A observed strategy for opening a lesson is that if anyone shows up late, even the second after the bell rings, they have to walk all the way to the office, and get an attendance slip from the office. While this means that people may miss the first minutes of instruction, it is meant to encourage kids to get to class on time.
An observed strategy applied during a lesson was started at the beginning of the year to give out three passes, if a student needs to go to the bathroom, they have to give Ridgway a pass. This is meant for students to take care of things before they come to her class. Today a student ran out of passes, and Ridgway had the student write her an IOU that was meant to be for some kind of chore or duty within the ceramics room to be completed at a later date.
There is often a lot of work that needs to be done before the end of the ceramics class, and Ridgway has a detailed lesson closure strategy. There are six tables in the ceramics room and Ridgway divided up all of the clean up tasks into six parts, Laundry/Floors & Slab Roller, Counters, Pugmill & Extruder, Tools, Sinks, Recycle Systems & Demo Station. Each table does a different task each day of the week, based off of a sheet that details these tasks, which clips of each students name are moved depending on what day it is. If students do not finish their tasks, Ridgway will leave a post-it note on their spot on the sheet.
A transition between lecture and working on art is when Ridgway polled students if they had completed a side project and when only a few students had even started, she decided to make the project extra credit, which then transitioned into the students working on another project.
Another in class transition was when we went to go look at the previous projects that had been hung up in the commons. Ridgway ended up cutting a project short in order to have enough time for students to critique the work. Ridgway also provided cookies in order to celebrate the student’s work and ease the transition.
The start of the digital art class Ridgway has students start off on the mat, not on the computers for lecture. This is so that students will not be tempted to be on the computers while she is talking, and they can look at and observe students work.
The way Ridgway has set up her ceramics classroom is very well set up, there’s a lot of projects going on and a lot of tasks that need to be completed, especially in regards to clean up. There’s a lot of those strategies that I would use in a ceramics classroom.
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