Integrate the Arts, Deepen the Learning
Critical thinking, risk taking, and collaboration -- along with academics and discipline -- are just some of the areas where Bates Middle school educators report big improvements since integrating the arts across all subject areas.
08/29/12
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Arts Integration: Fundamentals for Getting Started
Becoming an arts-integrated school doesn't happen overnight, but there are ways to enhance the process. Two veterans of successful transitions share tips from their experiences.
By Mariko Nobori
A former principal of arts-integrated schools, John Ceschini (right) now spreads the word about the positive impact of arts integration, such as the improvements in academics and behavior seen at Bates Middle School (left).
Credit: Zachary Fink
Arts integration (AI) is an approach to teaching that interweaves arts education with standard curriculum to help create a richer context for learning and can deepen student engagement. Educators at Wiley H. Bates Middle School in Annapolis, Maryland, where all teachers have been trained in and are committed to using AI, credit the strategy for successfully turning their school around.
Here are some tips from two veterans of successful AI transformations.
For the Administrators
Principal John Ceschini successfully transformed two Maryland schools with arts integration. Since then, he’s served as the executive director of the Arts Education in Maryland Schools Alliance (AEMS).
•Culture: Ceschini believes one of the most important things for an administrator is the right attitude. The leadership must decide that the arts are essential for all children and be willing to make funding, scheduling, and hiring decisions accordingly.
•Funding: “I’m not talking about a great deal of money,” says Ceschini, “because it’s a mind-set that you’re changing more than anything else. But administrators have to put some funding into the arts because teachers understand that if leaders put up the money, that means the program is important.” In the case of Bates, the district applied for and received a four-year grant to help them get arts integration started. The bulk of the grant money has gone to professional development. Because the arts have helped build community awareness about the school through public performances and school- and community-based projects, donor campaigns for musical instruments and art supplies have been successful.
•Schedule: Time must be built into the schedule to accommodate both PD and collaborative planning time (PDF). At Bates, one hour every day is earmarked for collaborative planning, and they have PD sessions every other Thursday, at least one of which each month is about the arts.
•Hiring: Most teachers will not have had experience teaching with AI, so you will need to hire people willing to take on the challenge of integrating the arts in their lessons and learn to maximize art’s potential to engage their students. “At first I was not sure about it,” says Bates Middle School math teacher Laura Casciato. “Now, with the practice and training I have had, I look at my pacing guide and think, ‘Oh, I can develop a dance to show that.’”
For the Teachers
Pat Klos was the dedicated arts-integration specialist at Bates Middle School and recently was appointed the arts-integration specialist for the county, where she will work with multiple schools. Her primary goal is to provide the resources and support teachers need to grow their repertoire of arts-integrated lessons and techniques. She brings in teaching artists and visiting artists, develops and leads PD sessions, and collaborates with teachers to create integrated lesson plans. Here is some of her advice on how to help teachers be successful with arts integration.
•Professional development serves many purposes: It enables teachers to learn the fundamentals of various art forms (PDF); it teaches them how to develop integrated lessons; and it provides them with the opportunity to experience art for themselves. The biggest resistance that Klos has encountered from teachers is that they think they’re not artistic. But with PD they realize the arts are for anyone, and they come to better understand the experiences they’re giving their students.
•Use AI intentionally. At Bates, every teacher is required to use AI in some shape or form, although not every lesson needs to be, nor should be, taught with AI. Klos uses two main criteria for implementing AI: •Look for a natural fit with the content. Don’t try to shoehorn it in or it can make the concepts more confusing. “The idea behind arts integration,” says Klos, “is that it opens a new door to understanding so it has to connect with the content standard for it to make sense.”
•Identify where the students are struggling. AI can be an effective way to differentiate instruction and break through with hard-to-reach kids. It provides a context that will help students build connections and gives them triggers for remembering the content later. At Bates, teachers use formative and summative assessments to find the areas where kids are struggling and then target these standards with arts-integrated lessons. They track the standards (PDF) that are taught with AI and have seen clear improvements in comprehension and retention.
•Collaborate and brainstorm. Brainstorming is one of the best ways to develop arts-integrated lessons. Bouncing ideas off each other within and across subjects and disciplines helps develop deeper lessons, the goal of the daily hour of collaborative planning time at Bates. As lessons get classroom-tested and refined, you can build a repertoire of vetted lessons on a shared drive.
•Leverage community resources. You can bring in teaching artists and trainers from arts programs or partner with community art organizations, or teachers can enroll in PD programs such as Changing Education Through the Arts from The Kennedy Center. At Bates, getting involved with the community has resulted in greater support from the community in return, including donations of time and resources.
