April - 2016

Paul Carney Arts Blog

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Ours is such a vast discipline with many superb, brilliant, innovative and exciting ways to teach the subject. All ideas are welcome here, I do not believe there is a right and wrong way to teach art, simply ways that have been shown over time to work more effectively than others. What is important is teaching a love of the subject that lasts a lifetime. These are my thoughts, opinions and ideas on teaching art, craft and design. If you'd like to leave a comment please do so. I like to debate my teaching methods when possible but I won't enter into abusive, aggressive or hostile arguments.

Wire Flower

Wire Flower

These beautiful wire flowers are ideal for older pupils to make using modelling wire. The same technique can be used for other designs too so encourage pupils to get creative and make different flowers and shapes, even tea cups and spoons. This post is featured on the TTS group blog page and can be viewed here at their own website: http://blog.tts-group.co.uk/2016/02/09/how-to-make-a-wire-flower-in-5-simple-steps/

Planning more meaningful art projects

Planning more meaningful art projects

I often see websites and facebook resources of artists grouped by style or theme with little or no underlying explanation of the meaning behind the work. It’s so shallow and fickle and it robs the student of the true value of the learning. The student may use these high quality sources in their own research and it could be argued that they are learning visually. This may be true but wouldnt it be far more effective if the pupils were taught the deeper understanding as well as

Idea Mining

Idea Mining

Ideas are often very difficult to find. You often end up staring frustrated at a blank piece of paper, wondering where on earth the inspiration will come from. So try Idea Mining the next time you’re stuck. This exercise involves applying the objective or purpose of the idea to different thinking strands, thereby simplifying it or increasing its complexity. I’ve compared these different thinking strands to layers of rock that you have to drill down to, to access. The deeper y

Negative impact of assessment

Negative impact of assessment

Assessment does as much harm as it does good. Overtime you labour over those purple pen comments or tedious rubric boxes that you have slavishly produced, please bear in mind that from the pupil’s perspective you have as much chance of damaging their learning as you do enhancing it. Creativity is such a soul bearing, anxious process that you have every chance of damaging their will to keep wanting to create. Pupils assess themselves more than you ever will. They put themselve

Ten tips for improving the quality of your Art & Design teaching

It’s very easy to get lost in the frantic world of teaching. You get caught up in the day to day and sometimes you forget what is at the heart of good learning. Here are some suggestions that I feel will help focus your teaching to create more effective students. 1. There isn’t a mysterious set of art skills that define a pupil’s art ability • It’s easy to get caught up in the mistaken idea that pupils come to you with inherant art skills that define their ability in the sub

Developing different approaches to making art

It’s important, when teaching art to understand that there are many different approaches to the making process. More often than not, art teacher lean towards a ‘Teacher-led’ approach, where they plan every stage of the learning out. This is fine in many cases, but creates very dependent pupils over time. By the word approaches I don’t mean techniques, such as painting, drawing or print etc. What I’m describing is the type of activity you create. For example you could just pic

Art Learning Behaviours

In order to teach art you should identify what you feel are the most important learning attributes, behaviours and knowledge that your pupils need to learn or demonstrate. These aren’t just generic learning objectives that mean little to the pupils but should be deep, focussed behaviours that you want them to evidence. They need to be able to demonstrate that they can do these, or that they have understood them, which may be in the form of a conversation or activity they have

Bloom's Art Progression

Bloom's Art Progression

Progression as Learning A while ago I developed this rubric based on Krathwold’s; ‘Blooms Revised Taxonomy 2001’ for developing learning targets in art and design. It was based on a similar thing I’d seen developed at Ohio State University for their Science students. This sets out the development of learning and progression in the subject in increasingly complex and more challenging targets from the Factual Remembering cognition in the top left corner to Metacognitive Creatin

General Intelligence or g and it’s impact on education

General Intelligence or g and it’s impact on education

The pursuit of intelligence in education is extremely important to us as educators. SAT’s GCSE’s, A Levels, Degrees, are all barometers of our pupil’s intelligence and thus, our performance as teachers. How much have our pupil’s progressed under our tutelage, how effective are we as professionals? There is an abundance of information about this on the web, on Twitter etc. and lots of stuff on multiple intelligence, Blooms, learning styles and much much more, all aimed at help

the Art of Questions

This article appeared in NSEAD’s AD Magazine January 2016 When planning and delivering lesson content teachers are continually striving for a balance between ensuring their pupils achieve the intended learning objectives and maintaining their motivation. We can’t place enjoyment above the need to deliver good content, but in we can’t ignore it either, because creativity is dependent on motivation. Now of course many art teachers build creative opportunities into project learn

#Creativity

Knowledge first. Then skills. Then creativity?

Knowledge first. Then skills. Then creativity?

Planning more meaningful art projects

Planning more meaningful art projects

Idea Mining

Idea Mining

Ten tips for improving the quality of your Art & Design teaching

Bloom's Art Progression