Sooo, I feel like I’ve been keeping this a bit of a secret the last two years, even though I have written of it, but I have been working very hard to get my National Board Certification in Teaching (NBCT). And I certified!!! When I logged in late, Friday, December 6th I saw fireworks!
My journey over the last two years was particularly tough as I battled being in chronic pain and discovering I had Lupus. I also had to quit my art teacher job because of an extremely unsafe work environment and move to teaching second grade in another building. (There are no other art teacher positions in my area that are open.)
Oh, and everything I learned 100% can be used in any other subject area and it was just as challenging as other teachers subjects! I proved that to myself doing this as a second grade teacher during year 2!
Before I forget, I want to detail the biggest things that transformed me and my teaching on this journey.
Why I Started
God had plans for me. I did not want to pursue this, but ended up doing so and getting into it so much I couldn’t back out! The pay was nothing like it used to be, the work, just as hard, thankfully I did have a scholarship. I kept telling God I didn’t want to do it, he kept showing me I should. (I absolutely was going to take this year off if I didn’t certify because the stress was a lot.)
But the real reason was the fact that I am alternatively certified and it still shows up by my name 19 years later on the state department’s employee search. Alternatively certified means I have a degree in another area, (BFA in illustration) but took extra classes and passed all my state licensing tests (before teaching) so I could be a teacher. Little did I know how much this was looked down on in the education community even though I am technically more educated than a regularly licensed teacher! So every time I have tried to get a different job that has been there, I have been passed up or offered sub-standard jobs more times than I can count and I believe it is because of this. I have gone to the state department about it and they refuse to change it. I have a regular teaching certificate, just like everyone else! Every 4 years my boss gets an e-mail update about who needs to renew their certificate and next to my name? Yep. ALTERNATIVELY CERTIFIED. I looked into going back to school and getting this removed. It is impossible without earning a second BA. I cannot afford that, nor can I afford to get a master’s, or I already would have done that. This was my only option to put my head above the rest and hopefully come out even! I don’t want to work in my current situation (teaching 2nd grade) for the rest of my career. I want options!
I’m so glad I did do it, in the end, eve if I didn’t certify. The reason? It was the BEST professional development I have ever done in my whole career and the most meaningful!
Breakthroughs Working Through the 3 Portfolio Components
Before Starting- I studied the National Board Art Standards. They supersede all other standards. They were the best art standards I had ever read, detailed, yet open for lesson creativity. They were full of wisdom, concise reasoning for what must be done/taught and confirmed all of the great things I knew in my heart an art program should offer students.
Component 2 Portfolio (The Differentiation Component)
I paced and worried for 2 days over the first thing asked of me- an overarching educational goal. What did they want? What did I want? My mentors kept saying to look to the National Board’s standards for art. I finally found the choices/ ideas and had a huge breakthrough! It all fell into place.
And just like that I felt like the doors opened and my true journey began. I had never set an overarching goal for my students much less communicated it with them and consistently reminded them of it! This was a fantastic game-changing goal in my work and classroom!
Component 3 Portfolio (The Video Lessons Component)
I had no idea where to start. God placed me in an art critique course to help me with this. i didn’t want to do it, wanted to take something more fun, but knew what I had to do. I took the Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) course for professional development. I had not done much art study in a long time with my students and having them learn to use evidence from the art to tell the story of what they thought the art was saying was fantastic. Most importantly, I saw huge benefits in my students from learning and practicing this technique. Their writing absolutely took off. Their ability to visually “read” pictures, and to use evidence they saw to logically back up their opinions made them much better students and problem-solvers. It also helped them understand how to use logic and reasoning.
There are 2 video lessons you teach and the other one I chose was art-making. (Of course! What else? Tee hee!) The second one was a small group where the students worked on their paintings.
Out of all the components this was the hardest for me. It took the most planning , the most work, hours of video, getting everyone used to being on camera, -I had the most worrying time with it! My biggest fault was that my small-group lesson was too close to being a whole-group lesson. Ugh! (I had to re-do this component.)
