Practicum Lesson Reflection

Our lesson is over now, with the critique wrapped up and student work all finished and documented. This was my first experience in planning a lesson and getting to see how it would be interpreted by each student, and even with fairly open expectations I was amazed at the variety of solutions, creativity, and effort that went into each project. Overall I feel that the project was a success, with students coming away with new considerations for materials and art-making processes than before.

We were able to stay on track with our original lesson plan without too many deviations, although some students needed more time. In an open studio course like this, those students were able to continue working for a few days while the students who had finished their work could resume work on longer-term projects from earlier in the semester. We were lucky in that this was the pace and flow of the course established by our CT for the course labelled ‘Commercial Art’. I hadn’t realized how unreceptive the students would be to presentations or discussions, as they wanted the course to be 90% worktime which is what they were accustomed to. Engagement was largely done on a one-on-one basis, because of this. Looking back, I think I would have liked to have reworked some of the time I had spent going over presentations and have the students share ideas with each-other instead.