(See our Resources and Downloads and our Pinterest board for other arts-integration PD presentations and arts-integrated lesson plans)
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How the Arts Unlock the Door to Learning
Student achievement was down. Teachers were demoralized. Until a bold strategy -- integrating the arts into curricula -- helped students embrace their learning and retain their knowledge. Today the faculty, staff, and students of Maryland's Bates Middle School are crafting a whole new vision of school transformation.
By Mariko Nobori
Students at Bates Middle School learn about art concepts such as photo composition (above) that are integrated into other curricula like math.
Credit: Zachary Fink
What do Mars and modern dance have to do with each other? How do you connect fractions with Andy Warhol? At Wiley H. Bates Middle School, in Annapolis, Maryland, the answer is arts integration. Every teacher there is committed to weaving the arts and standard curricula together to create a richer and more lasting learning experience for their students.
Arts integration goes beyond including art projects in class; it is a teaching strategy that seamlessly merges arts standards with core curricula to build connections and provide engaging context. For example, in a science classroom you might see students choreographing a dance using locomotor and nonlocomotor movements to demonstrate their understanding of rotation versus revolution of the planets (PDF). In a math class, you might see students learning fractions by examining composition in Warhol's Campbell's soup paintings.
What we also saw in these classrooms were students who were enthusiastically participating in the learning process, and having fun. It's not revelatory to say that the arts can engage kids. But that that engagement can also be leveraged to boost academic growth and improve discipline seems like a secret that really needs to be revealed. When you see how the kids embrace these lessons, hear them tell how art helps them remember concepts better, and learn about the improvements teachers have noted in student understanding and retention, it makes you wonder why more schools aren't integrating the arts in every class.
A Whole-School Reform
Bates decided to become a fully arts-integrated school in 2007 as the primary initiative in a whole-school reform effort. Other initiatives in their school improvement plan (PDF) included Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), an operational framework for implementing practices and interventions to improve academic and behavioral outcomes, and Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID), a college readiness system with research-based methods for elementary through postsecondary students. Their principal at the time, Diane Bragdon, had brought the school back from the brink of failure and now was ready to aim its trajectory squarely toward greater success. Bragdon got the support of Anne Arundel County Public Schools Superintendent Kevin Maxwell, long a proponent of schools of choice, who knew well the impact arts integration had had in other Maryland schools. The district applied for a four-year grant called Supporting Arts Integrated Learning for Student Success (SAILSS) from the U.S. Department of Education and was one of 15 districts and schools to receive it.
Since they started implementing arts integration schoolwide in 2009, Bates has seen a 23 percent drop in the average number of referrals and suspensions per student. The school’s percentage of students proficient or advanced in math has grown four times more than the state's over the same period, and five times more in reading. Not all lessons are taught with arts integration, but Bates takes pains to diligently track those that have been in a regular log (PDF), and they report substantial improvements in student comprehension and retention.
Why Does Arts Integration Work?
Why does it work? Arts integration uses teaching practices that have been shown in brain-based research to improve comprehension and long-term retention. For example, when students create stories, pictures, or other nonverbal expressions of the content they are learning -- a process researchers call elaboration -- they are also helping to better embed the information. In one eighth-grade math class, students prepared for a test on linear equations by creating photo stories of the steps involved. This required that teacher Laura Casciato spend nearly a full class period teaching about basic principles of design (PDF). She explained the trade-off: "It was an easy decision to spend time on the art because we know that they retain that information better. They're going to look at that test and say, 'Oh yeah, I remember that information from my photo.'"
As with any new initiative, there are a number of factors that must be in place for it to succeed. With arts integration, high-quality professional development is essential. Teachers don't need to be "artistic" to be able to use arts integration; they just need to learn some of the fundamentals so they will be better able to think of ways to merge art concepts with other content. For example, knowing the basic elements of design, such as emphasis, balance, contrast, and repetition, enabled Casciato to teach her students how to create more informative photo compositions to illustrate each step in solving a linear equation (PDF).
Bates used the bulk of their grant money for professional development, which they started in the 2007-08 school year. They have PD Thursdays every other week, and at least one per month is on arts integration. Last year (2011-12) was the final year of their grant funding. Teachers report they are now well versed in arts standards and know how to create arts-integrated lessons. Many now train their colleagues and new teachers entering the school.
Beyond engagement and retention, adults and students at Bates cite numerous other benefits of arts integration: It encourages healthy risk taking, helps kids recognize new skills in themselves and others, provides a way to differentiate instruction, builds collaboration among both students and teachers, bridges differences, and draws in parents and the community. Plus it's just plain fun.
