Paper+2

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 * Paper #2: How has your concept of “Teacher Role” changed?**

As a teacher with 30 years experience considering how my concept of ‘Teacher Role’ has changed, I would have to say it has become more inclusive of all three learning goals: acquisition, constructing meaning and transfer. Wiggins and McTighe relate these goals directly to stages one and two of backward design. Teachers specify the knowledge and skills students are to **//__acquire__.//** They develop essential questions to help students **//__make meaning__//** of the “big ideas”. Performance tasks are then developed that require **//__transfer__//** of understanding (McTighe and Wiggins, 2010). As a new elementary art teacher in 1982, I was more comfortable with direct instruction in which clear, precise instruction was concerned with the acquisition of facts and basic skills. I would concentrate on content vocabulary, factual history of artists or styles, and basic art techniques. The very nature of art production required my students to be active learners that are exploring and inquiring as they improve their artistic skills, so I did use some instructional strategies characteristic of a facilitator or coach. I would incorporate some divergent questions, on-going formative assessments, reflections and critiques. These teaching strategies felt more forced and uncomfortable than convergent questioning, lecture and demonstrating. They were new to me and the students were constructing meaning out more complex, important ideas than just basic facts. With experience and training, my instructional strategies quickly changed to be much more inclusive of making meaning and transferring learning. Today, as a high school art teacher, my role is to use all three interrelated learning goals as appropriate to particular teaching, but I am most comfortable with transfer. My students are active learners concentrating on inquiry and processes that require increasingly more complex problems and projects. As their understanding expands and their skills improve, they are able to transfer their knowledge and skills to more advanced and complicated creations. The assessments are on-going. Before I begin a unit, I orally check for the students’ familiarity with the subject, era, style and/or skill. I often use an analytic thinking handout to check for understanding of the “big idea” and essential question. Formative quizzes are given that the students may take over as needed. Students use an art critique checklist to self-assess, and they either write a formal critique of their work or have an oral group critique at the end of the unit. Other characteristics of transfer are also evident in my instructional strategies. As I walk around the room observing my students visual compositions, I provide specific feedback or may demonstrate a technique again. I point out where an object is not proportioned or where a student needs to develop more value contrast. At times, I have individual conferences with students about their ideas, skills and progress. I keep a chair next to my desk for this specific purpose. At this point, the teacher role that I feel least comfortable with is acquisition. My reasoning is that this is the instructional strategy that high school students can become quickly bored with. It is with lecture and the acquisition of basic factual knowledge and skills that my students tend to become less interested and begin to question. If too much time is spent here, students begin to state that they are bored, or begin to question the validity of this information to real life. The teaching strategies that actively engage the students in the inquiry of important ideas and processes that can be increasingly developed into more advanced processes and products are the understanding about important ideas and transfer their knowledge. Part of this in art is increasing their artistic knowledge and skills and then transferring these to more sophisticated and highly developed works of art.

**References** McTighe,J. & Wiggins, G. (2006). //Understanding by Design//. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum.