The room code of an art teacher

I have a room code.  I've had a room code since I started my final student teaching internship and I've kept it everywhere I've gone.  Even during the two times when I shared my room, I kept to my code, and let those around me know about it. The code: To never horde supplies in amounts where my room is nothing but piles.

During my my last internship, I was placed at a high school for one semester and the teacher had two large connected classrooms giving him about 2,000 square feet easy.  It was difficult to adjust to the room, because it was poorly laid out.  There were unorganized supplies in random closets, brand new supplies mixed with old, rarely if ever used supplies, there were speed bumps that interrupted traffic flow, and the storage of student work was often difficult.  I would often go in for several hours on the weekend to finish grading and to just sit and imagine how I would change the room to make it more efficient and conducive to making art.  This process of focusing on foot traffic, grouping supplies, and re-imagining storage gave me the skills I needed to be a successful art teacher.  I believe that the reason I've been successful has been because I have worked hard to lay a solid foundation with my room space.  Having a room space that is well-grounded has helped me eliminate problems with transitions, material distribution, clean up, and student interaction.  My room space is the first step I take when I come up with routines such as clean up or lining up too.  Your room dictates the type of environment and energy your students will be making art in as well as how your routines will flow.

Panoramic view of my new room mostly setup.

Now, I am a firm believer in leaving a place in better shape than when you arrived.  As a great student teacher, I reorganized my host teacher's kiln room, throwing center, and organized glazes and slips by firing cones.  I haven't been back to my host teacher's room since I left after graduation so I'm not sure if what I did was maintained, but I like to think it was.  If anything, the experience in working with a difficult space helped give me develop the skills I so highly value and incorporate in my teaching life regularly.

Sharing a room can also add to the difficulty of maximizing the space.  The teacher or teachers you're sharing a room with all have a different teaching styles, different needs, and different supplies.  My first teaching job was a .6 position just outside Detroit and I shared my room with the Mandarin teacher.  She was a very nice woman, but the urban teaching environment was very difficult for her to manage and there were a lot of cultural misunderstandings too.  Because she taught two classes in the morning, I taught three classes in the afternoon all of which were back to back, allowing us 5 minutes to change the room from a Mandarin classroom to an art room, we had a lot of problems.  The second year I was teaching at this school I was given a room to myself, which allowed me to make it an art room and focus on the space I needed for efficient flow and creating a good work environment. My teaching subsequently improved because I wasn't fighting my layout.

My second teaching location was in a K-4 elementary art room just outside of Grand Rapids.  At this
school I was a .3 art teacher and shared the room with two other art teachers.  It was nice to have an actual art room this time, but there were some difficulties in managing the space.  After my day and a half of teaching was complete for the week, I had to tear down my expectations, artwork examples, and make sure my students had left supplies in the order they were found.  It was a lot of extra work to put up and tear down your room in a matter of 48 hours.  I really streamlined what I needed the students to see. One of the teachers I worked with was very organized and particular about how clean the room was and the other was much more messy and cumbersome with supplies.  There were days I came to work only to find a mess left in the sink or all over the counter with the drying rack full which only added to my morning workload of preparation.  Needless to say I survived, even when the construction paper package was partially opened (a huge pet peeve of mine), I survived and established my own routines with what I was given with my room layout.  Teachers are great at making do with what they have.

Now I'm still in the same district but I moved buildings.  I'm now a .7 art teacher in another K-4 elementary school and have my entire classroom to myself.  It's a gorgeous room, with some large, gallery style track lighting on one wall, a large kiln room with ample cabinet storage, a paper storage room, and lots of cabinets.  I do wish there was more flat storage built in but overall that is just a small problem that can eventually be fixed.

Random things found in the storage room.

If you have ever had to move to a new building or even a new classroom within your building, its a lot of work.  Its even more work when you have one week to do it and the room you're inheriting is from your messy and cumbersome peer who spent 30 years in that room.  I should have taken more pictures of the room before I started making changes and cleaning, but there was that gut reaction of panic to start right away and not miss a moment as school was starting seven days from when I got the keys to my room. But to paint the picture of how much stuff was in this room, the retired art teacher took between one and three pickup truck loads of stuff to her house daily the whole month of June,  two to four loads of trash to the dumpster each day, and even had to rent a 10' x 20' storage unit for the stuff that didn't fit in her house. I even helped one day in June and took a few books of her hands and there was still so much stuff.

I'm still organizing and labeling things.  Sometimes I catch myself grouping like items in one cabinet only to finish and then decide they need to be moved over one cabinet more.  My room and I are still trying to figure one another out.  My computer and teacher zone are a constant mess because of the way the technology requires my desk and I am still mulling over my student table arrangement decision.  The more time I spend in my room, the more I am able to pinpoint what I need to fix.  Which, when you've been in your classroom for 10 hours and every counter space is filled with paper and miscellaneous supplies, that overwhelming feeling creeps up on you and you can't focus beyond the need to get the basics taken care of.

The supply closets & Ben sorting paper.

For me, the basics were to organize my dry goods (what I call my paper storage and dry art materials like crayons and colored pencils), go through my paint and organize it, establish a free choice/time area, create easy artwork storage, and an area to turn in artwork.  I'll admit, there were times I came home in those seven days and cried.  I cried because of the amount of cleaning and organizing I had to do and I cried because I was missing my old building with my teaching peers.  My mom and step-dad came up one day and helped me setup my tables, bulletin boards, posters, and even organized supplies. I had a fellow art teacher friend from college stop by and take a few things off my hands.  It was amazing some of the things we found in there.  As you can see by some of the pictures, it was an interesting endeavor. Ben spent several nights with me sorting paper and grouping like items.  He wasn't keen on doing such tedious tasks as sorting paper by color, shape, and size, but he did it for me anyway.  Ben thinks I'm a bit neurotic about those things and that they really don't matter, but for me I need to have it done to think clearly. It was good quality time together talking and listening to jazz as we sipped smoothies.

