Karina: I’m going to ask a few of you to share personal self-evaluation of your technique in the craft.

Lilia: In general, I’d like to have greater contrasts, clearer lines, darker lines.

Cristina: Our role as teachers in the arts is to help the students move from dependent learners to independent learners. And that very naturally translates to them being able to critically assess their own work.

Cindy: Students are attracted to the school to study the arts. They’re starting to understand the arts, understand themselves, it’s very motivating. That’s what the arts brings to the learners.

Karina: Lay out your prints. Let’s try to pick the strongest one in the bunch.

My goal is to get students to a place where they can self-appraise and self-evaluate their work in terms of its strengths and aspects that need improvement. But to be able to do that in a way they can sort of envision the solutions, and until they can do that, they’re always going to rely on outside voices.

Now the learning, again, might just be an affirmation of what you had been thinking, it’s just got confirmed.

Cristina: We take that whole process of assessing their own production and we break it down into steps.

Karina: I want to bring up a couple of prints that former students have done and a couple of mine working with this intaglio drag point method.

Cristina: Students need to see examples of great work. And then the teacher has an obligation to be able to speak to what makes that work so great.

Karina: You’re looking for actually fuzzy, black, hazy line.

Bringing in a few of my prints, and a few college level prints that approach this project shows them physically what the quality of the final print should be.

Seem to get this beautiful rich, I think just gorgeous blacks. These awesome–

Cristina: That’s the first component, is breaking down what it is that makes a work great, and then beginning to provide students with a vocabulary so they can access that material in different ways.

Karina: You guys know that if you say, “I like it, it’s cool,” what’s the next thing I’m going to say?

Student: What about it is nice and what’s cool?

Karina: What about it is nice and what’s cool? So I’m going to ask you to substantiate.

Lilia: You really get focused on vocabulary and making sure you have those words, so that when you go into a critique, you cannot just say, “Oh, this is kind of shady and strange.” You can be like, “Oh, this is very nice contrast.”

Karina: Why did you pick this one?

Student: It’s darker.

Karina: And?

Student: It’s clean as well.

Cristina: We begin with very fundamental vocabulary, so that by the time we get to this point, their ability to verbally articulate around their work comes more naturally to the students.

Karina: Why do you do critique?

Student: Because you learn through error and not through success.

Karina: Fabulous.

As students are gaining an ability to self-assess, one crucial thing is to give each student a chance to give constructive feedback. The Post-It note critique is a way of having them all involved and giving response to everybody’s piece. They’ve all now responded to, let’s say, ten other people’s works when they put up the Post-It notes, so they’re exercising, even if they’re not verbalizing those comments.

Lilia: It’s a really good opportunity to get really good feedback. And when you can see patterns of what is successful and unsuccessful in somebody else’s work, you can then apply it to your work.

From my sticky notes, I got a lot of “childish” and “exciting.” So I think I definitely got the childlike presence that I wanted in it.

Karina: You help them bit by bit, thought by thought, to get to a point of balanced self-assessment, where they know where things lack or need more adjustment. They can anticipate some of these corrections on their own.

Lilia: In terms of improvement, I would have liked to get a greater sense of its abandonment.

Karina: Because at some point, some of the students might just start to rely on themselves and their own intuition and to trust that. So I think they’re honing those skills.

Cristina: The power of arts education is that the student and teacher begin to recognize that every student artist is unique, and cultivate that student voice. I think it’s a very powerful tool for learning.