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Space: Area around, between, above, below, or within an object

26 July, 2019 - 10:08
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The Artist's View:

    All the area that exists around, between, above, below, and within an object is considered to be space. Forms and shapes are considered to be positive space and space that occupies the area in and around the form and shape is called negative space. Artists that utilize large negative spaces may express loneliness or freedom. Crowding together positive space reflects tension or togetherness. Depending on each other, positive and negative spaces interact with one another to create meaning. Space in three-dimension is considered to be the area that is over, under, around, behind, and through. Sculpture, jewelry, architecture, weaving, and ceramics are three-dimensional art forms. They are artworks that take up real space.

    ISLLC Standard #2: A school administrator is an educational leader who promotes the success of all students by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.

    A Leadership Perspective:
    When a teacher works alone he often has fewer skills for problem solving than when he works with an older or more experienced person (e.g., mentor). The mentor can help the teacher explore different, and often new, ways to solve problems through trial and error or through approximations of existing schema. For example, if new learning is conceptually close to what the new teacher already knows and understands, then he can more readily internalize the information. If, however, the new learning is significantly different from what is already known, then the teacher will likely encounter more difficulty in capturing the new information. In this case, a mentor can assist the teacher in identifying new pathways of understanding. Mentors can enhance the ability to internalize new and difficult material. The simultaneous effort of support and challenge on the part of a mentor offers a productive model for learning. For example, the mentor might support learning by first presenting material that the teacher already understands and then challenge him with information that is an extension of that understanding. Put more directly, a teacher learns best when learning is connected to existing understanding; teacher learning is social in nature.

    Understanding the role of space can help leaders create learning places that are at once challenging and supporting. Teaching assignments and the pedagogy that come with them help create challenge. Leaders help teachers grow and stretch by challenging them to take on different subjects, different age groups of students, different roles. Additionally, leaders create positive moments as they encourage teachers to use a wide range of pedagogical techniques in order to reach more students. Left alone, these challenges can create negative working conditions as teachers feel stretched but not appreciated. Effective leaders find a way to balance challenge with support. Much as space in art is constructed with positive and negative dimensions, successful learning space is constructed with a balance of support and challenge. The appropriate balance might include new teaching methods, but at the same time might include opportunities for team planning or for coaching. Through sustained, long-term, coaching, and support, leaders can offer teachers a safe environment where risks are valued and mistakes are acknowledged as part of the growing process.

    School-based management, in part, is successful to the degree to which that learning, amidst an environment of support and challenge, is present for both students and teachers. But bringing individuals and organizations to higher levels of effectiveness is a daunting task. It is the position of the author that organizational change can not happen without individual change, and vise versa. A first step in making such significant changes is to begin seeing teachers in a new way. That new way is a view rooted in an arts-based perspective and methodology.

    The notion that school-based leaders can assist teachers improve their effectiveness in supporting student achievement is central to schooling. One of the most specific ways that leaders can support teaching is through instructional leadership and supervision. The author develops some of this discussion in an earlier part of this monograph under shape. But more needs to be addressed in terms of the possibility of leaders capturing successful teaching and stretching growth of teaching from an arts-based approach. Specifically, the author offers a mechanism for applying the conversation of art to the art of teacher development. Put differently, one might ask “How might a leader build the art of reflective practice into the daily practice of schooling?”

    Reflection as a method for making meaning out of the teaching experience remains an important part of instructional supervision (Glickman, 2002; Pajak, 2003; Rucinski, 2005; Sullivan & Glanz, 2005). Reflection as a method of making meaning out of experience remains an important part of art criticism (Feldman, 1995). Reflection as conversation is central to making meaning out of the art of teaching. In as much as the supervision of teaching becomes art, then some understanding of the language of art is in order. In so doing, instructional supervisors can begin to utilize reflection, as in art criticism, as a mechanism for reflecting on teaching in a much broader and possibly more profound way.

