Teach Secondary Issue 13.6

+ What it takes to keep your school’s reputation safe + Why keeping your word is a cornerstone of effective behaviour management + The school that created its own ‘Global Issues’ curriculum + Are A Level students getting a sufficiently broad education? + The key factors behind Burnage Academy for Boys’ academic and pastoral success + A lesson in how Black soldiers shaped the British Army + New approaches to perennial behaviour issues HANNAH DAY Head of art, media and film, Ludlow College SOPHIE BAILLIE Associate director, Conscious Communications ROBIN LAUNDER Behaviour management consultant and speaker DILAN SAVJANI Director of personal development, Judgemeadow Community College GREG MORRISON Associate assistant headteacher, Burnage Academy for Boys ZEPH BENNETT PE teacher and school achievement leader A s with any subject, art demands a step up fromKS3 to KS4. This is the point at which a student’s contextual references, choice and use of media. and personal evaluation all need to demonstrate reflective thought. Contextual research is a great place fromwhich to help students move on from opinion and towards analysis. Make sure they know the background, reason or meanings behind the pieces they are studying, so that they can drop the ‘ I like ’ comments in favour of discussing whether the work is successful or not, as assessed against why the work was made. Does the work communicate what the artist intended? Can they back up their conclusions, based on direct observations of the work? In pieces such as Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, the message is blindingly clear – students can easily identify elements within it to back up their analysis – but with other pieces, such as a Rothko’s ‘Colour Fields’, this will be much more challenging. When it comes to developing students’ skills, it can be tempting to provide lists of processes, as this can be a great way of helping them to build a range of work. What we must avoid, however, is only giving them lists. What I therefore do is schedule in ‘GoldenWeeks’ – so called because they’re designed to give students a week during which they can create work that is truly theirs, and thus exciting and personal to them. The students get to select from the processes they’ll have been introduced to so far, and then proceed to revisit them in ways relevant to what they’re working on. This can be tied back into the contextual change described above – ‘ What are you, the artist, wanting to achieve? How will your media choices, and the ways you use them, help you to meet that objective? ’ Remember – what we’re looking to cultivate here is not the students’ ability to express their liking for something, but their capacity for critical reflection . Aword of warning, though – some students will fly when tasked with doing this, while others may fall completely. Making your own critical and purposeful choices is hard, but doing this will give your most able students the chance to take real ownership of their work. Others can be supported in making progress through scaffolding. Creative subjects expect this level of autonomy, which is what makes them so powerful and important. When the students’ final pieces are completed and evaluations are being written, at least some can hopefully now assess their work and developmental experiments from the start, just as an artist would. I certainly hope that they like their work – but if they can lay out their objectives and clearly discuss their successful (or otherwise) outcomes, then you will have produced art students of the highest caliber. LEARNING LAB INTHIS ISSUE THE LEARNING LEAP INART CONTRIBUTORS Thinking about… ABOUT THE AUTHOR Hannah Day is head of art, media and film at Ludlow College L E A R N I N G L A B 83 teachwire.net/secondary