maria pairitz's
community of teachers portfolio
xiv. professional growth
evidence
Professional growth, to me, is actively practicing lifelong learning. I believe it helps sustain a lively enthusiasm for teaching my subject matter and helps me develop new ways to relay that enthusiasm to my students. As I am advancing in my studies of visual arts education, I am finding that resources outside my courses help enrich my learning and draw deeper connections with my subject matter. The evidence I have compiled below demonstrates my commitment to ongoing professional growth and my search for new and effective ways of teaching visual arts.
What seeking out these opportunities for professional development has taught me is that becoming a good teacher is a creative process that requires motivation and dedication. It would be easy to become complacent and stagnant in my teaching, but going to workshops and seminars helps renew the passion I have for teaching visual arts. This not only benefits myself, but also serves as a model of lifelong learning for my students.
Networking is also an important aspect of my professional development. I believe the internet and social media to be a powerful tool in my growth as a teacher. Being able to tap into an instant resource of knowledge and collaboration allows me to make strides in my teaching even when I can't attend a statewide or national conference or seminar. I think this is also a great example for students of how social media can be harnessed for personal learning.
Reflective thought is a tenet in my philosophy of education. I believe that reflective thought is key to critical thinking skills that I want to develop in my students. By reflecting on my experiences observing and teaching, I am questioning the choices I and teachers I have observed make to seek out better solutions or alternative strategies to getting across a certain concept to students. Keeping a journal helps my reflective thinking and allows my CoT facilitators to give me feedback so I can learn and grow from how they responded to similar scenarios I may be writing about.
Ongoing professional development will continue to be a cornerstone in my teaching practice. In order to have high expectations for my students, I need to have high expectations for myself. From my experiences, the best professional development is experiential and collaborative, so it will be important for me to seek out opportunities that bring art educators together in person. I will continue to be open and honest in light of new learning experiences, I will not be afraid of change, and I will always be reflective of my teaching and experiences. I believe the evidence I have compiled demonstrates my capacity to incorporate professional development into my teaching practice and places me at ready to teach for this expectation.
Membership with National Art Education Association
Seminars
Membership to Education Honor Societies
These are national education honor societies I have had the privilege of being invited to join. Both provide scholarship opportunities, exclusive resources including publications, events, and networking opportunities, and the prestige of including these memberships in my resumes. These memberships are for life so they will continue to provide me with great resources and professional development opportunities during my teaching.
Pi Lambda Theta is one of the nation’s most prestigious education honor societies. Established in 1910, Pi Lambda Theta serves to recognize outstanding students who intend to pursue careers in education. With more than 185,000 individuals who have been inducted across the nation, membership signifies a commitment to academic excellence and the teaching profession.
Kappa Delta Pi (KDP), International Honor Society in Education, was founded in 1911 to foster excellence in education and promote fellowship among those dedicated to teaching. This honor society offers more hands on opportunities than the first because there is an active chapter on campus that meets bi-weekly and holds events. I have been a member since Spring 2016 and participating in this group has given me a sense of community with fellow, outstanding educators. It has taught me that you have to actively participate in a team in order to reap the benefits. I will be an active member of my school community so that myself, other teachers, and our students may reap the benefits of collaboration .
Conventions
Kappa Delta Pi iLead Workshop
November 5th, 2016
8:30 am - 4:00 pm
Kappa Delta Pi Headquarters
Indianapolis
iLead workshops are designed to help members become more effective teacher leaders. During this full-day convention, we learned about transformational leadership for educators, including how to create and implement a vision for teacher leadership. As we learned practical leadership skills, we increased our capacity for making a difference in the lives of our students, our school building, and the education profession overall. THIS LINK is a copy of the manual that we used throughout the day that included articles, activities, and spaces to respond and reflect and THIS LINK is a certificate of my participation. I am really proud of taking the initiative to go to this workshop alone because I know that even a year ago I wouldn't have even considered it. This experience has taught me that getting outside of your comfort zone can only help you grow. Participating in this workshop solidified that I am meant to be a leader. It also affirmed that new teachers can be teacher leaders in their school, it's not just reserved for those with tenure. What I will take away from this experience is that teacher leaders take risk, are lifelong learners, build up teams, and have grit. I will take these traits and apply them in every aspect of my life so I may be practicing and preparing for my role as a future teacher leader and be able to effectively enact them in the classroom.
