#teaching to learn

[catsburglynchington]

It's the end of the semester, so studio space/time is mostly devoted to homework. This would be more of a bummer if i weren't in a class called "creative curriculum" and if so much of my homework didn't involve felt.

[karen-mteach2016-blog]

The Dangers of Assessment (Reflecting: Visual Arts)

So far, I have not had any experiences in teaching Technology or the Arts.  During my practicum, there was a specialist teacher for Technology and a specialist teacher for Music and none of the other subject areas seemed to be a focus at the time.  So instead, I will reflect on my experiences with learning the Arts (specifically Visual Arts).

I do not consider myself artistically talented.  I also do not consider myself particularly well educated when it comes to Visual Arts. I am a self-taught artist.  I have endured many set-backs in my learning and I still consider just about everything I draw to be not worth the paper that it's drawn on.  I do, however, love to draw.  So I do it anyway, as documented here, and I try to learn and improve.  I have always loved to draw, or at least for as long as I can remember.  I find it calming and mentally challenging at the same time.  And yet, I never took a single Visual Arts class in high school. Visual Arts was a mandatory subject in the Canadian middle school that I went to, but an optional subject at the high school level.  In high school I studied both Drama and Music, which were also optional.  I even assisted with "teaching" for a Dance class (which primarily involved mixing and editing music tracks for the students to dance to).  But I never took a single Visual Arts class, even though I sometimes stared enviously at the other students' sketchbooks and the paintings they were doing.  So why was didn't I ever study art?  Well, two reasons I suppose.  The first was that I didn't like how it was taught and the second was that I wasn't any good at it anyway, so why bother?  And that, essentially, is the problem with assessment in the Arts.  But let's backtrack a little bit ...

Report:

In middle school I often received average or below average grades in Art class, with very little indication of what should be improved or what factors had contributed to the grade. I still have some of my old paintings and drawings from that time period.  There are no comments written on them, only a numerical grade written on the back of each piece of art.

Respond:

This made me feel completely unvalued and discouraged me from trying to improve.  I felt that no matter how much effort, or creative energy and care, I put into an assignment, I always received the exact same numerical grade.  Sometimes I handed an assignment in late and it still received the exact same numerical grade as all of the assignments that were handed in on time.  There was no indication of what I needed to do to improve. As far as I can recall there were no clearly defined criteria for the assignments in the first place.  At a certain point, I felt that there was no reason to try at all anymore since it never seemed to make a difference. 

Relate:

This is a refrain I have heard from my practicum students in other subject areas as well.  I recall giving feedback to one of my students on his draft of an English assessment.  He didn't really listen to what I was saying at first, or read the comments.  Instead, he took one look at the indicative grade I had written at the top of the criteria sheet and said: "A C!  I always get a C." with a sad expression.  I took the opportunity to explain to him exactly why I had indicated that grade and the specific areas that he could work on in order to improve it for the final draft and his entire disposition changed.  Suddenly he was excited about working on the draft, instead of resigned to his fate as a C student. 

Over the following days he constantly asked me questions about how to find more interesting synonyms for words and whether the new word he had chosen was appropriate or not (as an EAL/D learner this was something he struggled with).  The classroom teacher was amazed to see him actually staying behind during lunch to finish up his assignment, as this was not behaviour he had come to expect from that particular student.  He probably felt that that student didn't care about his grades, which perhaps he hadn't since he seemed to have given up on being able to improve them or even alter them at all with his actions.

As a student, it is dangerous to assume that you do not have the power to improve your grades.  It is also dangerous to equate grades with success, or even with learning.  This is something that teachers also need to be very mindful of though.  Often, whether we intend them to or not, students do equate grades with success and talent.  If they regularly receive poor or below average grades, particularly with minimal feedback, then they assume that they are "not good" at something.  Over time, this can lead them (as it did me) to give up on a subject altogether. 

Reason:

Assessment is an unavoidable component of teaching, but it needs to be balanced between the different types.  In my personal experience with Visual Arts education at the middle school I attended, there was an over-emphasis on summative, rather than formative, assessment.  Assessing too regularly can have a negative impact on the development of students' creative and artistic capacities (Dinham, 2015).  That was my experience with Visual Arts education.  In Music it felt like we were being taught essential skills and being encouraged to practice with minimal  formal assessment.  In Visual Arts on the other hand it felt like there was nothing but assessment.  I didn't feel that we were actually learning, but rather that we were being asked to perform an endless string of assessments, one after the other, with all of them being assigned a seemingly arbitrary grade.  The lesson to be taken from this is three-fold:

1.       Formal (summative) assessments should not be conducted too frequently and should be lead up to with meaningful learning activities.

2.       Assessment grading should not appear arbitrary.  There should be a clear set of criteria and the criteria should be transparent to students.  They can either be involved in determining the criteria or should have the criteria explained to them along with the learning objectives to ensure that both the assessment and the resulting grades are meaningful to them.

3.       Students should be given feedback, rather than simply a numerical or alphabetical grade. They should have a clear understanding of where their grade has come from and how it was determined and, if possible, should be given a chance to improve it either through an interview, in which they are able to display any understanding they have taken from the unit that was not clear from the assessment and explain the reasoning behind the artistic decisions they made, or through a revised draft.  If this is not possible, it should at least be made clear to them what they can improve on for their next assessment on a similar topic.

Reconstruct:

It is important in teaching any subject, but particularly the Arts, to ensure that you do not discourage students' interest and engagement with the subject.  While assessments are a necessary component of education, they should not be the primary focus.  It is important to provide meaning learning opportunities for students and not necessarily to assign grades to everything that they produce.

Before I moved to Canada, I was extremely enthusiastic at learning and practicing artistic skills. I would sit at the kitchen table on weekends doing watercolour paintings of the garden, and was more than happy to learn any new skills or approaches that anyone was willing to teach me.  I even entered a local art competition (which I submitted a terrible piece of Fan Art to, rather than a proper painting, but nonetheless was able to win second prize in within my age group).  So I came to middle school prepared to love learning more about art and having the opportunity to explore new mediums.  The type of learning I met with there was so discouraging that I completely gave up on formal Art instruction.  In cases such as these, it is best to take the lessons not from what was done, but from what might have been done and how students such as myself could be reached.

 References

Dinham, J. (2015). The ABC of arts education: Planning for authentic arts learning. In Delivering authentic arts education (2nd ed., pp. 121–150). South Melbourne, Victoria: Cengage Learning Australia. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uql/detail.action?docID=1990987