Newsletter - Week of Dec 18, 2017

Another amazing month of great art. We have been trying all kinds of new things in the art room. I have been really pushing the students to step outside of their comfort zones and have been pleasantly surprised at the amazing art they have been creating. It has been hard and students have been frustrated but I am hoping that they find their art work satisfying in the end.

Phones have still been a frequent distraction, after the holidays I will be implementing a no-phone policy in the art room. This does mean that students will not be able to listen to their own music and will have to use the Chromebooks to search any images they may need. I do love the ease and convenience of having phones in the classroom, but too many students have been watching movies, tv shows, and playing video games that I think for the last few weeks of class we need to crack down.

Here is this months newsletter. Please enjoy and have a Happy Winter Break!

Mindfulness in the Art Room

My school has recently started incorporating Mindfulness meditation into our school day. It is 5 minutes at the beginning of 5th hour. It is silent meditation to a mindfulness prompt. I'll be honest, I wasn't super excited for mindfulness, nor am I now. I am a private about intimate things, like meditating, singing, exercising. To me, those are not things that I do in front of strangers, especially not in front of 36 students. So mindfulness meditation in front of a classroom of 36 students wasn't my idea of a great time. Now don't get me wrong. Mindfulness or I should say mediation, in private, I am totally 100% for. I have for years worked with Yoga Nidra or Mindful Daydreaming. I started years ago, when my colleague at the high school introduced me to Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle. These men changed my life. I used to have the worst road rage. Now I am generally calm, my own kids can frustrate me. I generally mediate once a week. Although, lately have been slacking some. Despite that my students often state that I am one of the most chill teachers. Not because I'm a yogi, far from it. I don't think that I'm a pushover either.

Mindfulness is actually defined as a mental state achieved by focusing one's awareness on the present moment. An artist’ work will benefit from being in the present moment. By being totally focused on what we are doing we can create amazing art. What I am more interested in is, how can we harness the idea of mindfulness in a way that encourages creativity and thinking? Not only that but is exciting (or even acceptable) to students.

How does Mindfulness work in the Art Room? Well if I am continuing on the honesty train, in our current situation, not well. The school based mindfulness is the most stressful time of my day. I spend 5-10 minutes attempting to silence students. By the end I am frazzled and my students are frustrated with me. The routines we have established since 6th grade, are disrupted.This new initiative doesn't fit with my classroom. My students love to create art, they come to my room to build, create and dream. But the school mindfulness time doesn't help this. I should state again, I adore what the school is trying to do. I agree mindfulness will benefit the student. I do truly believe this, but in my space, at this time, it doesn't fit. And I believe there are multiple reasons why.

First, I've noticed when my students do participate their creativity centers seem lower and function less. Ideas seem to struggle out of them. Despite trying extra mindful thinking routines and looking at the artist's habits of mind, I find my students are still taking 3-steps backwards on their idea generation and creative thinking. I felt like I was missing something, so, in an effort to figure out what I am doing wrong, I began listening to the book Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire. As Erica Roberts on The Mindful Word website stated in her review about the chapter on Mindfulness in the book Wired to Create. "It’s explained that certain types of meditation (those that encourage some wandering of the mind, such as the open-monitoring style or relaxed mantra-focused practices like Transcendental Meditation) can aid the creative process, while other types (those that promote focused attention on a particular object or action, such as breathing, only) may actually block the flow of creative ideas." It is the second type that we are using in our school and it is my theory that this mediation style though rarely being used by students may be hindering their growth as creative thinkers. However, I don't want to only blame the mindful meditation that has us emptying our minds. I do believe myself as a teacher is at fault as well. So, it is my goal over the Holiday Break to research and explore more middle school minded transcendental meditation and try out a few on my students.

Secondly, my students are worried about themselves and how they appear in front of their friends. At 13 years old, they are not worried about the benefits of mindfulness. They may state that they understand why it is a benefit but to stand up and actually meditate. But in front of 35 other students, on an art stool, it's not going to happen. I love how it stated in the Art of ED pro series, in the video on Middle School Classroom management "middle school students are only worried about 2 things, US (like their greater group of friends) and THEM (as in themselves)." When they are silent (if they are silent) they are not thinking about emptying their brain but are thinking "Is my friend doing this?" "Are they looking at me?" "If Bella sees me mediating what will she say at lunch?" "Isn't Johnny sooooooo cute?" "Do you think Amelia likes me?" "Do you really think they like my hair?", etc, etc.