Personal Learning Networks
A personal learning network is an informal learning network using social media and technology to collect, communicate, and collaborate with colleagues anywhere at any time. Each connected educator becomes a potential source of information.
I have also created a YouTube channel to so I can have my own channel for screencasts and presentations that I can easily give a link to my students. I also use it as a professional development tool through my subscriptions to other channels. These also provide great resources for project ideas, instructional strategies, and collaborative opportunities.
I've created and been using a Pinterest account for gathering art education ideas and resources. On Pinterest, teachers can share different methods or tips they have for students to learn the materials more successfully. There is also a plethora of art project ideas that can be incorporated into my future curriculum.
Twitter is great for educators to discuss what's working in their own classrooms and allows a space to collaborate efficiently. It's comparable to having a professional development seminar available 24/7 on a wide variety of topics.
This was a webinar hosted by NAEA given by Beth Olshansky about her methodologies when it comes to placing art at the heart of literacy. Her approach eliminates the bias against visual learners when it comes to literacy. The processes she demonstrated treated words and pictures as equal languages for learning english and produced dramatic results for students at-risk as well as ESL students.
This webinar hosted by NAEA given by Marilyn Stewart served to enhance teachers' current art lessons by organizing them around meaningful, universal themes. She discussed why thematic lessons based on Boyer's Human Commonalities are more successful and engaging for students.
This was a three part seminar, hosted by the school of education, that helped education students develop cultural competency in the classroom. The first seminar focused on personal identity, the second focused on investigating the world, and the third focused on recognizing perspectives.
This seminar brought in three elementary teachers from public schools in Monroe County who were helping implement proficiency based learning in their respective schools. Proficiency based learning focuses on what is learned rather than when it is learned. There are levels of proficiency that correspond to emphasized standards and students must receive a level 3 out of 4 to move on to the next lesson. This was a unique opportunity since proficiency based learning is not being taught in our courses at IU.
Art Education Association of Indiana Annual Fall Convention
November 12th, 2016
8:00 am - 6:00 pm
Hamilton Southeastern High School
This was a full day workshop for any art educators in Indiana that part of the National Art Education Association. There were several workshops and special events for us to choose from and keynote speaker Sarah Green, creator of the Art Assignment on YouTube! I loved this convention because there were so many resources available to participants and opportunities for collaboration. THIS LINK is a copy of the workshops available during the day (I've highlighted the ones I attended) and THIS LINK is is a PDF of the notes I took on the workshops.
The workshop with ideas I loved and will apply in my own teaching was called "Digital Critiques as Summative Assessments." This 5th and 6th grade art teacher at HSE Intermediate School wanted her students to be able to talk intelligently and confidently about the visual world around them. She developed a summative critique at the end of each art project that her students had to create on their iPads. These critiques could be PowerPoints, iMovies, posters, etc. that they would make to talk about their art following questions in the Visual Thinking Strategies all while following the National Visual Arts Standards. These allowed her students to present their artwork and talk about it confidently in whatever format they chose. She then has them create QR Codes that she prints out and hangs next to their artwork during the annual art show so people can scan the code with their iPhones and listen to the students talk about their artwork while looking at the piece in person. I thought this was just the neatest idea and it totally revolutionizes the way I think about summative assessments. THIS LINK is a PDF of the packet she gave us including rubrics, standards, and examples.
This conference was a great opportunity to learn from art educators practicing in the field from a diverse school settings. Every workshop taught me new methods, instigated new, personal teaching ideas, and served as a space to develop new relationships. This conference is also a great opportunity to receive professional development points for license renewal in the future. I will continue to make time to attend this annual conference when I get a teaching position so I can be rejuvenated by the newest trends in my field.
This was part of our first workshop with District 2. We learned how to do weavings with straws to create little creatures! I could see myself using this project as a filler activity if I don't want to start a new project on a Friday, or have extra time here or there. I loved my little octopus!
