Reflection

​Teaching at Polaris has been a great experience. With Polaris being an expeditionary learning school, there were many differences from your average elementary classroom that took some getting used to. I have worked with elementary school students before but I had to make some adjustments to work with the students in this school. This class has taught me a lot about the important of planning especially when working with multiple teachers. I had 3 teachers in my classroom. We all had to make sure that we had a concise plan about what was going to happen and who was going to do that. We learned this very quickly when the first lesson came along and no one knew who was doing what. From there, we decided to have one teacher lead each class and the other 2 were simply helping that way students understood who was the teacher that day and so that there was so “battle of power.” Objectives proved to be difficult this semester. It took a little while to make them but putting them into action was another story. We had clear objectives in all our lesson plans but when we were actually in the classroom, it seems like those objectives were lost. Students often changed the conversation or did not remember what we were teaching them especially artists. These students are very enthusiastic about art and it was hard to keep in mind those objectives when all they want to do is have fun. This also led us to the issue of time management. The teachers always had a clear idea of how the time would be spent but sometimes students would spend much more time on projects than anticipated and others would work much slower that we thought. This proved a challenged for the teachers figuring out how to keep each student happy and challenged while not giving them more work. Questioning the student’s decisions helped with this issue. We would force students to dig deeper and make more informed decisions and understand why those decisions are being made. Not having an art room was difficult especially during the clean-up process. As teachers, we need to make sure that we have a routine that is understood by the students in order to make that process smoother. Leaving Polaris was difficult because I feel like the students truly valued art. They appreciated our time and the art we had planned for them. As I move into student teaching, I want to make sure that I build those same relationships with my new students. I want students to remember my name and be excited to come to art. I still strongly believe that students don’t care what you know until they know you care. 

Below, I have included the responses that the students gave to use about what they learned this semester. Although many of these responses are not tailored to our objectives, it amazes me how enthusiastic the students are about art and that we could contribute to their love of art.