Dcumentation and Peer Teaching Projects

Documentation is an important factor in teaching and a child's learning. As a teacher, documentation can be challenging because you are only one person trying to document an array of other people. It is useful to have parent volunteers or teachers aids, then, to help with the documentation process so no important aspect of a child's learning is missed or overlooked. Documentation can also be challenging for a teacher because your main focus is to teach the children and enable them to learn from their art experiences. Documentation can easily become a distraction for the teacher and is one more thing that a teacher must plan and prepare for along with the learning activity itself. Volunteers, again, come in handy when larger projects that require documentation are being done.

The peer teaching projects that we did in class were beneficial because it enables us to take on the roles of the teacher and the student. As a student, we were able to see what worked for us and what did not, as well as, what could be improved in our peer teacher's lesson plan. As a teacher, it was a good experience to create a project and have the experience to teach it to peer students. By teaching, I was able to see how the project was understood by my peer students and their reactions to the project which I can use to improve or change my project. I would incorporate peer teaching in an elementary classroom as a way of integrating the arts into core subjects. Students could gather themselves into small groups, similar to what we did in class, and teach each other different, simple projects of art relating to other subjects. i think this will give the students the opportunity to test their confidence and their creativity by teaching, and I think the students will have fun with it because it is a different kind of assignment and because it uses artistic concepts, the students will mostly likely have fun with it.