This year, as part of my professional development I'm looking into assessment in art education as a research project. I've been modifying various approaches to self assessment over the past year, but have been struggling to find a method that I'm truly happy with- one that recognizes the growth of the individual student by their own progress and clearly demonstrates their learning.

I've been having students turn in written reflections for a while, but Kate (see this post about the project) suggested that we have the students create podcasts about their towers. I was blown away by how much more thought and detail the students were willing to put in the podcast than they had done in the past on paper.

For their assessment, students explained their sources for inspiration for the project and how it their creations were representations and reflections of themselves. They also talked about their aesthetic an creative choices in creating their work. Here are just a few samples:

Just before the winter holidays, our Foundations Art students completed their (not ordinary, but extraordinary) two and three point perspective towers. My (not ordinary, but extraordinary) new colleague Kate Wentworth and I collaborated on developing this idea from Ken Veith's fantastic book... (wait for it) From Ordinary to Extraordinary. This book was given to me, by the way, by the (you get it- not ordinary, but extraordinary) Kendra Farrell at ISB Beijing.

Veith's lesson involves having students design 3 Pt. Perspective museums. Our elaboration of his idea focused on the students creating buildings that were secret puzzles about themselves. After designing their structures, the students had to incorporate something about themselves into the towers using three of the following elements:

• A Meaningful Object
• An Animal
• A Pattern
• Text
• An Image of Themselves
• An Architectural Style

I'm really digging Pearltrees, a great way to visualize internet resources in hierarchical organization. You can start with a main idea and then split off into branches of deeper categorization. You can even collaborate with others- this would be a great activity for students who are researching an idea to share resources and then visualize how the ideas they are investigating are related. I've been experimenting with this site through creating a Pearl Tree for IB Film. If you're teaching an IB Film class as well, feel free to help grow the tree!

Working on the F L O A T project?*

Scene: A student is explaining the inspiration of her artwork during a class critique.

Student: The idea of the horse comes from 'Catcher in the Rye'. Falling off of a horse is a symbol of a transition from childhood to adultsense.

Me: Adolescence?

Student: Yeah.

Me: I'm not sure, but my guess is that those are pretty different things.

I'm really digging some of the entries on Film Salon- while some of them are simply entertaining and fun to read- some are also excellent examples of scene analysis. This makes for some excellent resource material for film teachers- especially IB Film teachers who are working on building skills toward the scene analysis assessment. In these examples, author Matt Zoller Seitz rates his top ten scenes for 2010, and includes subtitles that explain what is going on cinematically as you watch the scene.

I haven't seen Let Me In, the American adaptation of the Sweedish Vampire film Let the Right One In (which is an interesting film and certainly worth a rental). However, Seitz includes this excellent analysis for one scene which explains why he thinks its the best scene of 2010:




His second favorite scene is from Toy Story 3, and I have to agree. It is a pretty powerful scene and I'm not above admitting that I shed a few tears at this pixar film (and apparently I'm not the only one). In this clip - he explains what makes the climactic scene so powerful (but beware, this contains spoilers).



Each of his top ten films receive their own post, you can read about them and see the clips here.

1. Let Me In
2. Toy Story 3
3. Winter's Bone
4. Dogtooth
5. The Social Network
6. Ne Change Rien
7. Shutter Island
8. Somewhere
9. The Ghost Writer
10. Solitary Man