Changing Education Through the Arts

Presenters: Amy Duma, The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC; Stephen D. Hockett, Fairfax County Public Schools, Reston, VA

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

II. Professional Development Process

STEPHEN HOCKETT: One of the purposes of our program, one of things that motivated a lot of us, at least at my school, is that we are all experiencing in the states' intrusion into allowing educators to make decisions about education and the student accountability piece. You'll hear about a lot of school systems taking away the arts. You'll hear a lot of school systems decreasing funding for the arts. We're very concerned because, at my school we talk about the arts and the sciences as really being the higher-level thinking skills of reading and math.

We truly believe that transfer and application happen through the arts and through the sciences. So our concerns that they were going to take these away because they felt that we had to deliver minimal standards in the areas of math and reading were very disconcerting. So that was our focus. At my school, we say É in Virginia, we have SOLs, so we say the SOLs are the ticket into the stadium, but they're not the game. If a lot of schools make that their goal, then that's as high as they're going to achieve and that's the vision they have for their children. It's not, as Amy said, developing children for life and giving and giving them the richness and fullness of what an education should be.

We began with the principals of the eight magnet schools meeting with Amy at the Kennedy Center. We had a common goal to define, develop, and implement arts education programs in all of our schools. We all knew how important planning was, especially when you're trying to coordinate the efforts of an organization like the Kennedy Center along with eight schools. So it was a very important piece. The first year was all about planning. We felt it necessary to create a shared vision, that we were all going in the same direction, although differently in every school. We did a planning session with the principals and the Kennedy Center. We then sent teachers to the Kennedy Center. There were six teachers from each school that went to courses and sessions, because we knew that the importance of what our teachers received in this process is what they were able to take back with them and implement in the classroom. So we sent six teachers to create teams to develop an implementation plan.

In creating the implementation plan, each school brought — we have what we call school improvement plans, where we have different objectives for different curriculum — so those school improvement plans were brought to the meetings. They looked for and determined commonalties that were among our schools and that were also focused on student achievement. Part of the planning was we helped to determine sessions that we were going to do in the first year. We knew it was going to be a minimum of a three-year commitment after the planning team. So we determined what kind of courses, what sessions that the schools needed and helped to design them.

Just as importantly, we developed a common language, and that was to define what arts integration is. We all thought we knew what knew what arts integration was, and we assumed that everybody was on the same page. We found out differently. It was an incredible year of learning and growth for us because we came up with: "Arts integration is finding natural connections between one or more arts forms and one or more other subject areas with learning objectives and assessment for both." Very important. This was a real "Aha." The light bulb went on for a lot of our teachers, because if you were to ask teachers, "Do you integrate the arts?" they would say would say, "Yeah. We sing 'Fifty Nifty States,' so we're integrating music and social studies." "I have dioramas, so that's visual arts." So we said, "No. That's not it." So we talked about the need to deliver dual learning objectives, whether it be a visual arts objective along with a social studies objective, or a drama objective along with a language arts objective or a math objective. So it really changed the way we looked at delivering instruction. And we each had state standards and objectives in those areas, although we're not tested in those, and there are national standards and objectives. So we took all of that into account.

AMY DUMA: In order to do this planning process, we got a grant from the National Education Association Foundation for the Improvement of Education, which helped us do the year of planning. And it wasn't a lot of money, but just their recognition that this was an important project and to get the $2,000 from them — as the executive director says to me, "for tea and cookies so we can get together" — made all the difference in the world. It was also them saying this project looks like it has potential, but you need to sit down and you need to do some planning. And there are organizations out there that will do that, that will fund a planning process. They won't necessarily fund a program that's getting started, but they're interested in backing up and saying, we'll fund the planning process and then bring your planning documents to us, and then we'll see if it's worthwhile to go ahead and continue funding that. So that's what we got from the National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, and it really helped our program.

Now we get to the meat of CETA and how we have structured our professional development. It really came together in layers, and fortunately we didn't have to do all the layers at once. We started with one layer and then we gradually added to that. In the first year, as we were getting started, we put together an introductory-level course called Integrating the Arts Across the Curriculum. It consisted of five all-day sessions during the school day. We had written into our grant that the Kennedy Center had found some money to pay for the first year of implementation, and we were paying for the substitutes for the teachers to come to the sessions at the Kennedy Center.

