The Open Art Room - Creating Structure as a Team

During my first semester this year, I had a student ask to meet with me one-on-one in our synchronous classroom software, WebEx. Often when I am trying to help students get caught up with their work, we meet and discuss which assignments to focus on and I can show them examples of the projects and answer any questions. I also showed this student demonstrations using my document camera. He really found our meeting helpful and we continued to meet like this once a week until the semester ended. He told me that working with a teacher like this made him feel more like he was in a classroom, like he was not working alone.

This got me thinking, how can I regularly create this environment for students? After speaking with some of my colleagues, "Open Art" was born. Open Art is offered to students once a week. The session is run by myself and 3 other teachers and it is open to students in any of our sections. During the session, we walk students through each step of the weekly project, demonstrate over the webcam, and answer questions as students work individually. We allow students to work at their own pace by letting them roam freely through the slides after we have reviewed them. At the end of the session students will have their project done or developed enough to finish on their own.

Here is a sample presentation from one of our sessions:

We have seen consistent attendance at these sessions and find that students appreciate the extra structure that Open Art offers them. Students know that they can plan to do their art homework during the session and can have someone there to guide them through it. Also during these sessions, our special education teacher is able to open breakout rooms to work with students one-on-one. It has been wonderful to collaborate with other teachers on my team to make sure these sessions run smoothly. I will definitely be implementing Open Art again next year!

Remembering Why We Do This

For the past few weeks, I have been collecting data from my post-test for my SLO. I wrote about this test earlier this year when we implemented it for the first time. At my school, this test is 23 multiple-choice questions offered through a website outside of our LMS. Students take this test during the first 3 weeks of school and the first 3 weeks after quarter 1 of Art 1. I started this journey feeling very upbeat and excited to see what my students came into my classroom knowing and how they would grow throughout the quarter. What I have found is some unsettling data.

At the moment (several hours before the closing of my post-test), I am sitting at 58.9% of my students hitting their growth targets. That puts me in the "Least Effective" category as a teacher. Throughout my young career as a teacher over these past 3 years, I have been told nothing but good things about my teaching methods by administrators. My students have given me positive feedback about what they are learning when I speak to them and I have generally felt fulfilled and proud of where I am as a teacher. These results threw a wrench into my teacher ego!

As it is, I am still not sure what is causing my students to do so poorly. I know of the barriers we have that might affect their performance; students not engaging with the content, test anxiety, students tired of taking all of these assessments (one per class, 2 times in 10 weeks), the weakness of multiple-choice questions to assess project-based learning, home environment, test questions with confusing wording, and a lack of effort to name a few. I have gone through many days of discouragement this week, feeling like everything I have learned about education is wrong and all the compliments about my teaching methods have been lies.

But then, I started to look at the data more closely. I began to see students growing by leaps and bounds! Some of my weakest performers have grown by the highest percentage. I even have students who have scored 100% on my post-test. When I was inputting the data of one of my students with special needs and saw that he not only hit his growth target but surpassed it, I jumped for joy! I was reminded why I am a teacher. It is not about crunching the numbers and hitting this arbitrary goal. It is about teaching each individual student and helping each of them grow. Maybe the data isn't showing it, but the students who have actively engaged in learning in my classroom have a wealth of new knowledge. I know this from talking to them, and from watching their work improve every single week.

I will continue to troubleshoot my assessments for my SLO and how I can overcome these barriers so the data starts to really reflect more of what is going on in my classroom. But, there are just some things that you can't quantify.

Am I a least-effective teacher? I certainly don't feel like one.