Unpacking One Of The Lesson Plans From The IPMM Arts Education Curriculum

The 2021/22 IPMM Arts Education Curriculum is live and available for purchase right now! We’re so excited to put this labor of love out into the world, to share with our community of teachers and educators. This comprehensive curriculum is 80+ pages long and includes 16 remixable and reusable lesson plans. 

The lesson plans are divided into three phases, each of which correspond to a different prong of our See, Think, Do pedagogy. 

• Phase 1 builds confidence in looking at art, analyzing, and discussing it. Through focusing mainly on visual qualities and elements, Phase 1 shows students that there’s no wrong way to talk or think about a piece of art. 
• Phase 2 is where students get to build social and historical context, compare and contract different artists and styles, and learn about art movements. The second Phase is all about creating connections between artists, movements, and visual styles, and putting art within a broader social context. 
• In Phase 3, using all of the concepts, tools, and techniques that they learned in earlier activities, students will create work of their own based on several prompts. They’ll focus on their own tastes, personal history, and style. 

The lesson plans culminate in a class-wide Art Gallery activity, where you’ll hang works produced by your classroom of artists in your school or other community space. 

Students will have undergone the whole journey, from simply learning about artists to becoming artists of their own, or See, Think, Do!  

To give you a sense of the kinds of lesson plans included, this article will unpack a lesson plan and explain its educational objectives and how it satisfies National Art Standards. 

How The Lesson Plans Work 

To use any of the lesson plans included in the IPMM Arts Education Curriculum, you simply pick an artist from the Living Artists Section and use their work to inform the lesson. Although some of the lesson plans are built to be individual or group-specific, many are scalable and could work well as either. 

Curating Your Very Own Classroom Exhibition

This lesson plan is the last one included in Phase 2 and is intended to help students synthesize all of the skills they learned in that phase. It requires an understanding of art’s social context and how different art can interact and connect, as well as confidence in discussing and presenting about art work. 

Choose 10-15 pieces of art from the List in Section 2 that fit together around a theme or idea. 

As a class, students will discuss and collaborate to pick 10-15 pieces of art by different artists in the Living Artist Section. 

When you purchase the IPMM Arts Education Curriculum, you’ll receive access to a virtual library of high-quality reproductions of each artist’s work, perfect for instruction purposes. 

The pieces selected should speak to a theme, coherent idea, or strand of thought running through each work. This could be as broad as Latinx artists working in Chicago, or as specific as artwork directly inspired by hip-hop culture and graffiti art. Your students get to decide! 

Encourage an open and fun conversation between students and empower them to feel like they are truly in control of the process! 

These pieces will constitute a virtual exhibition, which you’ll create via Powerpoint or another platform. 

Write a statement with your class on the theme of the exhibition and why the pieces you chose are included.

Finally, students will work together to create an exhibition statement. It should be around one page in length and other exhibition statements can be used as inspiration and guidance. They’ll explain the connections between all of the included pieces and what the curators intended viewers to come away from the exhibition thinking about. 

This could be a great activity to do after a field trip to an art museum or other gallery, when the experience of a professional exhibition is fresh in the mind of your students! 

How This Lesson Plan Satisfies National Art Standards 

Like all of our lesson plans included in the Arts Education Curriculum, the curation lesson plan satisfies National Art Standards. Specifically, this lesson plan builds on Anchor Standards 4, 7, and 10. 

Anchor Standard 4: Select, analyze, and interpret artistic work for presentation.

Enduring Understanding: Artists and other presenters consider various techniques, methods, venues, and criteria when analyzing, selecting, and curating objects, artifacts, and artworks for preservation and presentation.

Essential Question(s): How are artworks cared for and by whom? What criteria, methods, and processes are used to select work for preservation or presentation? Why do people value objects, artifacts, and artworks, and select them for presentation?

Anchor Standard 7: Perceive and analyze artistic work. 

Enduring Understanding: Individual aesthetic and empathetic awareness developed through engagement with art can lead to understanding and appreciation of self, others, the natural world, and constructed environments.

Essential Question(s): How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art? How does learning about art impact how we perceive the world? What can we learn from our responses to art?

Anchor Standard 10: Synthesize and relate knowledge and personal

experiences to make art. 

Enduring Understanding: Through art-making, people make meaning by investigating and developing awareness of perceptions, knowledge, and experiences.

Essential Question(s): How does engaging in creating art enrich people’s lives? How does making art attune people to their surroundings? How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through art-making?

Purchase The IPMM Arts Education Curriculum Today! 

To learn more about the Arts Education Curriculum check out this overview. You can purchase the Curriculum at our Art Education Shop today. Upon purchase, you’ll receive a Welcome Video from IPMM founder Evan La Ruffa and an overview video by me! If you have further questions, we’re always available to chat via email or Zoom call.