Installation Stations! Lesson #3

Installation Stations!

This Saturday, our kids were very surprised with the objects that they found.  Again, we set up the classroom in a U shape that was slightly separated so that there were distinct working groups.  Like last week's lesson, this lesson was difficult to manage because of the materials that we used, but we had some very pleasant surprises.

I think that teaching requires taking risks.  Dana and I took a huge leap of faith this Saturday and placed our "worst" behaved students in the same group.  We had no idea what to expect, but it was an absolute success!  David and Griffin have a lot of common interests, and we found that particularly with this project, that was the key element that made it work.  Because the project was to create found object sculptures based on their own "re" words, they could easily find something that they both enjoyed and worked in a similar fashion.  They were the best behaved working group in the class!

Another interesting approach to working that I discovered was Milo, Sequoia and Martin's group.  They did not have much in common at first, so I suggested to them that they do not have to come up with a "re" word first, but can see how the sculpture evolves.  They found that this approach worked very well for them, and constructed a very successful sculpture with the materials that they found.  I knew that there are different angles at which to solve a problem, but in working with this particular group, it really demonstrated to me that whether its top down or bottom up processing, both are great if students can reach the same goal and discover new things along the way.

Because there were a lot of objects scattered about the room, management became very difficult.  There were more "distractors" in the room that kept the students less focused on the lesson and more fixed on the found objects themselves.  I like that they got to interact with the found objects before they got started on their projects, but one thing that I noticed while Dana was addressing the guiding questions was that as she was passing around examples of found objects, they were paying less attention to her and the questions and more attention to the objects themselves.  One thing that I would have done differently is worked on the flow of the lesson and the transitions.  During awkward moments when the teachers don't know what comes next I found that there is room for management and behavioral issues.  I felt as though Dana and I were working against each other instead of working as a team.  When we plan our lessons, we have teacher actions for both of us, but I think that they need to be more specific and we need to follow through on our designated roles.  Otherwise, one of us is telling the students one thing, when the other teacher is expecting to tell them something completely different.

I want our classroom to be a community in which our students take ownership within that community.  Dana and I agreed that there needed to be more structure to behavior in our classroom.  We started the class with a discussion on classroom expectations.  We didn't want to write our own classroom rules because we thought that if they made them up they would be more likely to follow through with them.  I felt as though that approach wasn't very successful because there weren't any consequences for not obeying their expectations.  One downfall about Saturday School that I've mentioned is that because it is not a "real school" setting, we don't know how to approach discipline.  This is something that I would like to further address during class.