Why professional development is important for be/coming an educator?
Professional development plays a crucial role in becoming an educator. No matter where an educator is in their career, one must always remain open to the new and innovative ways to teach. Professional development gives us the opportunity to learn new skills that will further the learning of diverse students.
For me as an early educator, I knew that my student teaching would play a huge role in shaping who I would become as a teacher. For this reason, I took every opportunity given to me to enhance my toolbox and develop relationships with other artist and teachers in Colorado.
Professional Development #1:
The first professional development I attended was actually the first day at Eaglecrest High School. My mentor teacher offered the opportunity for me to be apart of the CCSD Visual Arts Professional Development Day where we would have the opportunity to take a class from one of the 4 artist listed below.
Tony Ortega- "Alternative Mark Making Processes"Â
Kim Anderson- "Portals- Entrances & Exits"
Jacque Webster- "Tintypes"Â
Mitch Caster- "An Easier Way to Draw"
Since I was going to be teaching Drawing and Painting classes, I took Mitch Caster's "An Easier Way to Draw". This was an incredible class where I was able to further my knowledge on perspective and how to deconstruct an object into simpler shapes to draw. The biggest take away for me was the way in which Mitch communicated his thought process to us. Sometimes as artist we forget that beginner artist can be intimidated with approaching a blank piece of paper. He taught me to also slow down and I took note on how he explained everything he was doing, while he was doing it (leaving no blank areas of confusion).
Professional Development #2:
My second professional development was when I attended a class hosted by Eaglecrest's technology resource member Jim Curran. This class was a really great opportunity for me to learn how to integrate technology into the art room where we focussed on creating interactive lessons or projects with Google Slides for our classroom. One idea that I thought of doing was to use what he provided as a template to transfer the google drawing slide into an art museum where students could upload their work to the same slide (or historical work) and us it as an online galley walk.
Professional Development #3:
For my third professional development, I decided to take the opportunity to actually teach and instruct 25 staff members on how to integrate art into their classroom. For one of Eaglecrest's staff development days, the art department provided the option for staff members to sign up and take the class "Zentangles". To prepare for this class, I prepped 30 home-made sketchbooks by using matt board (as the covers), binder rings (to hold them together) and fill each sketchbook with graph paper, drawing paper, and watercolor paper. My team members and I also prepped 60+ 5"x5" watercolor squares for the staff members to draw their zentangles on.
When the day came to teach the class, I was honestly very nervous. Having been in front of the classroom for some time by this point, I knew that I was more than capable and comfortable with my instruction...that was until I realized that I was teaching adults and not students. Once I began the lesson, my nerves suddenly went away and I approached the class with confidence. Knowing that that my class would be filled with math and science teachers,I decided to show how to draw a zentangle (meditative doodling that has patterns, or tangles, put together to form a Zen-tangle) on graph paper. I started the drawing by creating a graph with plotted points and from there created a specific and repetitive pattern using the points on the graph to guide me. I explained to them how this could be a great and fun way for students to incorporate art into their work. The sketchbook provided for them served as an additional example of how to integrate art into their classroom. Sketchbooks provide a great hands-on organizational component to their content where they can add worksheets etc (using the binder rings). This is also a great way for kids to feel more connected to their learning.
This experience not only gave me confidence in teaching in front of adults and other teachers, but more importantly taught me the value in advocating for the arts and being a leader in your school.
Professional Development #4:
For my fourth professional development, I decided to go to the Monet Exhibit at the Denver Art Museum. As an art teacher, I find it very important to remember that we are still artist and need to surround ourselves with opportunities to gain knowledge and appreciation of art. Having been to the Musee de L'Orangerie in Pairs, I thought had a pretty good concept on who Monet was and what his work entailed. I was pleasantly surprised on the vast amount of work exhibited starting from when he first began as an artist. This experience humbled me in the fact of remembering that we as artist all have a story and have a starting point to our artist journey. For Monet, his was caricatures... little people that he would draw on paper and for me, I could relate a lot to this. I always found a fascination with depicting the figure in my artwork and its interesting to me how his work transform from figurative, to abstract... just as mine did. This experience not only enhanced and exposed my knowledge of the artist more, but also reminded me how we can use artist work as inspiration in creating our own work which is all very important to teach to our students.
Professional Development #5:
My last professional development occurred when I participated in the CAEA Mid-Winter Conference held at Arapahoe Community College. Here, I had the opportunity to take a class hosted by Christian Dore, a European painter who transforms doodling shapes into masterworks of art. In this class, Christian taught me to take risks and use colors that I never thought about using. He also taught me how to transform shapes that I typically draw into a large, compositionally sound paintings. This method of painting is none that I've ever approached before and I most definitely will be using what he taught me in my future classroom. This was also a humbling experience for me because it took me out of my comfort zone and back into the feeling of the unknown as a student. For me, it helped me not only gain technical skill and approach to painting, but also the feeling of what my students experience on an everyday basis.
To represent my feeling of participating in my developing my educational profession, I decided to use photography as my source of medium by taking a picture of my eyes. I find myself creating works of art with mediums that I am comfortable with such as drawing and painting. For this reason, I decided to explore the medium photography. In this picture, you can see that my eyes are two different colors with the eye on the left showing what's called "Central Heterochromia", in other words, I have two different colors in my iris. Having been self conscious of my eyes ( my brothers have bright blue eyes and would poke fun at me) I took this picture knowing that I honestly didn't know what specific color my eyes were and wanted to know more about them. This experience was not what you would call your typical professional development, but more of self discovery and appreciation. Just as I continue to learn about education and bettering myself as an educator, I also push myself to recognize the beauty in myself where I find difficulty in.