How Do I Get Good Quality Student Work?
The quality of student work is something all art teachers think about. It is visual art, after all. We know that we are judged by the quality of student’s work by other adults, many of whom are impressed by realism.
Example:
A teacher walking down the hallway sees a group of portraits, gestures to the really realistic one, and exclaims “Oh my GOSH that’s so good, it looks just like a PHOTO!!”
We, as art teachers, know and appreciate many artistic styles, but that external preference for realism is real and counter to student aesthetics. I don’t know about you, but my students value art that connects to who they are and what they think, involving everything from inside jokes to personal interests. What my students choose to hang up on the display areas in our classroom is often very different from what I would select and decidedly less formal.
The art I gravitate to is made with originality, personal voice, effort, and skill. This is the type of student work I pick to enter in shows and choose for displays when I’m not able to hang up work from a whole class. I call this type of work “Formal Artwork” when I teach my students about it. However, it’s just one of the types of work available for studio time in my class because I see the product of good art teaching as quite a bit more expansive.
Good teaching, for me, looks like making lots of room for students’ aesthetics, including the silly, sometimes quickly made, and often incomprehensible-to-my-adult-mind art that they love. It also includes teaching skills and techniques, then students applying that learning in work that they make meaningful decisions about. There has to be lots of space to learn through experimenting with familiar materials in new ways, to bring personal knowledge into the classroom, to work in personal styles, and to learn new things on an individual basis.
This is a lot, this vision in my head of good teaching, and to accomplish it I have to be really clear with students about the possibilities for learning in the studio. I’ve created five categories of work in the studio, which students can choose from after they have learned about each one.
Teaching each of these five categories helps keep all of us on the same page about what is possible and gives us a shared language to talk about learning. When a student asks me for a linocut block, for example, I ask them about the process of lino cutting. If they haven’t learned or need a refresher, I direct them to content I’ve prepared that they can use to learn about that material, then make a formal project with time, care, and planning (formal projects are a must for me when using expensive materials like lino blocks).
Alternatively, if a student wants to spend class time sketching, we discuss what category their work falls in. Is it experimenting? What is the goal? Or maybe it’s part of developing a personal style and I can provide support there. Shared understanding and shared language help me partner with students to support their learning and challenge them, once a positive relationship is in place.
Good learning presents itself in many different ways and the vast majority happens through the creative process. It can look messy, non-linear, and might not align with adult aesthetics. My answer for how you get good quality student work is twofold: define and communicate to students about what you want and think about how you define “good” in terms of learning as well as product. This is something I think about often as I assess what’s going on in my classroom while students create.