IB/International Baccalaureate

As of the Spring of 2020, I am in my 10th year of teaching IB DP Visual Art. This experience spans three schools. The lowest score ever received by my students is a 5. This is also my third year teaching IB MYP Visual Arts.

My IB DP Visual Art teaching experience covers three IB curriculum revisions and three IB DP Visual Arts subject guides.  I am an active member of the 2022 IBO DP Visual Art Curriculum Review Focus Group Committee, and I have attended 7 IBO official training workshops including three Category 2 and one Category 3 DP Visual Arts workshops and Category 1, 2, and 3 MYP workshops.

IGCSE/International General Certificate of Secondary Education

At The British International School Shanghai I taught the Year 10 (US Grade 9) IGCSE students. The course was following the Edecel syllabus. My training for this was in-house. This was during the 2008-2009 academic year.

American Curriculum

I am American, and I was myself educated under an American high school (and elementary school) curriculum in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. As a university art education student, graduating in 1992, I learned the tenants of OBE/Outcome Based Education, which was at that time the dominant curriculum system in the US. While teaching at Northland High School in Minnesota, from 1998-2000, I was trained in SBE/Standards-Based Education, which became the generally accepted mainstream replacement of OBE in the US. During the summer of 1999 I authored a complete 7-12 art curriculum that brought the school into compliance with new Minnesota Graduation Standards law. Five years later, in 2004, I was trained by Hampton City Schools to teach the Virginia Standards of Learning, which I did for two years. The curriculum of Narmer American College, in Egypt, where I taught from 2002-2004, was also based on the Virginia Standards of Learning. I authored that school’s entire K-12 art curriculum in 2002. The American School of the Hague in The Netherlands also had a standards-based curriculum, and I was a member of the curriculum writing committee in 2001 as well as a member of the ECIS/European Council of International Schools re-accreditation committee.

UK National Curriculum

While teaching at The British International School Shanghai, in 2008-2009, I was trained in-house to offer the UK National Curriculum in art for secondary students. This included careful attention to the leveling of student work. I also had exposure to this system in 1992, as half (two months) of my student teaching practice was completed in London. (The other half was completed in the USA, in Pennsylvania.)

Understanding by Design

While at Brent International School, in the Philippines, I was trained to offer a UbD/Understanding by Design curriculum. As well, I was heavily involved in re-writing the school’s art curriculum, which was standards-based, into an Understanding by Design (which is a “backward design” system) framework.

DBAE/Discipline Based Art Education

This has for decades been a popular art curriculum in the US, and mainstream US art textbooks frequently employ its tenants. DBAE breaks the study of art down into four main “disciplines”: art history, art studio, aesthetics, and art criticism. My familiarity with this system began with my high school days as an art student and carried through my university and American and American school teaching days. DBAE also prominently features the Feldmen model of art criticism, with the four stages of description, formal analysis, interpretation, and evaluation.