Using Art Classes To Teach Confidence and Competence - Part I

Resilience. We all want our kids to be resilient. We want them to be able to bounce back when things go wrong. So how do we TEACH resilience, and secondly, can we use an art class to help build resilience?

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, the director of an agency that serves Philadelphia’s homeless and marginalized youth, likes to talk about the “The 7 C’s of Resilience.” Here are the 7 C’s.

1. Competence
2. Confidence
3. Connections
4. Caring
5. Contributions
6. Coping, and
7. Control

For now, I’d like to talk about just two of these skills: competence and confidence. Let’s start by talking in general about how to teach competence and confidence, and then let’s see how we can apply the principles to an art class.

How can we help kids gain Competence?

All it takes is experience.  We help our children to gain competence every time we focus on their strengths and when we let them make “safe” mistakes.

• Everyday household activities, like letting them do jobs around the house - even though you could have done it better - is one way to build competence. 
• Giving kids plenty of time for free play alone and with others is a way to help them develop competence. Play is a child’s chance to solve problems and work out disagreements.

How can we help kids gain Confidence?

Confident people believe in their own abilities, and there are several ways we can build that belief.

• We build confidence when we give honest, positive feedback about accomplishments. For example we can tell them,

               “I liked how clean you wiped the table,” (comments about a task)

               “I saw how kind you were when you. . .” (comments about virtues - generosity,

                     helpfulness, etc.)

               “I noticed how hard you tried.” (comments about effort)

• Children learn confidence when the challenges they face are not too difficult but DO involve stretching.

If an art lesson is managed well, it can be a terrific opportunity to teach both competence and confidence. How do you structure an art lesson to build competence?

Remember that we teach competence

• When we focus on a child’s strengths, and
• When we let them make “safe” mistakes.

We teach confidence

• When we give positive feed back and
• When we offer appropriate challenges

You can begin to apply these principles by following a simple rule when teaching art. The rule?

Provide a structured lesson

We would never give a child a piano and say, “Ok, now start playing.” Except for a few particularly gifted children, that would be terribly overwhelming.

The same thing is true in art. For some children, it IS possible to give them some paints, pastels, and pencils, a project to draw - and off they’ll go. But for many (most?) kids, that’s an overwhelming challenge.

They want their horse to LOOK like a horse, they want the beautiful building to look RIGHT, and a person to look LIKE A PERSON. But they don’t know how.

So how do you structure an art lesson so that it

1. Provides an appropriate challenge (enough support to insure success) and 
2. Enough opportunities to make safe mistakes.

The best way to give the needed support is to show them how to “take the drawing apart.” Show them where to start, show how the parts of the drawing are related, and suggest a process of how to get from start to finish.

Once they have been supported in making sure they can actually draw the object they set out to draw, THEN it’s time for a challenge. For example, teach them an art principle to follow and then ask them to figure out a way to apply it to the object they have drawn. For example, teach them about analogous colors and have them create a painting that uses 3-4 analogous colors.

Here are a few more ways to make art classes opportunities to develop confidence and competence.

Imagine this scenario. You’ve put together a great art lesson with lots of support to guide your child, and you think the lesson is going well, when, all of a sudden,

 The child bursts into tears, exclaiming between sobs, “It doesn’t look right!”

What should you do?

• Should you let the child start over? 
• Should you help by drawing on the paper to “fix” the mistake?

Rather than answer these questions, let’s first take a step back. The problem might have been prevented with a simple explanation at the beginning of the lesson.

• Before starting a project, it’s helpful to remind students that not all projects turn out the way we expect, and that even famous artists don’t like all the things they create. (If you doubt this, visit an artist’s studio sometime and see all the never-to-be-displayed work setting aside.)

• Secondly, before the lesson begins, remind them that they need to agree before starting that they will finish the project, even if something seems to go wrong. Learning to turn “mistakes” into happy surprises and agreeing to persist are both helpful in building competence.

As you can see, we’ve already answered the first question: Should you let the child start over? 

The answer is no.  By doing so you miss the opportunity to teach them persistence, and they fail to learn that “mistakes” can often be corrected by incorporating the “mistake” into the drawing, thereby creating something wonderful that had not been planned.

Let’s look at the second question.

Should you help by drawing on the student’s paper to “fix” the mistake?

It’s always a temptation, when a student is struggling, to fix the drawing with a few lines of your own. However, when you draw on a student’s work,

• You demonstrate that they are NOT competent, and that you are.
• You reduce their confidence.
• You also steal ownership of the drawing from them, and make it your own instead.

If you must demonstrate how to draw - and sometimes that is necessary -  draw on your own paper to demonstrate how to do a certain technique.

Making art is challenging work, and if the challenge is accompanied by enough support to insure success, art can be a terrific opportunity for students to

• Learn to solve problems on their own, 
• Gain confidence, and 
• Build competence.

Get some free art lessons, and start teaching your student competence and confidence today.