It can be challenging for educators to truly observe and not intervene. The goal is to learn about the natural inclinations of the children in your classroom, not how they respond to adult instruction. Use the observing tool so that you have a place to take notes about your observations and ideas for how you might like to support or redirect students.
Students often seek out adult asssitance and affirmation! If your students are seeking your opinion during your observation time, we recommend limiting your intervention to describing what choices they are making, with specificity and without judgement, and asking them to speak about their own work.
In this lesson, kids explore the many ways that pencils can be expressive! Teachers offer descriptive prompts that make kids aware of the variety of gestural, graphic and compositional choices that they can make with this tool, setting them up to work as self directed experts in their own discovery process.
