Week 2

Yesterday was a work day for all classes. Ceramics 1 continued building their coil pots. Intro to 3D worked on their wire shoe sculptures, and AP Drawing/2D started working on their "thinny" assignment. I love going to Fishers and I wouldn't want my mentorship anywhere else, but since it is far away, I can only go once a week for a full day instead of twice a week for a half day or even more if I had the option. Going in once a week makes it difficult to establish a relationship and sense of trust with the students, so they're more hesitant to come to me for help because I'm basically a stranger. I am finding that when I do approach them first or catch a student with a question before they can go to Ms. O for help that I am able to help them and talk to them and begin to establish that relationship. I'm going to keep being persistent. The only thing I'm concerned about is learning their names. I'm making sure to ask their names each time a I talk to them so they know that's important to me.

During workdays I have found it is very easy to do the work for our students. One student may have a question about how to proceed with a problem in their piece, you'll go to them and begin fidgeting with their piece and next thing you know you've done a considerable amount of the problem solving. I want to make sure I stay away from that. One measure I have taken to avoid doing the work for my students is recreating the problem with my own materials available and then work with the problem on model I've created which then allows me to demonstrate some options to my students and for them to take the information I've given them and apply it to their own piece.

Another thing I've noticed is that phones are very prevalent during workdays, or working on other homework. I think it's important to teach students how to use technology responsibly, not just force them to keep them away during class. So I want them to use their phones and tablets for research of references during projects, but that should really only be during the initial planning stage and when they hit a problem in the production of their piece. I think I will make sure to have phones kept away during project workdays.

Ms. O provided me with all of her curriculum maps and planning so I am going to look into that more in depth so I can begin gathering evidence for curriculum development. I also took a lot of photos of the classrooms to help develop my classroom management/culture expectation. I helped grade the first AP breadth assignments and found it more difficult than I would have expected. Talking with her through her thought process while grading helped a lot though. I learned a lot!

This is a photo of all projects that we graded yesterday!