Maestra Alexis Artist Workshop

After 12 weeks of open studio and materials exploration, I could feel that my middle school elective students were ready for more directed instruction. To achieve this, I decided to use one class per week to provide time for either direct instruction or critique. I started with critique as a pre-assessment of their ability to give and receive appropriate criticism. For this activity, students created a personal mini-museum using a black tri-fold board with one or more of their works for critique. The look and feel of the room really changed with the tri-folds on the tables; they gave each student a sense of their own space. Students were given sticky notes and instructed to walk our class gallery to leave comments on at least four works. In a whole-class discussion, we reviewed the TAG critique method from AOE (Hare. 2016). TAG stands for: Student artboards turn the classroom into  a mini-museum (1) Tell something you like (2) Ask a question (3) Give a suggestion