Overall, I've made it through twelve weeks of classes with everything rolling pretty smoothly.  My room still has some areas that ail me but I keep looking for solutions.  What I'm happy to announce is that I'm still keeping to my code even in my new, larger room, with vintage goodies.  Layout is important and something I'm always questioning and reflecting on.  I hope you enjoy some of my before and after photos of my room.

Happy dabbling.

Catch Up Day

I have been very preoccupied the last few months.  My last post was ages ago and did not involve much of about art education as I glossed over a quick visit to Detroit and family raku firing in the backyard.  So many things changed this summer that I have just now started to swim instead of tread water.

This weekend was my first weekend off in a very, very long time and I have truly been playing catch up.  Since July, I have done required wedding planning with my mom (apparently she doesn't find my procrastination productive), thrown together a last minute bachelorette party (long story), attended various family gatherings including a meeting of 'The Parents' and a grandmother's 85th birthday, taught a two week ceramic course to middle school students in the middle of a Michigan Forest, bottle fed and raised two abandoned kittens, moved to a different building in my district, cleaned out and prepared my room seven days before school started, did some major house projects, created and presented two professional development sessions at the state art teacher conference, and then spent some time in Texas getting my good friend married.

Now, this was just the big stuff that happened.  I have completely by passed all the little things that absorbed my weeknights till the wee hours of the morning. You're probably reading this and thinking, "Sounds like a normal Tuesday" but for me, its been a few years, really college since I have had this many working hours and on the least amount of sleep possible.  The nice thing about being this busy is that I appreciate my partner and life even more than before and it gets my creative juices flowing.  I have finally had the burst of creative thought I needed to start writing and illustrating my children's book.

So since today is my first day off in about three and a half months, I'm using it as my 'Catch Up Day', which is a technique that I use with my students in my classroom. I think scheduling a catch up day is an important skill to teach children.  Taking the time to reflect and realize you need some time to focus on projects or tasks that are unfinished I think makes them more independent.  I share stories with my students about how I schedule a 'Catch Up Day' for my own artwork and sometimes even life in general. It's good for them to see that going back to a project that isn't finished isn't going backward, it's revisiting those skills we learned and reaffirm our ability to use them.  Plus, lots of students need to develop some grit and the ability to stick with something even if they aren't good at or like it. The students are always enthusiastic about a 'Catch Up Day' because they think I say 'Ketchup'.  I am thinking about making a cute ketchup bottle that says 'Catch Up Day' like I'm sure you've seen on Pinterest.

One of the most challenging things I've found teaching elementary art is managing those students
who do not complete their work on the day that I plan for them.  When you teach over four hundred students, managing the coursework can be difficult.  How do you organize student's work between four sections of one grade level? What happens when one student works consistently slower than the rest of the class because of a learning challenge, extreme focus, or absences?  This is probably the biggest problem I struggled with last year, my first year teaching elementary art. So since moving to a new building and having my room to myself, once again, I made it one of my top priorities to be more diligent with keeping students up to date on projects.

I think I'm a pretty organized person, and teacher overall, however we all have our shortcomings and this was one of mine.  I created several methods of helping the students manage their own artwork and for me to have small check points to ensure they are completing their assignments.

Like when I taught middle school, I created a Turn-In Center for my elementary students.  This is where I have students turn in work and fill out self assessment sheets.  I have two plastic Steralite drawer containers that can hold 18" x 24" paper.  One of the drawers is labeled 'All Done' and the second drawer is labeled 'In Progress'.  At the end of the class period when artwork was to be completed, students place their completed projects in the 'All Done' drawer and those that did not finish put their work in the 'In Progress' drawer.  At the end of the day, I go through and sort out the classes, a little more work than some would be willing to do, but it helps me take note of who is finishing their work and who is not. I place the completed work into a class folder. The class folder holds a manila folder for each student.  We use the manila folder as a portfolio for each student's finished work.  At different times throughout the year, I'll have students pass work back with the portfolios and we put all completed work inside there. This keeps me organized for when the annual art show comes along and students have to pick out artwork and write an artist statement with parent volunteers.

Middle School Turn-in-Center bulletin board.

When we are working on projects that take two or three days and are 2-D, I store the work in construction paper folders that correspond to the table colors for quick work of passing out artwork.  I take those pieces that were placed in the 'In-Progress' drawer and review them.  I make note of who didn't finish and why, looking for any correlation from previous assignments.  Then, these works are placed in the class drawer where the table folders and portfolios are stored.  They are kept separate from completed pieces.  When I start to see there is a lot of unfinished work, I schedule a 'Catch Up Day' for the class or classes that needed it.  Those students who are finished with all their assignments are given a small art project that they can take home with them such as origami, making a tetrahedron, or even small weaving assignments.

Middle School Turn in Center table.

The images pictured here are of my current turn in system, as well as the turn in system I used when I taught middle school art.  I think these are both good starting spots for anyone who is challenged by late work and gathering completed assignments.  If anything, I hope it gets you thinking about how you organize your completed projects and handle unfinished ones as well.  Now onward to my own very long list of 'Catch Up Day' projects.

Happy Dabbling.