Teaching for Artistic Behavior

I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2017 Massachusetts Art Education Conference "Shaping Human Potential" at UMass Amherst. If you would like to view my presentation slideshow, please click HERE or click the picture below!

Making the Switch

Over the past couple of years, I've realized that something had to change.

There was more than one moment when I had finished hanging up a beautiful display of student artwork, and as soon as I stepped back to admire the display, I realized that even though I had given my students choice within the assignment, all of their work looked very similar. It was sometimes hard for me to distinguish which piece belonged to which artist. 

There were also times when students would ask me if they could do something new and different with their project. In one particular instance, I had my students do a project that focused specifically on expressive line and positive and negative space through the use of black and white contrast. In the middle of the project, one student excitedly asked, "Can I add watercolors onto this when I'm done?" Of course, my first instinct was to respond, "YES, go for it!!" But my inner traditional art teacher hesitated... the project was specifically black and white because we hadn't talked about color yet, and I wanted them to practice black and white contrast first. I gave the student an ambiguous answer along the lines of "Well, maybe... we'll talk about it later." But ever since then, I kept asking myself... why couldn't that student have tried something new and experimented with watercolor, if they had already grasped the other concepts? What made me feel like I had to say no, when the answer could have easily been yes?

After hearing about Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB), I had finally found an answer.

​I'd heard about TAB at the regional and national conferences over the past year. The idea was created by Katherine Douglas and Diane Jaquith with a three-sentence curriculum: 

What do artists do?
The student is the artist. 
The classroom is their studio.

TAB is a pedagogy that facilitates independent learning, creative decision-making, and divergent thinking. The idea of learner-directed and choice-based education made so much sense to me; it would give me the freedom to encourage and nurture those sparks of deviation and risk-taking, rather than restricting creativity within the criteria of a project. As a bonus, there has been a recent emphasis on UDL and choice education in our district. So I decided to learn as much as I could.

Last summer, with grants issued by the Groton-Dunstable Education Foundation and the GD Arts Boosters (thank you!!), I attended the TAB Institute at MassArt and then worked with Naturally Organized LLC to completely rearrange my classroom (along with my curriculum) to promote a choice-based and learner-directed environment. After learning from Katherine Douglas, Diane Jacquith, Nan Hathaway, Clyde Gaw, Julie Toole, and high school TAB teachers Ian Sands and Melissa Purtee ("The Open Art Room"), I was ready to go.

After incorporating TAB into my classroom, the results have been overwhelmingly positive, and it's completely changed my perspective on teaching. In this article, I address the preparation, curriculum, and assessment behind TAB, as well as the successes and challenges I've experienced during my first year as a TAB teacher.

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Preparation: Stations

Experienced TAB teachers share their knowledge about Centers and Stations at the TAB Institute 2017.

One of the most important components to the TAB classroom is its organization, specifically the establishment of media centers. Or, in this case, stations.  Rather than prepare a set amount of materials for students for a particular project, students can make their choices about the materials they need, and they can find these materials in stations organized by media. The stations I chose to use in my own classroom are Drawing, Painting, Adhesives, General, Collage/Mixed Media, Printmaking/Bookbinding, Paper, Fibers, Clay/Sculpture, and Exhibition.

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BEFORE

AFTER

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Collage / Mixed Media Station

Before: Materials were somewhat organized by type in white trays. No clear organization system. 

After: Materials are now organized by type into clear labeled bins. Magazines sorted by type. 

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Drawing Station: Still Life Objects
Shoes, hats, shells, rocks, plastic fruit and flowers, pinecones, skulls, hands, dinnerware, utensils, etc.

Before: Still life objects sorted by type but in cardboard boxes. All in a far corner of the classroom that was not easily accessible. 

After: Still life objects sorted by type in clear bins. All are easily accessible underneath and around the Drawing Station. 

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Drawing Station
Pencils, graphite sticks, charcoal, charcoal pencils, dry pastels, oil pastels, protractors, compasses, human drawing references, still life objects, sharpeners, erasers, tortillions, drawing paper, etc.

Before: Drawing materials in different places on the back shelves, and some are in drawers. Drawing references are in a far corner. Some paper is accessible in another cabinet, but most paper is in the big storage closet in the back in order to conserve materials for projects. 

After: Drawing materials, paper, and references are all in one place! Materials are out or in clear, labeled bins. 

