Theme Based Lesson Evaluation

After presenting the 45 minute theme based lesson to our students, Bri and I each compiled our own individual evaluation statements based on professor and peer feedback:

After the initial shakiness of our nerves, I believe Bri and I fell into a comfortable and coherent dialogue with our students. We had effective teacher presence and established clarity of our expectations of the class early on, which eliminated confusion and pressures about producing a finished product for the informal critique/class discussion. Enthusiasm was high on our end and the class warmed up to us quickly. It was at first difficult to get participation from our students when revisiting our 10 minute introductory lesson from a few weeks back, but by allowing a casual dialogue to emerge between ourselves and the students, we could gauge students’ understanding of past material and scaffold greater ideas from each participating student’s recollection of that lesson. We made sure to navigate the classroom individually as the class began creating individual sketches, keeping a keen eye on students who were demarcated as trouble makers. These students simply needed a bit more guidance, attention and explanation of ways to spin his/her own ideas from the group’s “web.” By keeping a calm voice and not singling any student out, classroom order was maintained and the sketches showed evidence of constructive thought.

Our own sketches/examples may not have been the best, but we did utilize the outside bulletin board, which provided a brilliant outlet for physical movement of the students. Sitting for too long a period of time provides ample chance for fidgeting and off-color activity. Our choice of pastels was perhaps ill-suited for the sketching exercise and was the result of poor material selection in our art closet. While there were plenty of different mark making tools, the condition of many of the supplies left something to be desired (i.e. markers were dried out). We managed to keep our presentation clean and concise by utilizing simple color coding and signage such as the “Think Tank” to establish continuity and organization in each group’s brainstorming. There was some confusion on my part about the counting off system, simply because Bri and I had discussed it so many times I forgot which way it would be executed. In the future, it would be valuable to allow students to break themselves into groups. Also, allowing the students to define “visual language” would better suit the project and could generate compelling ideas of their own, perhaps eradicating the need for assigned topics.