Previous Experiences and Adapting Our Lesson for the Future

I’ve had some really great experiences working with secondary students, but unfortunately, I have yet to actually teach an academic lesson. I’ve become pretty comfortable around students, and I feel confident in my ability to help problem solve, but most of my time with students hasn’t been me directly teaching them. Most of the time I feel like I’m teaching, it’s working one on one with students. I’ve yet to teach concepts to a large group of students at once, and I find it a little nerve-racking.

School For the Arts has been a very different experience working with secondary students. I really liked being able to talk with our small group about our ideas, even though most of the time the students had little interest in expressing their opinion. The lesson that we designed for UAYSFA was very loose in its conception, because I think we somewhat expected that our students would arrive with ideas of grandeur. It was clear that after meeting with our students that they weren’t really interested in conceptualizing upon our project and just wanted to work. We probably should have recognized that from the beginning and adapted our lesson by just providing the students with the plan. We tried hard to get out students to discuss their ideas and as a group come up with our design for the final product, but in the end the students only gave a little and the teachers had to in the end decided on a final design.

If I were to adapt this lesson for an academic environment, I would change a lot. Assuming that there are more students, the design would have to be adapted to be smaller, cheaper, and easier to build. I’d probably make all of the sections the same design, like a 1’X1’ board with a 6”x6” shadowbox. I’d probably focus the lesson more on using lots of found objects, and talk with students about how creative pairing of objects can make powerful statements. I think that making the sections smaller would make this project move much faster, which was a problem with the larger scale project. Having a large group of students would result in a very impressive installation, especially if more than one class was making sections. I think that simplifying the design is defiantly a necessity for this project, and dealing with identical sections will force students to be a little more creative when making their pieces.