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Curriculum & Structure

While the vast majority of the TAB classroom is learner-directed,  I have adopted skill-builders called "Bootcamps" from Ian Sands - for the first week or two, learning is mostly teacher-directed as students develop the skillsets they will need for open studio. For example, in Drawing and Painting, the first couple weeks are dedicated to learning about line and form, values, color and painting, figure drawing, and space, and the first days of Art Explorations are dedicated to exploring various media - drawing/painting, collage, printmaking, and sculpture. After Bootcamp, the first five minutes of the next few classes are dedicated to important topics in art, such as plagiarism, idea generation, and the meaning of art. The trick to these Bootcamps is never to talk more than about 5 or 10 minutes - I've found that students' understanding and retention are comparable, if not better, than when I spend 15 or 20 minutes talking about the same thing. 

I really liked the idea of taking the first 5 minutes of every class to introduce a new artist or technique to start the day. However, I haven't quite found the best way to do this because sometimes it interrupts the natural flow of the classroom. For now, I have been posting interesting artists and ideas on their Seesaw pages (our classroom app). 

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Assessment

This was one of the biggest questions I had about TAB... if there aren't projects with measurable goals and criteria, how do I grade? The answer turned out to be simple: Engagement! As long as students are engaged, they are learning, growing, and reflecting. 

Click here for the Google Doc.
​This rubric has been modified from an Engagement Rubric by Ian Sands. 

Seesaw
I have been using the app Seesaw for documentation - it's just like Instagram for the art classroom! At the end of the class, students take a snapshot of whatever they worked on that day and post it onto their Seesaw page. This is extremely useful for tracking students' progress and getting a better understanding of their work.

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Challenges

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Continuous Disengagement

The most prominent (albeit rare!) challenge had was continuous disengagement from a handful of students. I had a total of 68 students in Term 1, and at the beginning, I had a total of about 85% engagement overall. Most were in Drawing and Painting (an intro class), and about 10 of these students experienced sustained disengagement, where they would seem to get so discouraged or distracted that they did not create anything during class time. When I asked what they wanted to do, they usually told me they didn't know, or they didn't have any ideas. Using the following solutions, I was able to make some progress and reach 97% full engagement overall. From the original 10 students, 7 are mostly engaged for the duration of each class period, 2 are somewhat engaged or compliant, and 1 is still consistently disengaged - I'm not giving up yet!

Solutions

1. Conversation: When I first noticed that some students seemed stuck, I'd usually start with a conversation and ask what their interests are. For example, what do you like to do for fun? Do you play a sport? Do you have a special talent or skill? What do you want to major in? Who is your favorite musical artist? Who is an important person or role model in your life? 
2. Teacher Website: Under the Studio Art tab on my website, I included an Inspiraton tab for brainstorming, which has two subcategories: Ideas/Prompts and Images/Videos. The Ideas/Prompts page has brainstorming examples, questions, apps, templates for exploring personal identity, and hundreds of specific ideas and prompts that I've found online. The Images/Videos page includes various artists and tutorials for media and techniques, many of which I've shown my students in our Bootcamps and class introductions. 
3. Art Traps: Introduced to me by Clyde Gaw at the 2017 TAB Institute. This involves selecting a tool, a medium, and a surface (for example, a paintbrush, paint, and a square of cardboard), and dropping it off next to a student without saying anything. This is done with the hope that the student will naturally pick up the supplies and begin to play with them. 
4. Changing Seats: High school students tend to sit in the same spot, which can either be helpful or hurtful to their productivity. I tried this a few times with mixed results, though I made sure to explain this was not a punishment, but it was just to see if they would work better with a different group. I also found that some students did this on their own because they knew they would be able to focus a little better. 
5. Asking Questions: Asking questions like What if? or What would happen if? to prompt creative thinking. For example, if they were drawing something and lost interest, I would ask, what would happen if you cut that up and made something new out of it? What if that drawing was a background for something else? What if you splashed some ink or color on there? Eventually, the goal is that the student will ask these questions of themselves on their own.
6. Unconventional Materials: Unique tools, media, and techniques often caught the interest of unengaged students, at least for a class period. This was especially true when other students in the class were not using these materials. A particular group got hooked on liquid watercolors because they were a special material I had ordered; they blew on them to make splash-like shapes, added salt to create some cool textures, and even mixed them with soap to see what would happen. I also introduced artists who make art in unusual or unconventional ways. For example, "Red" Hong Yi uses materials like coffee and tea stains, seeds, flowers, makeup, melted candles, and chopsticks to create her drawings and paintings. 
7. Parent/Colleague Support: When I was feeling frustrated that I still couldn't engage every single one of my students, I reached out to parents, learning center teachers, and guidance counselors. They were often able to provide me with some insight on how to help and support these students. 
8. TIME: When all else failed, the one thing that really helped was simply time. Some students felt a little overwhelmed with the amount of choice at first, and it just took some extra time for students to become more comfortable with the open studio format and build confidence in their own ideas.

