle school groups to discuss in more depth and went beyond the initial question to discover many layers of similarities between the work of each discipline and what we are trying to get students to learn in our classes. We discussed how helping students see these similarities could help, for example, a student who feels comfortable in art class but feels their science or math teacher should “just tell them things” see how the work they are being asked to do is similar and transfer some of their approach from one class to the other.
The Department met at and visited the Lower and Middle School art spaces. Ann, Peggy, Rohan and Jeremiah shared the work that their students have done and thus far and covered what projects they will be moving into during the rest of the year. We charted the overlap in material use and conceptual content and discussed the ways in which we assess and provide feedback. We also set a timeline for our observations and everyone left with a sense of who and what they hoped to observe.
We discussed what our critical friends group would look like (expectations, schedule/how we will provide feedback) and shared what our courses for each grade would look like this year. The hope was to find points of interest within different classes across different divisions that would inform our own lessons and classrooms. Ideally the teacher being observed will receive feedback on their practice and the observer will take away things that they can use in their rooms. We will follow up with this during our next meeting and will create a structure by which everyone will see classes and be seen in an equitable distribution.
Type of Work Focus:
Description of Work Focus: Use the Critical Friends group protocol to do peer observations within and across divisions to support individual practice and with an eye focused on seeing the student progression through the K-12 experience
Schedule for Work: Tuesday Meetings as before.