Read and React Week 12

Chapter 6:  Learning to Engage and Persist
Students are reminded by teachers to stay engaged usually by verbal ques.  These may be obvious at times, however they can be subtle hints to the students.  Student may loose their focus and begin working in the wrong direction or in no direction at times.  It is difficult to keep every student on task at all times.  Students may need the external stimuli to keep on track such at verbal ques or music. 

Chapter 7:  Learning to Envision
Envisioning the end result is not always a simple task for our students.  Some students have a difficult time working from their imagination with no resources.  To encourage student to Envision the text suggest a variety of things, prompt the student to think o the many ways to use a line in their artwork, along with color, shape and form.  The lesson the text discusses will allow the student to use their imagination when developing this world for the creature to live in. 

Twyla Tharp
Tharp discusses the term "scratching" throughout her text.  This is a process an artist can go through to help the ideas develop.  There are a variety of ways a person can do this.  Looking at work by a master artist, looking to nature for inspiration, research through books, images, the web, use others work to influence yours, change their ideas a bit to turn them into your own.   Tharp believes all these processes will help an artist work.  She also discusses how an individual should generate, retain, inspect and transform an idea.  This process is used by many, however some steps are more difficult than others.

React:
As I was reading the "Learning to engage and persist" chapter, I had many students pop into my head.  Some of them are internally motivated, however there are the ones who I'm am continually encouraging to keep working.  I just had a student on Thursday afternoon say, "Mrs. Linneman can I start over?"....my answer 99% of the time no.  I feel that they need to continue working  and work through the problems then encounter.  He had 15 reasons why he should get do start over, however after we sat down, worked through the problem, he did change his mind (maybe not to willingly though).  I feel that self-confidence also fits into this chapter.  I have many students who are scared off persisting because they don't want to mess up or they really don't think they can do it.  This chapter really made me think about the different tactics I can use and will try to in the future.