This is the keynote speaker Sarah Green! She created the Art Assignment on YouTube and is the wife of one of my favorite authors, John Green. She does a fantastic job linking the internet to current art practices and getting people to make art. I want to use her YouTube videos for one of my class projects or as an extra credit opportunity!
I completed 9 Hours worth of Professional Growth Points. I didn't get a certificate since I don't have a license to renew, but it was good practice (and evidence) for the future anyways!
Personal Reflection
This is my journal for the Community of Teachers that I write in once a week to reflect on my observations at different schools and my mentorship. This helps me reflect and analyze my experiences in the classroom and explore what ideas or methods I would use in my own classroom or how I would modify them. I find this to be incredibly helpful in developing my own teaching style. I will keep a journal during my own teaching so I can reflect on the day and seek opportunities to tweak my practice.
Subscription to Studies in Art Education
In addition to my membership with the National Art Education Association, I subscribed a journal, Studies in Art Education. It is a quarterly publication that includes explorations of theory and practice in art education. These journals help me brainstorm new lessons or ways of presenting material so that I can make my class more engaging and effective. I plan to keep my subscription so I can stay up to date with current practices in my field.
PLC Goals
At the beginning of the year, the art department PLC got together to set goals for the semester, personal and departmental. Some of my personal goals for my classes were to encourage exploration of multiple ideas before locking into the final design of a project and to incorporate reflection practices throughout the project, not just at the very end. Ways I have worked towards those initial goals include having a lesson on thumbnail sketches before our first project. I made sure to get across the idea that thumbnail sketches should be used to explore multiple ideas quickly and that your first idea may not be your best idea. I taught them how to take elements of their first sketch and turn it into a new design by flipping it upside down, or vertical, taking one piece and exploring it with a new base, etc. I did this through personal examples of thumbnail sketches.
To encourage reflection throughout their projects, I created Process Logs, which are basically little check ins every other to every three days of work time. When I ask students to do a process log for that day, students take a picture of their work in progress and then a short reflection of what stage they're at, what they are finding challenging, what they feel proud of, how their ideas have changed from their sketches, etc. These have been very successful. Below are a few examples.
I created an art teacher Instagram account to showcase my students' artwork and to learn from other professionals in the field. I recently had a really affirming moment where I posted my students' work from our first project( (Spirit Pod Sculptures) and two teachers from across the US asked for more information on my project. I was able to get their emails and share the resources I collected and developed for this project. They both plan to use my project with their students next semester! I think this exciting not only because I am getting recognition for my hard work, but also because these teachers will inevitably take what I have given them and modify and adapt it to their own teaching styles, goals, and students and I look forward to seeing what they would do differently.
Journal Excerpts
After the students left early we had our PD day. think it is great that they took time out of the school day for teachers to have a PD day because I think asking teachers to come an hour early or stay an hour late isn't has accommodating tho their hectic schedules as it is to just make time for it during their work hours. I also like that this is a school wide initiative. I don't know if other schools do this, I know my old high school had staff meetings once a month early in the morning, but not a lot of people went, and it was mostly to just discuss problems, not to focus in on learning new methods and approaches to teaching. We met as a whole school at first to talk about how the PLCs were doing and then we split off into our PLC's. So the visual arts department and the performing arts department were paired together and within the two departments people split off into learning groups to focus in on specific topics and then joined together today to present their findings to each other. There were groups focused on assessment, differentiation, performance, engagement, and community outreach. I thought all the ideas brought forward were great and we were able to collaborate as a community of the arts and discuss some issues we were facing in our classrooms and problem solve together. THIS LINK goes to all the notes I took during the school day and on each presentation in our PLC. This is a picture of the schedule we got for PD day.
After the presentations, we took time to reflect. What we got out of these presentations is that the arts are definitely ahead of the curve when it comes to differentiation, project based assessments and other progressive steps schools are taking. So the department as a whole wishes they were treated as a resource instead of mules to make center pieces for an event, or putting on a concert, and not given enough time's notice or respect that the art teachers have a curriculum they have to follow too.
For me personally, I found that these PLC's were a great way to research and collaborate on numerous topics without feeling overwhelmed. By delegating certain topics to a few people who do the intense research and then present to their colleagues everyone benefits. I am glad Fishers is taking such an active role in their teacher's professional development.