Author(s): Remer, Jane
Published: September 2010 in Arts Education Policy Review
URL to article
Research Focus Area: Grading systems that work and are meaningful in the 21st century especially for colleges and employeers, and for topics like PE, arts, and health
Abstract:
This article explores the process of using lessons learned about high quality, effective arts education programs to help local educational leaders and practitioners create their own policy statements. It raises questions about policy implications from those lessons and connects them to the readers’ own experience. It provides an intellectual framework and an action agenda for developing local policy at the classroom, school, or district level that supports high quality arts education for every student. It argues that effective arts education programs must be supported by responsive policy and ongoing tax levy funds to have a greater chance for providing quality arts teaching and learning that endures.
Research Question(s):
What are the key lessons that arts educators and other school stakeholders need to know about building effective arts education programs?
Methods:
Intervention
Setting:
The author has built arts education programs across the united states.
Key Findings:
- There is a need for local arts education policy that embraces a wide spectrum of philosophies.
- There is a need for local arts education policy that embraces a wide spectrum of philosophies.
- This article outlines some of the valuable lessons that the author has learned over the years of local arts education programming.
- Lesson One: There Is No One Definitive Answer to the Question, “What Is Effective Arts Education?
- Because of the different styles, genres, and value systems that undergird our multiple approaches to arts education, there are many interlocking or colliding variables to producing effective arts education policy
- Lesson Two: The Vision Statement—All the Arts for All the Children
- Every project, program, and arts partnership needs a vision statement to capture your idea of the purpose and impact of arts teaching on student learning.
- Lesson Three: The Dance of Change—Preparing for the Fred and Ginger Routine
- The process of designing effective arts education policy will be fraught with set-backs. All stakeholders should be aware of this at the start and should prepare a head of time strategies to persevere through the adversity
- Lesson Four: Strategies for Change
- Distributed leadership, collaboration, and networking are the backbone of effective arts education programs.
- Lesson Five: Benchmarks and Criteria
- Program participants and experts in the arts and education should define benchmarks and criteria for high-quality teaching and learning in the arts.
- Lesson Six: Method
- Just as there are diverse definitions of and approaches to arts education, there are several schools of thought about what counts as arts learning and how to capture it. There is no “best” method to arts education research
- Lesson Seven: Who Should Teach the Arts? The Troika Plus
- the goal for all school resource personnel, including artists, should be to build capacity in and through the arts within and throughout the school (or district) staff.
- The Troika arrangement is a powerful idea for building buy-in and capacity throughout the school, and it helps to create district networks when joined with similar configurations in other district schools. It brings together Arts educators Classroom or subject area teachers artists
- Lesson Eight: Professional Development—Critical Support for Developing the Critical Mass
- single-day sessions (sometimes called one-offs), have little or no impact on participants, especially if the sessions consist mostly of lengthy lectures and poorly facilitated panel discussions
- One of the most effective approaches to professional development is the action workshop model, in which a series of interactive events encourage participant engagement and lead to new understandings of the topics or themes at hand.
- All professional development needs to be documented, assessed, and reviewed, revised, or adjusted throughout the partnership or program.
- Lesson Nine: Community Arts Partnerships
- Partnerships are complex strategic means to ends agreed upon by the partners. They require patience, negotiation, determination, and a genuine desire to collaborate; they need a lot of work and time and are not appropriate for every situation.
- Many partnerships stumble and disappear when grant funds run out. The irony and cruelty of this situation is that many of these relationships are on the brink of finally figuring out what they are doing, how best to do it, when to document it, and how to present it coherently to interested outsiders
- Lesson Ten: Moving from Pockets of Excellence to a Critical, Sustainable Mass
- The problem with “pockets of excellence” is that they are frail, have brief shelf lives as innovations, and are not designed to generalize or “scale up” across school systems. Most of these programs do not last long enough to develop and mature through the cycle of preliminary innovation to the point of complete faculty buy-in during implementation, and, eventually, to careful documentation and validation over time.
- the A-Plus program has studied American arts education history, and it seems to have found a strategy for moving beyond the pocket of excellence structure and building on bedrock toward a critical mass of network schools in several states
- Lesson Eleven: Arts Advocacy as a Double-Edged Sword
- the arts education community, which makes such a significant and costly contribution to the education community, is its own and almost only champion. We still have not figured out how to make determined allies and stalwart champions out of a critical mass of schools and educators who are our regular partners and whom we serve as resources.
- Lesson Twelve: Don’t Forget the Money, Honey, but Try Not to Depend on the Kindness of Strangers
- “Don’t put all your arts education eggs in one basket”, the author warns. Arts education is sustainably funded by an array of sources at each time
Implications:
The author recommends the following policies for potential stakeholders in schools. These include educational administrators at all levels, teachers, specialists, librarians, social workers, parents, students, artists, all relevant decisionmakers in community arts and cultural organizations, school boards, elected and appointed legislators, and others who care about the arts as part of the core education for young people.
- All arts policies currently on the books at the state, district, and school level should be regularly reviewed for aptness and compliance in the schools and districts for which they were written
- All students should learn the fundamentals of dance, music, theater, the visual arts, and film and media. They should choose one or more of the art forms for advanced, sequential learning through graduation.
- Students and teachers should conduct and engage in arts studies that make authentic and balanced connections to other academic disciplines.
- Quality arts teaching by certified arts educators with deep content-based knowledge and experience in teaching the arts should be enhanced and extended by in-depth collaboration with classroom teachers, college and university instructors, and community artists receiving sustained preservice and ongoing in-service training and professional development.
- Decisions regarding who shall provide leadership, training, and professional development should be made by consensus through the deliberations of a collaborative council of school administrators, arts educators, classroom teachers, community artists, and parents empowered to render these and other instructional judgments.
- National, state, and local standards, blueprints, and curriculum frameworks and assessments should be made available as guides to school curriculum development, instruction, and assessment practices.
- Technical and instructional assistance should be available from the school and the local school district to support principals and their teachers in the design, implementation, and assessment of comprehensive and coherent arts education for every child in every school. This assistance might be provided by an itinerant team of certified arts educators, classroom and other teachers, and professional artists identified by the collaborative council.
- Qualitative and fundamental quantitative methods for student self- and peer-to-peer assessment, teacher action research, and rigorous school-based or independent program evaluation should be embedded in the teaching and learning process throughout the school or district.
- The arts and cultural community should be invited to engage with and provide extended services to schools. They should develop partnerships with the school community and be urged to construct semester- or year-long high-quality arts and career opportunities for students.
- Parents should be urged to engage in arts learning with their children, and should be afforded opportunities for personal and professional growth in and through the arts. They should also become regular observers of their children’s work and serve as critical friends regarding the quality of student work and “performance” effectiveness of the arts program and its outcomes.
- Any and all afterschool arts teaching and learning should be available to all students and connect directly to the goals and objectives of the school’s ongoing sequential arts curriculum.
- Networking and collaboration should be a fully developed strategy to support collaboration and sharing among all participants in the school and district’s arts programs.
- Outside and independent evaluators should be engaged to assess student learning, evaluate arts education programs over time, and make recommendations for improvement.
- Tax levies and other generally reliable sources of money for teaching and learning in the arts should be line-item entries in the school and district budgets.
Limitations:
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