Embedded Files
When I think about what I ultimately want Chapman students to gain from my art program, I continually come back to the concept of students being able to think of the world around them as wet clay. I want students to understand that everything around them is moldable, from the cars they see driving on the road to the world problems they see on the news. I want my students to see that they can use their creative ideas to change things for the better. Creative ideas are what helps our world evolve and students should understand the power that their ideas possess.
Students posing for a picture while "time traveling" to the future.
How has the pandemic made art more important than ever?
My approach to art education in the remote learning setting.
My approach to the way in which I teach is built upon the idea that the art room should look and feel completely different than any other classroom at school. I want students to walk into my room and be able to get lost in imagination for 45 minutes. I combine my passion for costumes, digital media, improvisational acting, and the bold imagination of young learners to create magical environments that inspire creative thinking. I am a believer that there is no such thing as an unmotivated child, there is only unmotivated curriculum! I create curriculum that strives to engage all learners, using strategies borrowed from Design Thinking, Montessori, Reggio, Understanding by Design, and TAB.
Museum Intro.mp4Introduction to our museum project.
Texture Hunt w:out Demo.mp4Introduction for a texture rubbing activity.
Let's Plan A Party.mp4Improv exercise featuring assistant teacher, Patito.
Virtual morning announcements during the pandemic.
How the 9 components fit with my overall goal.
My curriculum is designed with an emphasis on helping students learn how to think like an artist, placing a greater value on creative thinking than technical art skills.
While planning lessons, explaining daily learning goals, or assessing my own teaching, I use a Thinking Like An Artist Rubric (Click to view).
This rubric identifies 9 components of what it means to think like an artist. These 9 components are used as the backbone of my curriculum design and are used to continually assess my pedagogy.
The 9 components of thinking like an artist are:
Reflection and Revision
Persistance through Failure
Tolerance for Ambiguity
Curiosity
Questioning over Answering
Valuing Influence and Collaboration
Play as process
Self-Guided Exploration
- Idea Generation and Imagination
My curriculum's definition of creative thinking is based upon four components of creative thinking, which were identified by American psychologist and researcher, Paul Torrence.
The four components of creativity are:
Fluency - the ability to generate quantities of ideas
Flexibility. - the ability to create different categories of ideas, and to perceive an idea from different points of view
Originality - the ability to generate new, different, and unique ideas
Elaboration - the ability to expand on an idea by embellishing it with details, or the ability to create an intricate plan
Chapman artists in first grade spend the majority of the year focusing on the understanding and practice of these four components. One of the many strategies that is used to help students understand Torrence's components is through an animated team of superheroes, The Creativity Crew.
The creativity crew is composed of Captain Flu (superpower of fluency), Flex (superpower of flexibility), Origin (superpower of originality), and E.O (superpower of elaboration. Throughout each episode, students are shown various ways that the superheroes use the Torrence's four components to solve problems.
Origin's Story.mp4Episode 1
Captain Flu:Fluency Conv.mp4Episode 2
Flex's Story.mp4Episode 3
E0's Story.mp4Episode 4
Final Creativity Crew Episode.mp4Episode 5
Want to see an example of one of my unit plans? Click the button below!
Want to see an example of one of my unit plans? Click the button below!
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