So what can we do to help students become more mindful in the art studio?

First, let's teach students how to focus their thoughts.

- Twenty tabs open in your brain happens, but how do we focus on to one thing and follow through on that. We need to be encouraging students to be in the present moment. I love the article on Five Minute Mindfulness on the Art of Ed that talks about using 5 minutes of silent time. My current students are predisposed to dislike the word “mindfulness”, so I will be seeking a different word for this time. Maybe we will call it our Chagall Time or Dali Time since they worked with dreams and thoughts.

Second, create a space where the students know that thinking is valued.

- Take a look at Cultures of Thinking and Thinking Routines by Ron Ritchhart. This can be powerful if you can get your whole school involved. One of our elementary’s uses this and it has changed their entire building.

- Go old school and return to the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) days

Encourage students to observe the world.

- Take some space in class to just observe and see.

- Take your students for a walk around campus and see who can notice the most unusual things.

- Have students keep a visual diary. In the book Afterworlds by Scott Westerfeld one of the sub characters is a collector of all kinds of crazy things and these things change as the books she is writing change.

Teach the Artist's Habits Mind.

- Take a day each week to review the Artist Habits of Mind.

- Check in with your students and see if they are actually doing these.

- These are included in my rubrics for each project and I ask them about it in their project completion self-assessment survey.

- I give this to the students to keep in their sketchbooks. I also have small individual ones, for each Habit on my wall.

Try some technology free days and silent days in the classroom

- In the Podcast Everyday Art Room for the Art of Ed, Cassie Stephens discusses having a Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light for the vocal level in the art room. I use a similar system except for Technology. After listening to Cassie Stephens podcast I think I will be creating 3 small canvas' with a paint brush for talking (or maybe lips because middle school students would like that) and a cell phone for technology.

Attempt a few creative visualizations or guided imagery with your students.

- I found this article Guided Imagery: Use these scripts to help children cope with anxiety and stress from Catherine Gillespie-Lopes on the Mindful Word website incredibly helpful and enlightening.

- The Chopra Center has some helpful resources

I hope this helps you create a space for Mindfulness in your classroom.

There are so many ways that we can grow from being in touch with our own thoughts and ideas. As artists we don't need to clear out the clutter in our brain, we just need to organize it and use it to our benefit.

Forms for Art Teachers

In my last post I talked about all the amazing things that forms can do for everyone, but I started thinking about how can I use this for my classroom. I started wondering how would using some of these new techs look in the art room? Ultimately, what I found was that I what I have constructed is making my life as an art teacher so much easier. I am going to admit that I am little obsessed with Add-ons right now and specifically Autocrat.

1. Supply List

One of my biggest struggles is ordering supplies. While I love getting supplies in. I hate making that yearly supply list. I dread having to do this. I dread it so much that I actually put it off until I'm desperate for the items. The worst part is that I will make list after list of items and then lose those lists. Then I find that I've forgotten to order the blue watercolor paint. So I created a form to help me with this exact problem. It is a pretty simple form, I put in which item I need, the item number, and the quantity needed. Since I have my phone often nearby I put the link on it so I can fill it out, right away. I can then use EZQuery to sort the information. 

After trying this for a few weeks, I am realizing that finding the item number while putting away stuff is a huge pain in the butt. I have found I skip that question and have continued using the item and quantity needed. 

2. Project Organization

Each year I try to organize all my art projects, lesson plans, presentations, etc, etc. Unfortunately, I have things scattered between handwritten notes, photos on my phone, links on Pintrest page, and everywhere in between. I have tried linking them together. I've tried linking my presentations with my documents, but that has never actually come together. Plus, that takes so long. This year, I created a google form. In my form, I choose, grade level, semester, skills assessed, target goals, resources, and then my final reflection. As I type this, I am thinking about adding in Common Core Standards. This form is linked to my ipad/desktop, so that as soon as I finish a project I can fill out the form and add it to my digital portfolio and I print a copy for my binder.

Not only did I create a form but I also linked the Form spreadsheet using Autocrat and it now auto-fills a document for me. Basically, Autocrat creates my lesson plan. Which is spectacular because in my district we have to provide a lesson plan and a reflection to our administrator for our observations.With this one form, I have actually completed my requirement for planning and reflection.

