Parvin Peivandi, IB reflection, Oct 26^th, 2014

This week, the IB seminar was very useful for preparing us for the short practicum. I planned what should I observe, ask, or do in short practicum. I intended to observe the international minded education in the classroom, the way teacher teaches based on the multi cultural nature of the school and the way he designs his lesson plans with globally minded education and up to date Information. I picked two goals of the education in the IB seminar as the areas of my interest:

The goal of education is preparing children for citizenship and also to teach them cultural literacy. I found the base and the most important of all of the educational goals is critical thinking. If we teach students to think critically, they stay away from the biased information, judgments and assumptions. If students learn to think profoundly about every thing they see or receive, they will be open-minded and can function or compete in international settings more successfully.

I reflect on my visit of ST. John’s IB school and how the art teacher designed her lesson plan to improve the critical thinking of her students. She taught perspective successfully by creating many analytical questions before project and after project that made students really engaged in the subject matter, the challenge and problem solving solutions for fixing the perspective drawings.

I am asking myself that how can I design my lesson plans to improve the critical thinking of the students? How can I teach them to be more innovative in 21^st century? What should I bring from contemporary art to the class to give students recent information of the field?

Parvin Peivandi, IB Reflection, October 16^th, 2014

In the IB seminar this week, I had chance to show my IB journals to one of my classmates: Rachael. I asked her to write some notes for me about the IB reflections that she reads and her feedback was really helpful. She highlighted the strengths of my IB reflections such as: great questions, use of IB vocabulary, thoughtful observations, great connections to other courses and my real experiences. She noted also few grammar mistakes.

Reflecting on this experience in our IB seminar,I found peer feedback assessment as a strong educational tool that I can use more in my future classes. As I have learned in human development and psychology course, Scaffolding is a technique that I can use to empower the students in need by the help of their peers. Now, peer feedback is another scaffolding technique that I can use in my IB pedagogy. Due to the challenging and rigorous nature of IB education, I believe more assistance and modification strategies should be considered in unit lesson plans such as peer feedback, formative assessment in the form of teacher’s feedback and also rubrics with student friendly language.

The idea of making the language of our education student friendly was amazing too. Few years ago, I have experienced a hard time as a student in some of my classes in which the teacher was teaching with a complicated language and challenging vocabularies. Also the speed of the presentation is an important factor that has a huge impact on the student’s learning. Also, I remember in our teaching methodology class at UBC, how one of the previous graduates of UBC talked about her mistake in delivering materials fast and in a complicated language that made her class fell behind the curriculum.

With all of these useful hints, there are some great questions here: How long should be devoted to peer feedback in each unit plan? What should be the criteria of successful, unbiased peer feedback? How should I make as a rubric for peer feedback to guide the students? What should be concluded, what not? And why student friendly language is so important in teaching technical vocabularies in art classes? What visual elements should be added to rubrics for the ESL students?

Nov. 5^th 2014   Parvin Peivandi

Second week of short practicum

Second week of my practicum went well. I have observed 7 other classes, I have taught and received feedback and I could know my students. I enjoy my time at school while some students say hi to me in the hallways and I see how are relations is growing. My next inquiry will be how can we improve the motivation in both students and teachers? Observing the other classes, I could see the challenges in teaching, learning process in the classrooms and how different teachers approach their students. Now, I can see the difference between art class and other classes, which make me, feel that I am in the right track.

I am full of curiosity, excitement and eagerness to learn and to develop my ideas in the form of lesson plans for my students. My SA’s support and respect, has made me more confident in my presentation. This week, we had useful conversations about contemporary arts and teaching new media in the classroom. I make a conclusion that as artists and teachers, we have this opportunity to fuel our energy and creativity by doing research and demos. At the end of this week, I have a better perspective about teaching art in public high schools and I feel more pleasure to work with the students. I look forward for the long practicum to tailor my lesson plans for these students and experience joy and excitement with them.

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