My Not-so-Eloquent Philosophy on Planning Lessons/Projects
In my relatively short teaching career, I have taught art in four different schools- each within a different district and two states! (More on the reasons why in a later post...) Although it was such a pain to start over at each school every time, it really helped broaden my vision of what different school environments and administration can be like.
Anyway... my point is, in only one of those schools was I required to actually type up my lesson plans. And even then, they were rarely read by any of my supervisors. So, I really am NOT in the habit of writing lesson plans. Now, I work in a very large "progressive" district where all of our lesson plans are already written... we just have to act them out... like reading a script for a play. While there are certainly many wonderful qualities to these lessons, I really love writing my own!
My first year of teaching, I was in a district that had absolutely no structure in terms of local standards and my principal was only concerned with me putting pretty things in the hallway. So, I got in the habit of coming up with all my lesson plans on my own. While this made for an extremely stressful and busy first year, it also set the tone for my overall philosophy about writing lesson plans...
Artists are creative people- duh- and obviously we chose this career because we want to use that creativity. I find ideas and inspiration for lessons all over the place... Current events, the weather, the school community, other artists, and especially from my students. I can't tell you how many times I have formed an entire lesson around something cool a student came up with that I thought was cool, so I wanted to share it with all of them! We are constantly hearing how art reflects life, so shouldn't our art lessons do the same? I appreciate the resources and ideas that my current distict gave me, it can feel limiting sometimes when I think that what I need to teach my 600 students fits neatly into a three ring binder.
Just a piece of advice though... whether you type up your lesson plans or not, always, always, always test them out yourself first. I'm sure most of you already know this anyway, because it only takes one or two times of not doing it, to learn your lesson. I also use my creation of the project as a basis for how long it will take the students. Typically, it takes students about 4x as long to make a project as it takes me to make the sample.
And finally... even though inspiration can come from anywhere, there are still those times that we just cannot think of something cool to do. In those cases, check out Artsonia. Artsonia's "museum" is absolutely loaded with lesson ideas from real art teachers. Just type in a key word if you have some idea of what you want to do. If not, just type the grade level into the search box and go from there. Some of my most popular lessons were inspired by these!
Anyway... my point is, in only one of those schools was I required to actually type up my lesson plans. And even then, they were rarely read by any of my supervisors. So, I really am NOT in the habit of writing lesson plans. Now, I work in a very large "progressive" district where all of our lesson plans are already written... we just have to act them out... like reading a script for a play. While there are certainly many wonderful qualities to these lessons, I really love writing my own!
My first year of teaching, I was in a district that had absolutely no structure in terms of local standards and my principal was only concerned with me putting pretty things in the hallway. So, I got in the habit of coming up with all my lesson plans on my own. While this made for an extremely stressful and busy first year, it also set the tone for my overall philosophy about writing lesson plans...
Artists are creative people- duh- and obviously we chose this career because we want to use that creativity. I find ideas and inspiration for lessons all over the place... Current events, the weather, the school community, other artists, and especially from my students. I can't tell you how many times I have formed an entire lesson around something cool a student came up with that I thought was cool, so I wanted to share it with all of them! We are constantly hearing how art reflects life, so shouldn't our art lessons do the same? I appreciate the resources and ideas that my current distict gave me, it can feel limiting sometimes when I think that what I need to teach my 600 students fits neatly into a three ring binder.
Just a piece of advice though... whether you type up your lesson plans or not, always, always, always test them out yourself first. I'm sure most of you already know this anyway, because it only takes one or two times of not doing it, to learn your lesson. I also use my creation of the project as a basis for how long it will take the students. Typically, it takes students about 4x as long to make a project as it takes me to make the sample.
And finally... even though inspiration can come from anywhere, there are still those times that we just cannot think of something cool to do. In those cases, check out Artsonia. Artsonia's "museum" is absolutely loaded with lesson ideas from real art teachers. Just type in a key word if you have some idea of what you want to do. If not, just type the grade level into the search box and go from there. Some of my most popular lessons were inspired by these!
