Principle O1: Organized Curriculum Aligned to Sandards
The Hope Principle O1 challenges teachers to offer an organized curriculum aligned to standards and outcomes. From my understanding this means teachers should work to plan units, lessons, activities and assessments that focus on building a bridge between the mandated standards for learning expectations, and clearly stated, grade-level appropriate, student-centered objectives and learning targets. The Lake Washington School District (LWSD) is in the midst of generating its Curriculum and Assessment Framework and proficiency scales for the Visual Arts, and I have been given access to these documents as I start to craft my own unit plans. These standards have provided me with a valuable tool by which to design my curriculum and organize my assessment and instruction strategies.
A few days ago I met with the Assistant Principal and we had a good discussion about strategies for me to use when I need students to provide evidence for the variety of learning targets I set. I have been thinking a lot in particular about how we assess student’s ability to apply the creative process to art making, and how to better incorporate and assess student’s knowledge and application of academic language, art concepts, and self expression.
Power Standard 5
The document shown here is the LWSD Visual Art Proficiency Scales Power Standard 5: Applies a creative process to visual arts (2014). I have been deciphering these documents and I highlighted in green because that is my code for learning targets that I think could be reached in the formative stages of a project, the blue denotes a summative target item. If I align my learning and doing targets for the students with these standards, I should be able to assess using the proficiency scale which will be the basis for how I design the rubric and completion checklists.
In writing the Unit Overview for the Watercolor Silhouette/Stencil Unit, I recognized that I can organize my learning goals around the standards by identifying ways for students to demonstrate their understanding. One idea would be to ask students to provide evidence of process and understanding by listing, answering questions, and experimenting with skills in a sketchbook. I plan to make weekly formal checks for completion in these sketchbooks, and informal looks throughout the week, assessing student’s progression through the process of art-making. As an example, for the learning target: Explores and gathers information from diverse sources to create visual arts (LWSD, 2014), I will ask students to look for drawing reference images using Google Image search on their student laptops, making a log of the ones they will use as a resource for their project. I will assess for completion in a formative assessment check-off, and make summative assessment by asking students to reflect on how they made use of the research phase of the creative process, and what was important about it. In the rubric, students would be graded for successful completion of the research step (approaching standard) and successful analysis of why and how it is an important step in the process of art making (at or exceeds standard).
Reference
LWSD. (2014). Proficiency scales: Visual arts: Power Standard 5. Curriculum and Assessment Framework (January, 2014). Lake Washington School District.
Susanna Jones bPortfolio 