    Focusing specifically on how teachers and supervisors can reflect and discuss teaching behaviors, scholars have readily acknowledged the role that reflection and feedback can play in supporting teacher growth (Beebe & Masterson, 2000; Bennis, 1989; Bolman & Deal, 2002; Dewey, 1938; Glanz, 2002; Good & Brophy, 1997; Kelehear, 2002; Lambert, et al., 2003; Nolan & Hoover, 2004; Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004; Schon, 1987; Sullivan & Glanz, 2005, 2006; Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002; Woolfolk & Hoy, 2003; Zepeda, 2000). The manner in which supervisor and teacher talk to each other reflects the capacity of both parties to recognize that teaching is about supervisor and teacher as well as teacher and student. The relationship that emerges from the conversation is beneficial to both the teacher and the supervisor. In other words there is a bidirectional benefit (Kelehear & Heid, 2002; Reiman, 1999; Reiman & Theis-Sprinthall, 1993). But in order to understand this bi-directionality, some consideration must be given to the nature of conversation and how it can move from concern about self to concern about others. The Concerns Based Adoption Model (CBAM) provides such a theoretical understanding.

    For several years, emerging in large part from Fuller's (1969) original study published in the American Educational Research Journal, researchers in staff development have provided an important mechanism for framing and supporting organizational change through the CBAM (Hall & Loucks, 1978; Hord, et al., 1978; Hall & Rutherford, 1990). The stages of CBAM are Awareness, Information, Personal, Management, Consequence, Collaboration, and Refocusing [See Table 4.3].

Table 4.3 Typical Expressions of Concern about an Innovation

Stage of Concern

Expression of Concern

6. Refocusing

I have some ideas about something that would work even better.

5. Collaboration

How can I relate what I am doing to what others are doing?

4. Consequence

How is my use affecting learners? How can I refine it to have more impact?

3. Management

I seem to be spending all my time getting materials ready.

2. Personal

How will using it affect me?

1. Informational

I would like to know more about it.

0. Awareness

I am not concerned about it.

 

    This theory recognizes that when individuals come into contact with innovations, they necessarily travel through the levels of concern (i.e., starting with awareness and moving up the scale) based heavily on how “new” the innovation is. A profoundly important distinction between the first four stages and the last three is that the focus of the individuals moves away from themselves and more toward the effect an innovation has on others. Art conversation has some interesting parallels as well.

    Edmund Feldman (1995) provides a paradigm for discussing art publicly, i.e., art criticism. His four-step, (description, analysis, interpretation, judgment) approach offers students a specific process for undertaking aesthetics or critical theory. When an observer engages an artwork using the Feldman Method, that individual will first describe the piece. The goal in this step is to describe objectively what one sees. An essential part of this step is to delay any judgments or conclusions. The second step in the Feldman Method involves analysis. In the process of analysis one begins to describe different elements of the art, like the use of color, or line, or value. The third step in the Feldman Method calls for interpretation. The goal is to try to find meaning in what one sees. The final step in the Feldman Method is for the observer to begin making judgments about the artwork. This step is the first one that calls for evaluation on the part of the observer. Thus, if there is an art of reflection for teachers and an art of reflection for artists, then there clearly is a message for instructional supervision rooted in an arts-based theory.

    If an instructional leader begins to describe teaching behaviors as art, one can observe that the same movement from concern about self to concern about others also happens. To put it differently, initially the conversation focuses on the technical dimensions and afterwards addresses the aesthetic elements of the lesson. In the first two steps the instructional supervisor observes the lesson in its technical dimensions. The observer describes and analyzes the lesson and these pieces are very important. In fact, without first establishing that the learner outcomes are met and that classroom management supports that achievement it is premature to consider any other portion of the instruction. If, on the other hand, the supervisor describes and analyzes the lesson with a teacher, and they both feel comfortable with those steps, then they can begin discussing the instruction in qualitative or aesthetic ways. As in the description of the Feldman Method above, teachers and instructional leaders can readily engage in “describing” and “analyzing” a lesson but it is quite a different story to “interpret” and “evaluate” the lesson. The final two steps require the instructor and observer to attend more carefully to the feelings, the consequences and the subtleties of the lesson (Heid, 2005). But the final two steps are the essence of beginning to observe teaching as an art and supervision of such teaching as also an art. To ignore those steps is to continue reducing class observations to inspection and “fact finding” rather than enlarging the observation to the aesthetic possibilities of excellent teaching. Given the important role that all four steps play in promoting the art of teaching and the art of discussing teaching, it is instructive to observe how using the Feldman Method makes sense [See Table 4.4].