What those five sessions consisted of were participatory workshops in the four art major forms. So one day we looked at drama, the next time they came we looked at dance, visual arts, and music. We were looking at how those arts could be integrated with other subject areas. In the first year of the program we focused on literacy skills, because in looking at the school improvement plans, that was a commonalties across all eight schools. So we were looking at the connection between those four art forms and language arts and how we could help the schools, through art integration learning activities, advance their goals of increasing literacy skills in students. A typical day when they would come to the Kennedy Center would be that they would attend the workshop in the morning and then in the afternoon there would be planning time. The teachers said this was the real gift for them, because they never really have the chance to sit down, uninterrupted, and do some planning with their colleagues.

I should back up. They're coming in teams from each of the schools at this point. The teams consisted of the principal, at least one arts specialist (and by that I mean the music teacher or the visual arts teacher), and the rest were classroom teachers. But the makeup of those teams was key also, because there was somebody on the team who had an expertise in one of those art forms. The principal was also there to show support, but really we wanted the project to be teacher-driven, so the inclusion of the classroom teachers was key.

In the afternoon after we'd had lunch, the planning time was for them to sit down as a team and consider, out of what we learned in the morning, does that trigger any ideas? Do any of those ideas really resonate with us? What kinds of learning activities are we going to be developing? And we put together some forms that would help them with this. We didn't want to have teachers right from the very beginning just writing lesson plans — here's the form that you use, write your lesson plans — because what we were concerned about was that they would develop their first idea into a lesson plan. What we wanted them to do was to brainstorm a number of ideas.

For example, if we were looking at the connections between drama and language arts, brainstorm at least about four ideas of how drama could be integrated with language arts. Then we have some criteria. And going back to our definition of arts integration, is the connection natural? Are there objectives in both the art form and the other subject area? Is there assessment in both of them? Is it developmentally appropriate for the age level of the children? Asking them those questions, getting them to think about which one of those of those would be the best one for them to then develop into a lesson plan. So we got them thinking critically about arts integration. We wanted to raise the bar, and that's what this first year really did.

The other important thing that we did the first year was, they came as teams and we said, okay you're teams, but you're going to function as study groups. We found some resources that would help us define what study groups are. We said, you're going to be focusing on looking at and studying arts integration for the next two years — we asked for a two-year commitment from the team. And the way that that's going to happen is, you're going to have these five sessions where you come to the Kennedy Center, where you're with your colleagues from the other eight schools, you're going to attend these participatory workshops, you're going to have planning time, but that's not enough. There needs to be work happening in between those sessions, otherwise it's all just going to die.

So we set it up so that there would be an expectation that there would be study group meetings at least once a month in their schools for two hours or twice a month for one hour. And they could decide when they wanted to meet, where they wanted to meet. They put together a one-year action plan, and they decided on their schedule of when they were going to meet, who was going to run the meetings, all the logistical things like that — who was going to call the meetings, who was going to take the notes — but also, what were their goals for the first year? The given was that they were going to be studying arts integration, but what specifically were their goals? One group from one school decided to focus on one particular art form. But they could decide. We weren't going to legislate that for them.

So, as they met in their study groups, we sent them articles that we found in educational journals and magazines about arts integration. With some of them, we didn't agree with their philosophy, but we sent them to them anyway, so they could read them and talk about them and say, hey, wait a minute, this isn't what we believe. So, again, to get them thinking and reading critically about arts integration, to raise the bar on their definition. Then, as they began to try out some of the learning activities that they were learning in the workshops in their classrooms, they would come back and share that in their study group meetings: Oh, I tried this learning activity with my students, and here's how it went.

Every time they met, they filled out what we called the study group log, which was just a way for them to write down, in a brief format, the minutes for their meetings. They faxed those into the Kennedy Center. We also got copies of their action plan. So it was a way for us to set up a communications structure, too, so we knew what was happening. And once in a while they would write on their study group log, "We have questions about this part of it. Amy, can you help us out." And then I would try to go and find some resources, and I would either email of fax them what they were asking for. That made me feel a part of the whole process, and I didn't have to be out at nine different study group meetings in eight different schools during the year. That would have been a full-time job in and of itself. But I felt I was connected with what they were doing, and I could seen what was needed and the next step as we were putting together the professional development.

So the study group piece was very helpful, and in the resources in the back of your packet, we've listed the book that we used, called Whole-Faculty Study Groups, by Lick and Murphy, that you can order through the National Staff Development Council. It's a wonderful resource.

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