Component 4 Portfolio (The Student/School Needs Component)
Huh. Sooo many things in these components required bravery on my part, doing new things, things I avoid, and perhaps the most was this one. I had to advocate for a student need. What a transformative thing this was for me. I have always been shy about asking for things or “bothering” admin with problems. But now I had to and I had another good reason. Two years before, a person in admin had completely re-done the special class schedules between my two buildings I served. Since the early childhood building was my original building I was kept there. They didn’t want the two buildings sharing specials anymore. Instead of hiring another art teacher for the older kids in the other building they just canceled art! I was so upset. Those children needed art! That was so unfair!
And now- I was being asked to do something about it. So I bypassed everyone in my district and went straight to the top- after all my Superintendent said we could e-mail him and talk to him anytime! So one night, I poured my heart out to him in an e-mail about the other building needing an art teacher. I was so impressed that he not only followed up, but came to me and met with me, asked questions, toured my art room, looked at what we were doing and found value in it. I had to do a lot of other work, like justify why we needed an art teacher for the upper grades, make budgets, wish lists and find actual evidence that this would help our district. It took a lot of time and effort aside from my job, and National Boards work. But my Superintendent found it all very good information and they opened the job up! So now the other building has an art teacher! (While all this was happening I had to quit being the art teacher at my building and move to the building with the new art teacher- I just wish it could have been me…)
Component 1: The Test
I’m glad I took this one last because I learned a lot reflecting on my art lessons and I used that knowledge, plus the deep knowlege I got from studying and using the NBCT Art Standards to answer questions on the test. I’m proud to say the test was brutal, but also my highest score! I have never studied so long and hard for any test. I read 4 huge art history books, took a whole notebook full of notes, watched hundreds of youtube videos and prayed a LOT. I mean you have to know the history of and the reasons for the art from the beginning of time until about 5 minutes ago! Plus all the weird art vocabulary, art processes, developmental stages, appropriate practices, and safety practices! That is just as challenging as the social studies exam for National Boards!
I would say that art is history and history is art. Also art is the history of Christianity which was fascinating to me- how it drastically changed with changes in the church. I loved re-discovering the art through the ages (it had been a while since I had my 4 semesters of art history in college). I loved re-connecting the history with the art and it inspired me in my own studio practices as well.
Illustrating the Bible, the lives of saints, even traditional crafts of France, the stained glass windows of the Gothic cathedrals are like a gigantic, glowing, illuminated manuscript.
-Carol Strickland, “The Annotated Mona Lisa”
I also became so inspired all over again by all the artists through time. Sister Wendy was one of my favorite art historians to listen to and study art with on Youtube. She had such a great way of explaining things. Her talks made me very emotional at times, remembering how important art truly is for our world- and I don’t mean just art in museums, I mean every human’s desire for creativity, and what comes out of that God-given urge to create.
Art is about being human. Archeologists know that when they find evdence of art, they find evidence of human beings. It expresses all hat is best within us: our desires, our hopes, our truth. Art changes, but it doesn’t get better. Painting starts at the top. It is our story.
-Sister Wendy Beckett
Doing Things in The Classroom I Had Never Done:
The biggest transformation I experienced was my ability to trust myself and my insights into my practice and to stand up for myself and my choices in the classroom. I did many things I had never done before like:
-Setting an over-arching goal for the year or class
-Having students asses themselves.
-Using red/green dots as signals for when kids needed help during a project
-Using exit tickets so the kids could privately tell me how they thought they were progressing to meet the goals set for them
-Using post-it tags as a formative assessment to find certain elements and principles in a poster-sized work of art
-Using post-it notes as a formative assessment
-Asking kids to use the rubric to show me how they met the goals in a piece of art in a 1-on-1 meeting
-Using a piece of final work as a summative assessment
-Finding out why art education was important to the students in my school defending it and advocating for it.