Table 4.4 Typical Expressions of Instructional Leaders Using Art Conversation

Level of Criticism

Expressions of criticism

4. Evaluation

Was the lesson successful? In what ways might it have been improved? What recommendations might be useful to improve the next lesson?

3. Interpretation

How did the methodology affect students? How did the methodology interface with the subject matter? How did the lesson match or mismatch the learner needs and styles?

2. Analysis

Were the learning outcomes met? How did classroom management affect the attainment of the learner outcomes?

1. Description

Objectively, what do I see? Withhlod evaluation of the lesson or teacher.

 

    Applying the Feldman Method to artwork was new for the instructional leaders and that newness helped remind them of the power, intimidating power, of innovations. Applying the Feldman Method in teacher observations was also challenging as it was innovative for the administrators and for the teachers. The author asked the same eight students to take their new knowledge of the Feldman Method and apply it to teacher observations. Using the chart above (See Table 4), the students began to be comfortable with the different steps in the method. In pre-observation conferences at their schools, they discussed with teachers the specific points for observation and the structure of the observation instrument. After each lesson, the observed teachers were asked to apply the Feldman Method as they reflected on their own lessons. In the post-observation conference, the instructional leader asked the teacher to lead the conference by moving through the Feldman Method. One of the instructional leaders came to class one week and remarked: “I cannot get my teacher to do the last two steps. All the teacher wants to know is if he passed or not! We just have nothing to talk about after we finish the technical part.” Other participants also reflected similar concerns. In a culture of high stakes assessment, of both students and teachers, it is easy to lose sight of the aesthetics that impact learning and to reduce learning to the technical or immediately observable elements of a lesson. Toward the end of the term several of the instructional leaders commented that their teachers, after they began to trust the leader's intentions, were becoming more comfortable with discussing the aesthetic steps (i.e., steps three and four) in the Feldman Method.

    With each attempt to apply the Feldman Method to instructional supervision, the students became more comfortable applying the conversation of art in conferences. An especially exciting part of this growing confidence and in keeping with the CBAM stages of consequence, collaboration, and refocusing, the students began considering different approaches to using art language in observing teaching. As the students became comfortable with the innovation later in the term, the author and students began discussing the consequence the Feldman Method might have on student learning and teacher growth. Their concern moved from concern about self to concern about the innovation's impact on others. They also moved quickly to collaborate on possible alternatives to the standard format the author proposed. And finally, as a final project in the class, they were asked to refocus the Feldman Method and formulate a new format for critique so that they could make the assessment instrument meet the needs of teachers and students at their schools.

    Introducing school leaders to the language of art, and in this case the Feldman Method, reminded the author and students that innovation can be overwhelming. In order to come to terms with innovation, school leaders must also recognize the teaching the CBAM theory offers. A particularly exciting connection for the participants and authors, and an unanticipated one, was the link they made between concern for self and concern for others in both the CBAM and Feldman Method. The message was clear: when school leaders and teachers, in parallel fashion, begin attending to the art of teaching, then they necessarily begin to move beyond the important and necessary technical dimensions of teaching to the crucial and essential aesthetic considerations that make a classroom a place for academic achievement and personal development. And in this context, creating learning space for teachers invited experimentation, risk-taking, and a culture built on teacher professional growth and student learning.