Art Integration

Reflection
When I was in college to become a teacher, in 2010, I had a literacy professor who told us that viewing is one of the most important literacy skills, but it also the one that rarely gets taught. The first article and video brought me right back to that.

In the first video, it was clear that the children had been given the skills and the practice they needed in order to observe and discuss the art the way they were. I want that for my students, too.

My unfiltered response to it all ends up mostly being frustration. We teachers go through college and pay tens of thousands of dollars to learn all of the best ways to teach and to integrate everything so that children can make connections, there is differentiation, and everything is meaningful. We leave college wanting to be The Best. Then, we graduate and go out to teach in schools only to find that we are expected to teach from a script. Expected to be on the same page in the teacher's manual as the other teachers on our team. Teaching the same things while the students sit and listen.

It frustrates me because I know we can do better. It confuses me because some administration will encourage teachers to try new things and will talk in PLCs about best practice, but they also ask teachers to come up with a calendar that says what page of the teachers manual we must be on at any given moment.

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that this is "ideal" but not reality in most cases.  We see things as educators in preparation that we think "I will DEFINITELY do that when I'm a teacher." Yet, when it comes time and we have our own classrooms, all the "other" things that we have to do become the reality - testing, core classes, curriculum requirements, etc.  I think if we as teachers start to push back and show by doing how important some of these things are for our students, maybe administrations will start to listen.  (We can always hope?)