Turning My STEAM Classroom into a TAB Classroom: An Online Journey

Hello and welcome to my TAB classroom journey. The next couple of weeks you will get to experience my classroom's transformation. I will try my best to share my experiences and ideas as I go along. I hope you enjoy and maybe even find some inspiration to try something new, too! If you do, I would love to hear about it! Please leave a comment below or contact me through one of my various social media sources.

Introduction:

In order for me to properly take you on the journey with me, you need to know how and why I have decided to go towards the TAB classroom idea. So let's start at the beginning. In my district we have the opportunity to turn two of our professional development days into "trade days". A trade day is just what it sounds like, we get to trade a typical professional development day into a day off if we complete a class with other teachers throughout a three month period. For my April trade day, I joined the art teachers in our district to go over the Art of Ed's Winter Conference. While choosing our conference sessions, I came across one called "Infusing STEAM concepts into a TAB Classroom" by Kelly Phillips. Since my education license and background is not actually in art, I had no idea what a TAB classroom was. It was originally the STEAM acronym that caught my eye. So I asked the seasoned art teachers what it meant. The high school teacher, Sara, explained to me that it stood for teaching artistic behaviors or choice-based-curriculum. This idea intrigued me so I decided to research it on my own. I found a lot of information from the website, TAB Teaching for Artistic Behavior. Here is what I discovered: