Helpful books to future Art Ed teachers.

At my last session of my internship, the teacher I'm interning with, Mr. Ted Braggins, showed me 2 books he had and stated that the books would be quite useful and valuable to future art ed teachers like myself. He stated that a lot of what is in the books is how the new standards of "grading" teachers is going to be. The books he showed me were:

"Understanding by Design" by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe

"The Art and Science of Teaching" by Robert J Marzano

"Art and Science.." is just basically the ins and outs of teaching. You'll read everything from how to set up your classroom, to how one should speak and react with their students. I found it somewhat useful with certain aspects, such as the "little things" that I'm going to have to take into consideration...ex. classroom setting and how to fully engage your students. 

"Understanding by Design" has a main focus...a method known as the "backwards design." Basically with this, teachers should focus in one what they want accomplished by the students and start off with the big ideas and then work back from there. The design is broken up into 3 stages. IDENTIFY DESIRED RESULTS which leads into DETERMINED ACCEPTABLE EVIDENCE and finally PLAN LEARNING AND EXPERIENCES AND INSTRUCTION. Wiggins and McTighe feel that teachers should move away from their "safe zones" of just simply making art for art's sake and move into things that will be more thought invoking and promote understanding. 

If this is really how teachers are starting to be evaluated, I say this should be a must read for all us future teachers. We need to see/realize what we are going to have in store for us.