A.G.A. P.E continued

Step 2: Continue your reflection in your blog under A.G.A.P.E. - Engagement answering the following questions: How am I facilitating student Engagement with learning through relevant, personalized, authentic, challenging and self-directed learning presently? Being an art teacher I use this process a lot with the kids, I would almost say all the time. The projects that we do are all of the above and it is fascinating to watch them create their projects. To what degree do I see myself as capable of fully Engaging learners for deep learning and growth in their own ability to direct and regulate their own learning? We do this everyday. The kids are given guidelines, but they have the choice of how they will make it their own, how they will create and problem solve their work, they collaborate and work together, they reflect and analyse their work. What’s difficult for me when it comes to this aspect of A.G.A.P.E.? I am very support of if this, but tracking data would be hard for this process. When everyone wants to see data about everything in the schools. What’s easy for me when it comes to this aspect of A.G.A.P.E.? This is the process that I learned when I got my bachelor's so it almost feels natural to me. How would I like to grow when is comes to Engagement this semester? Continuing to give challenging, interesting projects to my students. This the video we watched and it was really interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

The Cycle of Action Research

At this point I have done by abstract, submitted my questions and now I need to pull my paper fully together. I feel as though I have pieces of my paper in different places and it all needs to come together. I am excited to use visuals to help navigate my paper. I need to set aside a few days to tie it all together. I was hoping I would have it done by now, but this year has been very busy for me. My next goal will be to have my paper fully written or at least a rough draft by mid March.

Action Research Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset

Share of a time you faced your action research with a fixed mindset. In the beginning I had thought what am I going to do with this iPad in an art classroom. There are so many projects we do that our hands on. I was very quick to think that the iPad in the classroom may not be successful for a specialist. It took trying some new things that I was not sure about how to use or how it would go over before I started to see that the iPad was not as scary as I thought. It did take some failure and picking myself back up before I started to feel comfortable. There is also that uncomfortable feeling of the kids know more about these iPads and apps than I do! Share of a time you faced your action research with a growth mindset. When was there a setback that you saw as another opportunity for learning and growth? Once I got over the obstacles that I shared above my mindset started to change and I felt like the opportunities to use it were endless. It has completely changed my mind about the iPad. Now some days I feel like how could I live without this device. I keep finding more and more ways to use the iPad. My latest revelation was in a floral design class I was coteaching and I thought this would be so much easier to show what I am doing in making this arrangement to 26 kids if I had used the iPad to record and Apple Mirror to show everything I was doing on the SMART Board. Wow, now I am innovating and implementing all the time!

Storytelling

Our assignment was to do storytelling in the classroom. This is my story... I played claytionary (sculpting with clay from words drawn out of a bowl) with my kids as a review. The team with the most combined sculpting and question review scores as groups would be the winning group to get a treat. So I had to keep it competitive so that they would try to be the top winner. In the end I told them a story of the first time we did this game type of learning that the winning team was given a choice of having a full cupcake or sharing half of it and then the whole class would get a treat. I was astounded when the group took the full cupcake. How could have I have thought they would have shared! So, from now on I always bring enough treats for everyone, because you never know if they are going to share or not. I suppose my prop was that I was holding a box of cookies, sure kept their attention. I guess the lesson learned here is to not assume things and to always be prepared!