Supporting Independent Learning

I want my students to make art, their art, art that is relevant and meaningful to them. I want them to decide what this looks like. My students want to do this too, but they have questions, because what I'm asking them to do looks so different from any learning experience they have had before. I want to create a space where my students are artists - envisioning, responding to challenges, creating, and reflecting, all in meaningful ways. To do this, I'm realizing, I need structures that support this vision.

I realized that for my students to know what my vision of work in the studio looks like, I needed to be clear about it. I came up with the following list of ways to engage in the studio:

Talking to students about these types of learning and what they look like over the first month of school has started to create a shared understanding of what studio time can be and provided them with expectations that are clear but still deeply shaped by the ideas and goals of each individual.

I've also been focusing on time management for the last week, which is an essential skill for self-paced work. There is a huge difference between teacher-paced lessons and the self-paced lessons in Studio and I realized I had never directly addressed this, so I did, then added it to the planning form I ask students to fill out when they start something new.

This planning form, which I wrote about previously here and here, has become an essential teaching tool that supports ideation, self-pacing, goal setting, and understanding all the possibilities for work in the studio.