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Brand Your Program

10/15/2014

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Branding Works 

Today, I was reading the latest blog post by Seth Godin about how important it is to "put a frame around it".  In his post he discusses how things are judged on their appearance, and states with wit "How should I judge this," is something we ask ourselves all the time. When you make the effort to give us a hint, we'll often take the hint".  When reading this, I was reminded of that fact that how we promote and sell our programs to students makes a huge difference in how they buy into the classes we teach.

I spent a lot of time in my college years surrounded by friends who were pursuing careers in creative advertising.  The Ad Center, now known as the Brandcenter, is where a lot of my friends ended up going to graduate school while I was entering my first year as a teacher in Henrico County Public Schools. My friends became obsessed with ideas, creativity, and innovative persuasive techniques.  I became equally obsessed, as they were persuasive in selling me the value of those things.  As I began my career as a high school art teacher,  I brought a lot of those thoughts about persuasive tactics to the classroom.

Rather than relegating the description of what I do to  "teaching high school art", which has enough negative connotations of its own to strip anyone of confidence, I wanted to say something more about the impact of the program I wanted to build and the education I wanted to provide my students.  I spent two years figuring out how to teach without quitting my job, then got hired at a brand new school as its sole art teacher.  I saw this as a tremendous opportunity to build something from scratch.  It felt like a startup company that had no identity yet, but had the potential to become amazing with the proper care and branding.


So, I decided to "brand" the program at Deep Run High School as "DRHSART".  It worked for VCUARTS, and I figured it was a language that made sense to the creative people in the area.  I developed a simple logo that would be easily recognizable,  a color scheme that has been proven to work by several other major big names in the creative industry, and infused all aspects of our communication with a simplified, yet sophisticated design sense.  I figured that if I kept at this for long enough, eventually things would start to be recognized as professional and sophisticated.


I feel really good about the brand of education, the quality of student work, and the accolades we've accumulated over the past twelve years.  I have no idea if it was the brand that had to do with the success or satisfaction I feel as the leader of the program here at DRHSART, but I will say that the energy I put into the brand has convinced me, if no one else, that what we do here is worth while and professional.  The buy ownership, autonomy, and passion that I have for the brand is enough to keep me working hard, and I think that's enough to believe that "putting a frame around it" seems to work.



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Initial Instructional Planner

9/24/2014

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View the Instructional Planner

Art 3:  Introspective Self-Portrait Unit

Getting Started
I decided to use a lesson that I've taught for many years, just to see if I have been following the methods described in the instructional planner.  I started by trying to brainstorm the "Big Idea".  In order to come up with the language that described the lesson's "Big Idea", I made a list of all the essential learning that takes place in this unit in my own words.  I didn't use the language of the SOLs for this at first, because I wanted to think about the learning on my own before trying to make it fit into the "Standards" that are described by the state.

That list reads like this:

Mastering the use of charcoal as an artistic medium.
Consideration of craftsmanship.
Seeing  the subtlety of light and shadow.
Introspective thinking.
Expression of emotion, content, and  tone.
Create an original work of art that has personal value.
Analyze proportion and spatial relationships.
Provide written and verbal feedback of peer work.
Provide written and verbal reflections of own work.
Recognize styles of artists from the Renaissance and Baroque Eras.
Compare and Contrast works of art from two distinct art eras.
Understand the cultural and historical context of art works.
Explain how art is a reflection of the time in which it was made.

Once I had my list of essential learning statements, I used that language to write two succinct sentences that encompassed as many of those essential learning statements as possible. 

That statement reads like this: 

Studio:
"The students will create meaningful, introspective works of art with careful consideration of design and technique".

Art History:
"The students will understand circumstances surrounding the flourishing art culture of the Renaissance, and will compare it with the dramatic art and culture of the Baroque age in Europe."

Next, I began to use the Bloom's taxonomy chart to list all of the verbs that apply to the learning in this unit. After creating comprehensive lists of verbs that relate to the learning in this unit, I began to "unpack" the standards of learning by hunting for words that overlap from the Blooms chart and the Standards of Learning for Art III.  In order to speed up the process, I copied and pasted only the Art III standards into a document, and searched that document for key words from my lists. For each of the levels of Blooms, I listed all SOLs that had common language with my list of verbs. Here are the results of those overlaps....

Blooms Taxonomy Levels
Create
create, design, develop
SOLs:  AIII.3, AIII.4, AIII.6, AIII.7, AIII.14
Evaluate
evaluate, explain, compare
SOLs:  AIII.12, AIII.13, AIII.18, AIII.25
Analyze
analyze
SOLs:  AIII.11, AIII.13, AIII.14, AIII.22
Apply
Interpret, summarize
SOLs:  AIII.16, AIII.17, AIII.19
Understand
compare, contrast, relate, demonstrate, interpret
SOLs:  AIII.2, AIII.3, AIII.6, AIII.13, AIII.16, AIII.17, AIII.23
Remember
remember, recognize, recall

Now What?
Once I had all this information in front of me, I was feeling confident about the learning that happens in this unit.  Then I looked at the Instructional Design and Driving questions portion of the Instructional Planner. This was much more difficult to complete than I had originally thought it would be.  To be honest, I'm still not completely sure I've filled this section out properly. Here is the finished product that may or may not be what is expected by the state.

Overall, I feel like I have a better grasp on the instructional planner, but I still don't have confidence that I've completed the form properly.  I do, however, have great confidence that this is a 21st Century lesson that challenges students to think critically and create meaningful, original works of art that have personal value.   I am also confident that the Art History taught in this unit challenges the students to think critically about how art is a reflection of the time and location in which it is made.


The biggest take-away from doing this instructional planner is how it made me want to add a field trip to bring the Art Historical content to life.  This year, we will take a field trip to the National Gallery of Art in D.C. to se some of the work we studied in person.
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    Mike Guyer

    This is my educational blog that is used as my self reflective tool as I go through the teacher-evaluation process.

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