Lastly, there's equity. If we agree that the arts can provide all kinds of benefits for kids, from intellectual to creative to social-emotional, then shouldn't all kids have the opportunity to learn about and experience them? But far too few schools have either the funding or the bureaucratic support to make this a priority, a lack often born out of fear of sacrificing academic achievement. What Bates and many other arts-integrated schools across the country are showing is that by creating a richer, more memorable learning experience through the arts, they unleash not only a rising tide of academic achievement but they lay the foundation for what it means to be a truly creative community.
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Education Trends
The Social and Emotional Benefits of Being Weirdly Creative
August 29, 2012
By focusing on the shapes and sounds of Balinese musical instruments (above), Bates Middle School students learn about radius and diameter. Test scores show knowledge retention improving; students say they enjoy learning and feel connected socially. Credit: Zachary Fink
The boy is small in stature, bespectacled, and unnaturally articulate for a sixth grader. I have heard from his teachers and principal at Annapolis, Maryland's Wiley H. Bates Middle School about the academic benefits of arts integration, how various forms of artistic expression (PDF) are employed to learn math and science as well as language arts. I have also learned about the virtues of a critical-thinking technique known as Artful Thinking, developed by Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, that deepens students' intellectual understanding generally by deepening their understanding of the multiple layers of artistic expression.
Now I am keen to discover more about the social and emotional aspects of this learning strategy. Are relationships between students positively affected by arts integration? What about the rapport between kids and teachers? My young source holds forth with disarming confidence, especially about some of the toughest social and emotional issues middle school students face: fitting in with your peers, being different without becoming isolated, how to navigate the gauntlet of critics, teasers, and bullies that line the rocky path to high school.
I probe for more details. (Full disclosure: I, too, was a little guy, often defending myself against the big boys whenever they set out to prove their physical dominance. So I find my source's calm, rational discourse a bit too good to be true.) What I learn from him starts to soften me up.
I'll paraphrase his remarks: Expressing yourself creatively in front of an entire class, especially when you are not good at art, is the great equalizer. At first you feel pretty weird, especially singing and dancing. Because you've never done anything like this before, and you're not sure you want to work with other students this way. You think maybe someone will make fun of you. But because everybody has to sing and dance and do the art, everyone is in the same boat. It's harder to put someone down if you're the same as him.
So you have to keep doing the art day after day. You have to dance the motions of the planets or sing their name in a song or take a photo of a jungle gym exhibiting the properties of an isosceles triangle. And somehow, through all these awkward displays of creativity, the social playing field levels, and you actually start to have fun, and you begin to make friends with kids you might never have even spoken to, because they're having fun, too.
Even Too-Cool-for-School Kids Can't Resist
I get the point, and I am impressed with his how-a-negative-becomes-a-positive analysis. Still, I want to see this contagious classroom creativity in the flesh. I am escorted to Mrs. Dunn's seventh-grade math class. Here students are investigating the geometric properties of circular shapes, in this case, the circular shapes of traditional Balinese percussion instruments. As round cymbals and drums of various sizes are distributed to the students, I size up the class. A not untypical cast of characters, all shapes, sizes, and colors. One group catches my eye: three boys wearing similar athletic-style jerseys. Tallish, physically fit, and chuckling with each other, they are clearly content with themselves. Asked by the teacher to observe something about the circular instruments, each obliges haltingly. Two of the three are only moderately helpful in group efforts to choreograph a dance to illustrate the circle properties. But when the entire class commences to play the instruments and dance around in concentric circles, I am astonished.
First of all, it's true: Everyone looks pretty weird, especially my boys in the jerseys. And it only gets weirder as the tempo picks up. Unexpectedly, I actually find myself choking up. Virtually every kid is smiling, if not laughing out loud. Heads, tails, and torsos are wagging in all directions. A blissful oneness seems to reign across all the social divides, and even the three musketeers seem dead ringers for the goofy, upbeat little preschoolers I am sure they once were. When asked after the dance about circular geometry, the quick, animated responses from every corner of the classroom leave no doubt that learning is happening.
Almost without exception, teachers at Bates are enthused about arts integration as a method for making learning a deeper experience for students and faculty. They are quick to add that the program has not brought an end to classroom disruptions, the need to keep kids on task, or the occasional disciplinary referral or suspension. But it has rolled back the need to police kids. And it has opened up new vistas of social and emotional connection between students and adults. As one science teacher reports, "With the vast majority of my students, I am truly facilitating big chunks of their learning by focusing them on diverse artistic expressions of their knowledge. They do the expressing, not me. And because I am not commanding them, I think they like me better. I know I like me better."
Source: www.edutopia.org
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