What perspectives/strategies/practices did you learn from the first placement that revised/enhanced/transformed your previous perspectives or assumptions about teaching and learning? -What changes have you made or adjusted to adapt to the second placement?
This blog post is a lot different than I intended to be. I had thought the changes to the second placement would be more about adjusting to how different lesson planning is for elementary due to the developmental differences of each age group, or how much more you need to be proactive in teaching procedure and routines. Instead we had to adapt to a huge change that no one expected – the shift of all schools to online learning only due to Covid-19. This has been difficult to navigate as a student teacher because we aren’t in the loop of planning and implementing online lessons as much as we were during in-class instruction. This is not the fault of our cooperating teachers as the past few weeks they have also had to wait for guidance and instruction from the administration who is waiting for guidance and instruction from the district administration.
The focus of myself and my cooperating teachers has changed from art instruction to more of an emphasis on social-emotional learning. The specialists teachers have offered optional enrichment activities but the main job is to check in with families and students to say hello and keep those relationships active. In the middle school classes we attend an optional office hours’ time period each day and we make art with whatever students wish to connect through Schoology. That has been a nice way to still make art and provide a safe place for students to come and hang out. The main changes I have adjusted to are to not worry about assessment and if everyone is on task. At this point and time the mental health of students is more important and we stress that art can be a tool to help students cope with these stressors but we do not want to make it an additional burden on families.
The biggest change I have made from my first placement to my second placement is that I now understand it is not possible to accomplish every single goal each day and that teachers must prioritize the items that are most important. For some students the important thing that day might be that they remembered to clean up their area and we should take that as a victory. Not every student will be able to be fully engaged in the art making process every second of every class and that is okay.
I chose to forge a silver bracelet for this art process exploration because forging is all about changing the shape and form of metal. Despite it’s rigid appearance non ferrous metals are quite malleable and respond like clay when hit with the hammer. An errant hammer blow can push metal in the wrong direction, but this can be corrected by adjusting the area where you hit the hammer. When forging you are constantly examining the metal to make sure it is moving where you want and changing your hammer blows accordingly. I have used this as a metaphor for teaching because you make a lot of mistakes when you first learn to forge just as you do when you are first student teaching. But you do not give up and as you perservere, the metal object takes shape just as a teaching practice and philosophy does. The silver bracelet is not finished yet as it still needs to be refined and polished, but it is starting to take shape, just as my teaching practice is.
The silver begins as a straight bar, then is painstakingly shaped into a bracelet