Choice-Art Educators (CAE) Column: Spring 2023

A Choice-Art Educator’s Evaluation Wish List

Essentially, choice art is the very essence of out-of-the-box teaching and learning, but it is largely evaluated by incongruently marking the domain-named boxes of a walk-through template. Using a common assessment instrument to evaluate an uncommon pedagogy doesn’t have to mean a less-than-stellar evaluation if your administrator is prepared for what they will be observing. To that end, I’ve compiled a wish list of three things I wish for every administrator to know before evaluating a choice-art studio.

First and foremost, please know we will neither look, nor sound, like the art rooms of your youth. When you step in the studio to evaluate, we won’t all be quietly copying a teacher-made example of the same thing. Rather, be prepared to see students moving around the studio with agency and creative autonomy, and who are working at different stages of completion of their process. Be prepared for frenetic sounds of building relationships, honing social skills, and “Hey, show me how you did that” peer-to-peer instruction. Studio learning is vibrant, chatty, and busy, and this can sometimes be misconstrued as chaos. Reframing this perception as less like chaotic, more like electric, is key to appropriately evaluating what’s actually occurring in the studio.

Which brings me to Wish Number 2. We all know the importance of feedback when we are learning. Through our own studies as educators, we’ve learned how to construct quality, timely, and relative feedback for our students. Choice-art educators are most enriched by feedback that is less about students out of their seats or socializing while they work, and more about how we could differentiate for our student with a behavior plan in the context of our pedagogy. For instance, give us feedback that identifies missed opportunities to be culturally responsive in our lesson, or tell us how we did helping our new ELL understand our learning objectives. Too often, our feedback is focused on how students look and sound while they learn, and how we should modify behaviors that we have cultivated and encouraged—which is not useful feedback for us at all. We know it’s a different vibe in here, and we want you to know that, too.

My final wish would be for administrators to know how lucky they are to have a choice-art educator as their colleague. Most of us did not begin this way and have spent years (over a decade now, myself) cultivating a practice that required unlearning and relearning a better way to engage our students. We have pored over the research, joined interest groups, mined our own professional development, and suffered mediocre evaluations on our journeys to be our best educator selves. Possibly the most difficult part of becoming a choice-art educator is the part where we have to learn to let go. We have to let go of what we see as potential and let the child determine the best way to use it. We have to let go of planning every move they make and learn how to follow their lead. We have to let go of product-focused outcomes and allow the process to teach. It’s a long row to hoe, and it can be exhausting.

If you have an art teacher who took the leap of faith necessary to become a choice-art educator, you have a teacher who is not afraid to innovate, make mistakes, and learn from those mistakes. If you have a choice-art educator in your building, your students are exclusively primed to generate original thoughts, make meaningful real-world connections, and demonstrate proof of learning in far better ways than we could ever ask of them. Before you step into the studio to observe, do your best to remember this is not the art class we grew up with. When we know better, we do better. This is the magical “student voice and choice” the education world has told us is the way. Take time to notice what students are doing when they are out of their seats. Listen closer to the chatter in the room to hear what students say to each other, what questions they ask. Most importantly, take pride in your choice-art program; it didn’t come easy, and it’s a gold mine of learning engagement.

Holley Andersen, CAE Co-President-Elect
Fayetteville, Arkansas

Julie Jacobusse and Maggie Leysath, CAE Co-Presidents