Starting Points - Baseline Test

As an experienced art teacher, you know all too well that the class aren’t all beginning from the same starting point. Pupils enter Secondary High education with a very wide ability range depending on how much art is studied in the feeder Primary Elementary school. Now, you can’t teach anyone anything unless you have a good understanding of what they already know and can do in relation to what it is you’re trying to teach them. So the first thing you do when they begin their new school is to do a baseline test - to identify your pupil's unique starting points.

Nearly always this is a drawing activity or in some schools it is the result of a first project done over time. Pressure to get baseline results into the school's database usually means School Leaders want these grades within the first few weeks of term. So the pressure is on you to accurately measure all your new intakes ability in a short space of time. And the problem with relying purely on the result of an observational drawing is that this method is flawed. You simply cannot tell everything about potential Exam GCSE performance from drawing skills alone. There are other critical factors such as literacy level and imagination skills that need assessing. My baseline test aims to address all of these areas and can be done in one lesson! What you should end up with is a very clear indication of a pupil's all-round ability in art very quickly.

Download it for free here

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The journey - Project planning

In core subjects the curriculum is pre-written; they don’t have to design the content, it’s all mapped out for them. But in art the curriculum is a blank canvas and in every school around the country, art teachers are left to devise their own curriculum. Mostly though, there are universal themes we come to time and time again; portraits, still life, landscape etc. and even the artists studied are surprisingly common; Surrealism, Cubism, Pop Art etc. Now there's nothing wrong with learning about these artists but ideally, you want  your pupils to have developed a personal understanding of art. The problem is; when you choose the artist links for projects all the time, the pupils aren't able to take ownership of the type of art that interests them. And even when you have planned for a project to incorporate a specific skill, you are in actual fact limiting the success of the project to only those who can master this skill. What you should be doing is showing pupils that there are many ways to represent things and that they should develop their own way of working.

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So the real skill of project planning is; 'How can I teach pupils to independently investigate art, to take ownership of what they want to do, learn how to develop complex ideas and develop skills in areas that interest them?' This is VERY different from planning a project where the artists have been pre-selected and every learning stage is mapped out with an explicit outcome. Again, I cover how to do this in great detail in my Art Teacher's Handbook.

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Art skills are important of course and sometimes this does mean teaching them through direct instruction, but there is no expectation for any student to have a set of art skills based on drawing ability or in fact anything resembling traditional art skills. Contemporary art shows us that art can be an idea, it can be music, performance, film, text, found objects and even thin air! It may seem like the emperors new clothes, but what this approach shows us is that art can be inclusive for all.

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If you're looking for examples of this style of project planning, I suggest you look at my Media Art project and my Expressive Painting project.

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Measuring Progress - Assessment

There has been a move toward an assessment system I actually used myself for many years, even when we had levels. It seemed to me to be much more effective to keep assessment light and simple so I used to use a High, Middle and Low banding system. This is now the informal UK National system and was recommended by National Association Head Teachers. It comprises of the grades: Working Towards, Achieving and Exceeding the targets set. It omits to hidden levels of attainment however. These are SEN and G&T students who will either not be able to meet the class targets or easily exceed them. I've written a lot about this in my Art Teacher's Handbook.

Many schools have adopted the GCSE Exam  1-9 grading system in KS3 Junior High, where pupils begin at a low score then move up through the grades as they progress. I'm not a fan of this system since there is NO guarantee that any achievement in this early phase counts to the eventual GCSE Exam result. It is also too similar to the dreaded Levels system we have just gotten rid of!

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Assessment should be a positive experience that helps me improve and want to try again.