-Sending surveys to parents
-Meeting in a Personal Learning Community (PLC) outside of school with other teachers working toward the same goal as me and supporting each other and helping each other! I loved my NBCT meetings!
-Talking to admin about my program.
-Letting kids talk about artwork without me interjecting! Lol
-Keeping DETAILED notes about students in art to monitor progress (I have and still do this as a gen. ed. teacher).
-I actually painted a watercolor painting for my students step-by-step, one step each week so they could see the progress and how an artwork emerges. I also discussed with them problems I had painting and how I fixed them. They LOVED this. Like a lot more than I ever thought they would! It was important for them to see a real artist work and how they work through issues in a piece because honestly all art is just problem solving!
Things I had done before and really enjoyed doing again were:
-Displaying student work- yes yes yes! My favorite part of teaching art is filling the building with color and happiness!
-Stopping for a few minutes and just going table to table to be completely happy watching them make art. I would lavish them with praise and I meant every word. All their hard work made me so happy.
-Taking pictures of art making- for some reason this makes me incredibly happy and I love to look back on pictures I’ve taken over the years, much like visiting the tables and telling them how amazing they are.
-Watching kids draw, helping them- they often are very scared of this process and it can go off the rails but often they just need 1 line corrected to get right back on track. I do a draw-a-long for every project and the kids get very good at this!
-Making connections with art and other subjects. In my art room we always had an over-arching curriculum that did this. One year we traveled around the world making art inspired by different places and cultures. One year we made art about animals all over the world. One year we made art focusing on the elements of art and principles of design. Last year we made art focusing on art history through the ages. It’s all quality education and all very meaningful! The connections they made spilled over into many other academic areas and I saw huge leaps in reading and math because of art!
-Yes, I did see academic growth from art because the second year in my program I was back in a general ed. classroom making art on Fridays and watching in awe as my kids repeatedly used art connections to solidify their own learning in their heads! I was stunned- it was amazing. I had a very low class that year and they grew by leaps and bounds!
-Not being afraid to get messy. The art room is the place for this. I had all kinds of organization to keep it at a minimum, but I practiced never getting upset if there was a spill. I just brought out all the old beach towels and they always helped sop it up!
-Talking with kids about art.
-Making literature connections with art projects and sharing wonderful books.
-I trusted my ability to problem-solve more than ever to help students reach goals.
-I trusted my ability to figure out why students struggled or did not struggle and how to best help them individually. This is a fine art and takes a lot of introspection and the ability to admit you are wrong about something and the ability to change it and try something else!
-I held students to high standards and would not let them slide! This meant a LOT of problem-solving with them and encouragement from me, as well as refining work. Art definitely has an ugly middle part to it- we had to keep going to get to the best it could be- just like I do in my studio!
-Helping kids understand how they can use art in their daily life and with school.
Conclusion
Well, that was a lot, but it is really hard to put the amount and scope of things I did to get certified into words. There were so many awakenings and great, positive changes in my teaching practice. It was worth it, but it was steel sharpening steel and I literally prayed my way through the whole thing. It was much harder and more intense and more time-consuming than I thought it would be. But it was career-changing. I feel re-charged and like my decisions are more purposeful and I trust myself a whole lot more. But most of all I am more convinced than ever how important the arts are to students (and that means all arts, not just visual).
If you are thinking of undertaking this feat my advice to you would be- find a cohort, a group or a PLC you can meet with regularly, even if it is a zoom call and make the time to meet with them. My cohort got me to the ceritifcation line 100%. I could not have done this alone. We read for each other, bounced ideas off of each other, reminded each other of things, and those that had already passed helped those of us going through it. I hope to continue to be in my cohort and help others as that is what we should do as educators.
Keep your candle burning so others can light theirs from yours and let your teacup run over so you can give from the saucer.
With arty school love to you from Kansas Street,
-Jaime
Life on Kansas Street 