Lessons & Rubrics
When I started at Leadership High School in 1999, I was asked to build a fine arts/art history program from scratch with no direction. I had no formal teacher training, so most of this I learned the hard/hard-headed way. Most of my own models for high school art projects were stultifyingly traditional, and not models I wanted to revisit. I eventually learned how to create effective lessons with explicit objectives that didn’t limit expressive possibility.
The Fine Arts/Art History program was a mandatory, yearlong, introductory 2D studio art class (commencing with traditional skill-building projects and evolving into more complex experimental themes and ideas), as well as a slide-based college-level art history class (emphasizing the birth of the modern era, and progressing into contemporary visual culture). Students were required to give formal, highly creative portfolio presentations of their work to their classmates at the end of each semester.
The most popular projects for students tended to be ones that gave equal privilege to both technical skill as well as personal voice. The samples here were chosen because they were consistently popular with students, and were connected with some amazing student work, some of which is in the Students and Work section.