Reflecting on my Back-to-Back Mini Lessons

The most recent mini-lessons I constructed as a part of my unit for my education classes this year were two back-to-back lessons from any place in my unit. (See my blog post about the pre-reading lesson I constructed for this unit as well!) I chose to focus in on what a group critique is and how the classroom environment and morale affects a group critique. The first mini-lesson required my students to participate in a restorative circle to talk about safe ways to critique artwork which helped our group build trust and confidence in each other. The second mini-lesson expected students to use their thoughts from the restorative circle and apply them to critiquing artwork.


Here I have both my lesson plan and the student work that I collected from my peers who participated in these lessons. The lesson plans I created and the student work I collected illustrate Standards 5 and 7 of the Vermont Licensure Portfolio. Standard 5 outlines the importance of student engagement in multi-disciplinary areas that could also be considered global issues. When I was initially designing these lessons I wanted my students to build off of the community from Day 1 while critiquing in Day 2. In this respect, students are using skills in both English (communication) and knowledge of art to make discoveries and give constructive criticism. These are all skills that will serve my students well as they continue to grow in the world. Standard 7 describes that instruction is based off of what students know in terms of their general knowledge and their knowledge of specific content areas. I always want my lessons to be accessible for my students, however this was a special case considering I needed to teach my peers about something they may have never had exposure to. With that being said, I thought it would be a good idea to have my students generate their critiquing guidelines while in the restorative circle so then they would be held to their own standards while actually critiquing the next day.


I learned quite a bit from teaching these two lessons back-to-back. The one thing that I was acutely aware of once I opened the restorative circle on the first day is that I wanted my students to talk about the best and safest ways to critique artwork when I had never explained what a critique was to them. I learned that I made a pretty big assumption about what my students knew without even realizing that I had made an assumption in the first place. That experience taught me that I need to teach mostly every single thing I want my students to be able to perform. I also learned how to adjust my second lesson in order to compensate for what my students needed from the first lesson. I took a few steps back and explained to my students that I should have talked to them about critique before opening the restorative circle, and that now I wanted to review critique guidelines and let them ask any questions about the process. I was entirely ready to field any and all questions about the critique process during those 20 minutes because I wanted to make sure they had the information they needed to critique a piece of art. I hope that these actions continued to foster that sense of community and caring for my students (and peers) that we worked on during the restorative circle.


The exit tickets I had my students complete after the restorative circle on Day 1 were disposition checks. I wanted to ensure that my students were feeling comfortable with the idea of critiquing before we moved on because eventually in the unit (not in these lessons, however) we would be critiquing each other’s art. This lesson and its exit ticket connected to my transferable skill standard (Transferable Skill- Creativity: Identify, manage, and assess new opportunities related to learning goals). I had a difficult time making a clear connection to this standard with my students, so I decided to take Day 2 as an opportunity to root the class in the objectives. I could feel that both myself and my students were already more understanding of where we were headed in the unit. The post-critique questions that I had my students fill out after we had critiqued were the answers to the focusing questions based on the objectives derived from our standards. This connection is one I made sure to make clear to my students which I believe made us all feel better about our learning.


As I revise these lesson plans for my final unit I plan on creating a day before the restorative circle to talk about what critiquing is and practice critiquing together. Then the class could talk about empathetic critique practices in the restorative circle with the fresh knowledge of what a critique is. After the restorative circle on the next day in the unit, students will transition into critiquing their own artwork together. This to me seems like a much more logical path of critiquing to follow with students who may have never critiqued something before.


I feel like my lessons were designed well with accommodations in mind. I created agenda sheets for my students to have physically so I could avoid technology during the restorative circle day, I created vocab sheets for my students to have during the critique on the second day so my students would have new information at their disposal. I also redesigned my plan for Day 2 with the understanding that I could improve upon how I taught during Day 1.


The backwards-design of creating a unit and the specific instruction I received for building visual literacy skills both greatly helped inform me while I was creating this unit. I wanted to get my students to a place where they knew the types of questions to ask about a piece of art. I first looked at the standards I had at my disposal, decided which of those were pertinent to my students critiquing art, and moved forward in deciding how to best create an assessment that would measure their learning. After I created that assessment, I wanted to embed visual literacy strategies for my students to understand and apply to their assessment.


I feel like a theme running through my blog posts is that I am so over-the-moon excited to finally start teaching real students in a real classroom, and these lessons entirely affirmed that for me. I truly believe I have a passion for teaching and I am a pretty big literature and art nerd. I want to share all of that with my students and show them that learning something new can be fun and challenging. I think that after having taught these lessons I need to be careful that that excitement and desire to connect with my students doesn’t overpower the need to connect their learning to standards. Something that I will need to continue to work on while I am student teaching is finding a balance between those two ideas.