Subject/Course:

Grade Level:Art 7/8

Project Idea: Introductory Project

Major Products: Vocabulary Pre/Post sheet, Applied/Fine Art identification activity and one artwork at week’s end.

Driving Question: Can you understand various types of art from different cultures and historical time periods, given coherent examples and background information as well as basic terminology, even if you have never read about or studied them? 

Content: Chapter objectives utilized with review and test. (Mittler and Ragans Introducing Art 2007).

21st Century Skills: See lesson plan.

Entry Event: Vocabulary activity with word-web.

Public Audience: Students (?)

John,

Excellent identified standards and 21st century skills! Very good targets for your students. You definitely thought about this from a backwards design perspective

I do have a concern about the overall purpose and intent of the project. Right now you identify that most of the material is taught before the project begins. Right now you project looks more like a performance assessment of past learning. PBL is intended to drive NEW learning to create a need to learn the content. In this case, the Project would need to create the need to learn the vocabulary, art content etc that you want students to learn. Then the lessons you have developed would be taught the project to address the needs of the students as they work on it.

Also, there needs to be some work on creating a more authentic need for learning the content. What authentic reason and audience could there be to learn the content? What service could they provide? Once you figure this out, your products that you have students create will become more authentic and your driving question will become more relevant and engaging.

I encourage you to look at BIE’s library of project related to art. Also, please visit the DIY tutorial on the front page to review some of this ideas I have mentioned. I look forward to seeing a new idea from you soon.

Mr. Miller,

Thank you for your coments on my lesson plan.  I have been seriously thinking about one’s reasonsfor using the PBL template/model in the classroom.  I have spoken with many Art teachers in my county and they often comment on the fact that they don’t really rely on the text-book.  Well, they really don’t utilize PBL either, so I’m skeptical about how I approach this entire mapping phase.  I distrust the notion of abandoning the text-book as a teacher because we have state standards (which are essentially the same as the national standards) and then we also have chapter objectives already mapped for us in the text-books that I intend to use.  The Art class-room is project-based by default, though I understand the conceptual basis upon which this model is implemented for core curriculum and even some art classes.  At this point, I am most concerned about what the best model will be for the students.  In some of my plans I feel as though I have tried to cover too much material and I think that if I want to keep this model, my chapter studies will last two weeks instead of one.  I have kept in mind the possibility of revision, as even our mentors and administrators at the state level often encourage us that nothing is written in stone and that we should feel free to adapt new strategies and to try ideas that work best for the given situation.  I think what I will end up doing is creating three versions of each plan and get additional opinions from our state curriculum consultants. 

Thank you again for your comments.  Your comments helped me realize I never thought of justifying a power standard with a reason.

-John Timothy Robinson
-Mason County Schools, Mason County, WV