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Classroom Cleanliness

Organizationally, the classroom is in a much better place than it was before. But I've noticed that with the open studio format, things seemed to be even messier because students were using all different kinds of things around the classroom. The sinks were a disaster all on their own, no matter how many times we went over the cleanup procedures, and even when each student was assigned their own supplies. Crumpled paper towels and paint-filled brushes and palettes everywhere. 

Solutions

1. Individual Materials: ​A few years ago, I started assigning a certain number of brushes, palettes, pencils, sharpeners, and erasers to each student and put all of them into personal art bags, and students would need to return everything in good shape at the end of the course for a materials grade. With occasional missing items, it's been a much better alternative than leaving everything up for grabs, and it gives me a better idea of where all the materials are. 
2. Mini Jobs & Accountability: A few weeks into this school year, another teacher suggested something that had been on my mind for a while - dividing up mini jobs at the end of each class period. So far, it's worked MUCH better, and students hold each other accountable. I used to do a general clean-up, but the lack of specific tasks didn't work as well. I've just recently tried dividing up tasks by table, which has also worked well so far. 
3. Easy Access to cleaning supplies: I've put a spray bottle of cleaning solution in a caddy at each table, which has done a pretty good job of encouraging students to wipe down their tables. My next idea for this is to leave a box of wipes on the table so students don't need to use paper towels. 
4. Crusty Brushes and Goopy Palettes?: So far, I save dirty brushes and palettes for students to clean in detention, but I know a lot of other teachers keep a bucket of water in the sink. At the end of the day, everything has soaked enough so that it's easier to clean. I'll consider this if my previous solutions don't seem to work, but I'm still on the lookout for other ideas.

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Successes! 

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Overall, using TAB for the first time was an OUTSTANDING success, even more so than I had expected or hoped for.

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Student Learning and Growth

With choice, students have the freedom to learn more about what interests them, and therefore their growth naturally happens. Here are a few notable progressions:

Annie

Nic

"Looking back at my previous work from the beginning of the class, I didn’t seem confident with extending out of the boundaries from simplistic pencil-on-paper pieces lacking expression. This was in part due to my understanding that I was not an artistic person, and in part due to my lack of objective motivation for completing new works of art. It was difficult to find inspiration at first because I was unaware of the different art techniques that could be used to convert any normal objects into abnormal expressions. As the class developed over time, and as I acquired new art skills, I started to create pieces centered around value and depth. I began to enjoy how defining different parts of a piece distinctly produced an effect of realism. I then began shifting my artwork from technique-based creations to passion-based creations: I started conveying my love for the sciences in my art. I drew pieces of the International Space Station, I sculpted a Tesla Model S out of air-dry clay, and I put a lot of time and emotion into painting a realistic surface of Mars as an exposure piece. Over the past 9 weeks, my work in art has ultimately grown in my connection to the pieces I have created: I have become much more confident that I have some scale of artistic ability, and art in this class has become less of a chore for me and more of a relaxing morning activity.... I responded to challenges in my work by learning about and applying new media... I worked through these problems simply by learning about recovery techniques in art, and I learned these things over time by asking the teacher for advice.... Overall, I am happy to have taken this class, as I learned valuable techniques that will carry through in my artistic side as I enter college."

Pyper

"My work has really grown over the past weeks because I think that I have become a lot neater with my sketches and coloring then before, and I am trying to draw new things.... I made my pieces unique because I really tried to add my own style and ideas into characters I was drawing, such as ninja turtles. For example, when I was drawing my ninja turtles, I always use a specific face shape and eyes that are very important to me. Also, when I faced challenges, all I had to do was keep going. I would give up sometimes, but I would try my best to get other projects done and review what I could do better next time."

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May 2018
​Overall, implementing TAB was an overwhelming success, and this was clear throughout the entire school year. Students finally have the freedom to explore, take creative risks, and express ideas that are important to them, creating learning experiences that are so much more meaningful and authentic. This complete freedom of choice makes art entirely accessible to students of all skill levels and backgrounds; art is finally reaching those who might not have considered themselves artists before this year. I am learning so much more about my students than ever before, and they teach me something new every day. Rather than displaying projects in the glass cases, I'm displaying unique art by each individual student. I'm so glad I switched to TAB, and I can't wait for next year!