Taking the time at the beginning of your residency to co-generate goals with your students can help build investment and can help you connect with and support each individual student.
We’ve represented this generative process as a tree: Your goals are the trunk connecting the base or roots of a student’s previously established knowledge or art-form specific knowledge to the branches of a student’s curiosity—what they want to learn. By doing this, your goals build toward an engaging, supportive, and creative environment.
When asking questions to generate these goals, think about:
- Your positionality in this specific classroom: What is the power dynamic and how does this impact your facilitation of questions and expectations?
- Making your line of inquiry accessible to your students. Use varied modalities for students to respond to or offer questions (e.g., graffiti paper, open-ended, multiple choice, thumbs up/middle/down, move physically along a continuum, write on slips of paper, etc.).
- Consciously creating a stigma-free classroom and building community among your students.
