Reflection on my teaching experience

Reflection on my teaching experience-II.

Students motivation

Teaching of art in an inner city middle school like long middle school one of the most challenging experience one can ever face as a visual art teacher. The students come to my class with a pre-conceived negative mind set about art. They think art is all about drawing and painting, or crafts. They are very resistant to any reading from the text book. Some claim they can’t draw nor nether like art. They are there because the schedule brought them there. When you try to convince them to participate in the art activities or else they will fail, they will tell you; what am I going to do with art anyway? I don’t care if I fail; you don’t need to pass art class to be promoted to the next grade. If students need tutorials in mathematics or language arts the administration will chose the connection period. When it is time for annual projects, core teachers will keep the students in their class to complete the project during connection time. If there is any seminar, workshops or a talk by a special guest it is also connections time.

When parents come to conference day and you informed them that their child s failing they will tell you I am not worried if he or she is failing in art. My worry is in his mathematics and science grades. With these negative attitudes and perceptions about art by ball share holders in the school one has manage to whip the interest of these students to come to my class, do some work and sometime even don’t want to go back to their core classes . The secrete of my success is the application of the right brain aptitudes, that is creativity, imagination, sacrifices and going beyond the call of duty. The power of the fruity chewy candy as a reward is all that it takes to make these kids to participate in my art class. It cost a dollar per bag of about 30 pieces. Three classes a day, therefore an average of about $3.00 a day and $15.00 a week. This reward is so powerful that students don’t want to miss my class. Class participation is 80% to 100% in my class.

In addition to the candy, I have also created personal work sheet that covers every aspect of activities we do in class a form of scaffolding or differentiation for those who claim they cannot draw or art is not their thing The activities range from puzzles, cross match and meaning, similarities and difference., word search, word search with hidden meaning, bingo, find the hidden objects and many more.. Find the hidden objects puzzle is the most attractive of all, even teachers come to compete in it in my class, It teaches them different ways of looking at things, calm them down, work in cooperate groups and also vocabulary development across discipline not leaving out creativity and imagination With the scaffolding activities and the power of the fruity chewy candy power, I am able to fulfill all school requirements for my classes in terms of changing my bulleting board every month, participation in art shows and competitions and creating creative back drops for every school activities.

Despite all that I have stated I still have some few disciplinary problems and I am still finding ways to over come it. Another problem is with the days that I don’t have candy. They will ask you; so I did all these works for nothing? They feel they are doing the work for me to decorate my bulleting board. With my recent knowledge in action research through ArtsAPS I have also created a survey on surveymonkey.com to find the causes of the less motivation by some students and also to evaluate my class and teaching style. I will analyze the result to redirect the direction my classes will be going, a form of action research. I am also going to aligned Howard Gardner and Daniel Pinks six sense theory to all that I do in the classroom. I hope to post the results of the ongoing action research on my blog.


.