Week 10: Assessing, Reflecting, Planning

·      Student  Engagement Learning:

o   Describe student willingness to participate in the discussion. Are you witnessing change?

They are always very active and have a great passion to make some narratives. It took us 20min to do VTS this time!

o   What did students notice about the featured artwork?

First they find a guy is sick and lying on the bed. (I have to explain that the there’s something wrong with my camera, so we retake the first few seconds. Actually they noticed the medicine to prove the man is sick.) Also they noticed a woman is holding some leaves. And then they find many objects in the room like bag, sewing machine, flower, photos, painting, cross, candle, towel and hot water.

o   Are you seeing more careful observation and deeper noticing?

Yes. They inferred that the woman maybe pick the leaves outside window, because the pattern of the leaves are the same. And they think maybe the leaves are used to heal the man. They noticed two portraits on the wall, and think they are the man’s mother and dad. They also the little boy is the man and the woman’s son, because their skin color is same. They think deeper about this, then they found the woman and the kid are sad since the dad is sick. They even noticed the content in the painting is about Jesus, so they believed the family is Christian.

o   Are students expressing their observations conditionally as they gain experience looking at art?  (i.e. “It could be…” “It might be…” “It’s possible…”  “I wonder if maybe…”

Yes. Sometimes they will use it maybe, and it looks like.

o   Are students demonstrating more flexible thinking? (i.e. “At first I thought, but now I think…”  “It might be…, but it could also be….”)

Yes. I remember when one kid noticed something on the floor, he said it is something hot. Then he thought for a while, and changed his idea to say it may be soup, because the steam.

o   Describe student interactions during the discussion.  Are they linking their own responses? Are they respectful and democratic as they construct meaning?

Yes, they linked their own responses like first one noticed the woman was holding some leaves, and there’re some leaves outside the window, then he found the leaves were in the same pattern, so he said the woman got the leaves from outside the window.

o   Were you able to vary the questions from time to time without altering the meaning? 

I think I sometimes I changed the question like “what more is going on here?”, ”What is happening?”

o   What do you think students learned from this discussion?

They learned to how to make different items together to make more meaningful narratives.

o   What did you observe that makes you say that?

Once they continued listing some items that seemed separated. I want to them can make more connections, so when they just said they could see leaves, I asked ”What do you think about the leaves? What happened?” It works great, they make a meaningful narrative about this.

·      Reflective Practice:

o   How did the VTS discussion feel and what did you learn by facilitating the 4^th lesson with your students?

I feel they improve a lot. I learn to change the questions to lead a better discussion this time.

o   Are the questions and prescribed teacher behaviors becoming more natural and comfortable?

Yes. I became more confidence and comfortable.

o   Have you tried to reword the questions without changing their intent/meaning?  Did the change impact the discussion in any way?

Yes. Actually, I think it is more useful to ask “What more is going on here?” than “What more we can find?” Because “What more we can find?” let them think more about individual items than make meaningful narratives.

o   Were there any surprises?  Will these impact your practice moving forward?

It took us 20 minutes doing VTS, we really got a lot. When I thought we could finish, they still had lots of things to say.

·      Planning:

o   What do you want to work on as you plan for future VTS lessons? How do you think you can accomplish that?

I think this time I chose a higher level picture for them. (They are in Grade2, but I choose the curriculum for Grade 3) But they still did an impressive job. In the future I will do more research on selecting images and let them improve more