Important steps In Designing Units

Step 1: Determine & Unpack Standards
Step 2: Group Standards into Units
Step 3: Identify Enduring Understandings tied to
                  standards
Step 4: Decide Themes to frame the unit
Step 5: Design Essential Questions within the
                 Unit Theme
​Step 6: Create Unit Performance Assessment to
                 Assess Priority Standards
Step 7:  Write Lessons that Build Skills to the
​                Assessment
                         - Inquiry-based Lesson Design -
​                              What is Inquiry?
                          - Inquiry-based Lesson Tips -
                              Teaching through Inquiry in Art
                          - Inquiry-based Lesson Design -
​                              Inquiry-based Lesson Structure

What does it mean to teach through inquiry in a contemporary art curriculum?
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Use themes and big ideas driven by essential questions to frame your investigation.
• Many artists do not work in a single medium or technique and instead try to explore an idea, situation, or question through multiple media and visual strategies.
• Consider planning around a big idea, theme, or question first; then, decide what projects, skills, or materials will support meaningful investigation and expression. The big idea or theme should focus the investigation and create a unifying framework, in which you can include multiple resources, artworks, and artists. ​
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​Push beyond a media-driven curriculum
•Increasingly, artists are making works that defy traditional media categories. Rarely referring to themselves as strictly painters or sculptors, artists utilize the most effective media, tools, and contexts for the ideas they want to express.
•Provide opportunities for students to gain skills in materials that emphasize their thinking about ideas across media. Allow them to gain familiarity with multiple ways of representing and thinking through a specific theme or concept. Many artists do not work in a single medium or technique and instead try to explore an idea, situation, or question through multiple media and visual strategies. 

The Importance of Play
Vygotsky argued that play makes a crucial contribution to the development of the unique human aptitude for using various forms of symbolic representation,
whereby various kinds of symbols carry specific, culturally defined meanings. 

Play becomes a transition where children develop abstract thought. Children, he argued, require the support of real situations and objects with which to workout ideas through play. Thus play both allows children to consolidate their understandings of their world and facilitates their development of the representational abilities they will use to think through ideas as an adult.  Play develops into more sophisticated investigations and experiments where students explore abstract thoughts made visible.
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​Give students options: introduce multiple artists and media sources
• Avoid mimicking the style or working methods of a single artist. Instead, introduce a range of artists who may have divergent ideas or approaches, and can offer multiple perspectives and working methods related to a chosen theme, idea, or question.

• Select the artists you bring to your classroom to include a combination of historic and contemporary voices, as well as perspectives from diverse cultures and worldviews.
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Emphasize process over product
• Rather than designing a lesson with a final product or project in mind, consider different ways you can model how to develop and realize an idea. Plan backwards, to address larger learning goals that nurture critical-thinking and research skills, so that students can make meaningful works informed by well-researched and developed ideas.
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Think and talk more
​• Set up your ideas with conversation and introduce suggestive examples, compelling role models, and diverse methods that help students engage in meaningful art making.
• Have students brainstorm ideas and questions on paper instead of rushing to start on artworks. Encourage students to share their ideas and possible next steps with classmates and those outside the classroom.
• Help them think through multiple options before selecting a final idea to pursue. Engage them in discussions that challenge and develop their ideas, in anticipation of realizing a work of art 
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Structure of Sample Learning Plan in Art

Elementary UNITs

Coming Soon...

Middle School UNITS

​Coming Soon...

High School UNITS

Coming Soon...

Engage:
1. Exploring/Discussing Professional Art/Artists
   Activity 1.1: VTS (Visual Thinking Strategy) Conversation
   Activity 1.2: Observations, Connections, and Guided Discussions/Inquiries
   
Explore:
2. Exploring the Big Idea
   Activity 2.1: Mind Mapping and Brainstorming
   Activity 2.2: Media Experiments

Explain:
3. Workshops   
    Activity 3.1: Technical skills/Concept building #1
    Activity 3.2: Technical skills/Concept building #2
    Activity 3.3: Technical skills/Concept building #3
    Activity 3.4: Technical skills/Concept building #4
     
Expand:
4. Project Planning for Independent artwork
    Activity 4.1: Plan
    Activity 4.2: Investigate

5. Create Independent Artwork
  Activity 5.1: Creation of Artwork
   Activity 5.2: Classroom Critique
   Activity 5.3: Revisions & Finalizing

Extend:
6. Reflection & Documentation
  Activity 6.1: Write reflections on the artistic process, write artist statement rough drafts
   Activity 6.2: Photographing the artistic process

7. Interact with Authentic Audiences
   Activity 7.1: Presentation of Art Work & Artist Statement
   Activity 7.2: Respond to the Work of Others (VTS, Critiques, etc.)
 
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