3. Student Reflections

Finally, I recreated my student reflection and turn that into a form / auto-filled handout. Right now, the lack of printers in my school makes it hard for us to print out the final reflection. I love the idea but getting the reflections too my student's hands seems more difficult. While Autocrat will send me these forms, having to print all 350 is tedious and just silly. I want the students to have them and look at them. I think that in the future, when I move more into Google Classroom I will link this and have the students fill it out that way.

Amazing Things You can do with Google Forms

     Did you know that you can do all kinds of crazy things using Google Forms?! I mean, awesome things, like teacher appreciation, parent contact, and yes the dreaded discipline? YOU CAN!  I'd like to think I knew all these things but honestly it's one of those things that I'm not sure if I knew it or if I just didn't have the creativity to think up such awesome ideas.

    On November 3rd I had honor of being asked to present at the Mercy High School Tech Talk #MHTT17. While my presentation was great, I was more blown away by the other presentations. While it was a small conference it was effective and impressive. Just what I needed for those just before Thanksgiving Blues. You know those over worked blues, where you force yourself to think about a thing to be thankful for everyday of the month of November to just forget how overworked and out of control your school life is. Yeah, this was perfect. Their keynote speaker, Brent Coley, was brilliant. His stories propelled you into a space of laughter and sometimes tears (or that almost tears moment). To sit and remember in a funny yet thought provoking way that we have the influence to be eduawesome is just what I needed. I needed to be reminded I have the power to change a student's perspective but simultaneously I'm not the only teacher who is terrified about becoming THAT teacher. You know the one who is set in their ways. The one who will criticize every student and teacher, if their behavior doesn't fit the 1952 protocol for education.

    Well, what does this have to do with teaching Google Forms? It was during this conference and in the session Taking Google Forms to the Next Level with Brent Coley that I learned how awesome it is to use Google Forms. I was so excited I had to share it with someone and since most of my building is headed out on the Washington DC trip, I returned to my blog. I highly suggest watching the tutorials on how to create these amazing Google Forms at BrentColey.com

    The thing that I have loved about Google Forms, since the beginning of Google Forms; is it will take the data from a survey and populate it into a Google spreadsheet. Let me repeat, it will take the data from a survey and populate it into a Google spreadsheet - this spread sheet then can be sorted for deeper investigation and can also be shared with others. I used to sort everything using the pull down tabs in Google Forms but I found out that a better ways is to use the google chrome add on EZ Query, you can easily and quickly sort your spreadsheet from its original format into other pages based on specific criteria.  Here you can see that I have created other pages at the bottom of my Spreadsheet labeled 8th grade, 7th grade and 6th grade. All I had to do was use the EZ Query add on, then select what I want to include in my query and how I wanted it sorted. POOF! After a minute or two, depending on my connection speed, it populated the new sheet and now I can easily find my students via grade and name. Again I suggest watching the tutorial. It is much easier to watch than to explain via text.

What blew my mind was the teacher feedback and teacher appreciation forms Brent Coley used in his presentation. Both of these forms provided positive, immediate feedback to teachers, the teacher feedback form was for informal walk through, a non-evaluative way for Coley to acknowledge the good work that he was seeing in his teachers classroom, he stated "if I need to leave non-positive feedback about a walk through, I'm not sending that through an email." The teacher appreciation form was created to send positive vibes to the entire staff at Coley's elementary from the students and parents and probably some teachers throughout his school. Both forms then used autocrat to send an automatic receipt. In the teacher feedback example the receipt was sent to the teacher being observed and to Coley himself. He stated that a copy of the receipt was then saved in a google file as well. For the teacher appreciation a copy was sent to the sender and to the teacher. Coley also stated other places that he would use autocrat, Student Discipline, here the feedback would be sent to teacher, the administrator, parent if needed, and then the counselor. All of these can be easily plugged into the program beforehand and will auto generate based on the questions asked in the survey. I am totally stealing these from him and creating my own versions for my school. Here's a mock up example I have created for walk through observations.

These are just a few examples of the amazing places that forms could be used. At my school we have used forms for Student of the Month but it fell flat because finding the google doc, copying the information was not that exciting or easy to do. However, with the addition of autocrat we could easily create a "receipt" or award/certificate for the students that states exactly what was announced about their student of the month nomination.  Plus it will auto-send the information right to my counselors and anyone who wants it. Here is one that I made for my counselors for the student of the month.

Good luck creating your own awesome forms and check out Brent Coley's website for some other amazing form ideas!