Sloan+Willona

March 2009 - Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development//
 * Making Content Connections Through Arts Integration**//. Willona M. Sloan

ABSTRACT //This article summarizes how school programs used information from// “Learning, Arts, and the Brain, the Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition”// 2008, to develop arts integration programs. Experiences were cited from A+ Schools at the University of North Carolina, The Alabama Institute for Education in the Arts, and the (Out) Laws and Justice Program based in Los Angeles. Some key points learned from these sites are: · The true key to successful arts integration is collaboration among teachers · Teachers map curriculum and decide where gaps and conceptual connections occur · Teachers develop thematic units that integrate subjects · Small school districts engage teaching artists who have been trained · Teachers are trained in the process of making connections between content standards in the arts and in other disciplines · The (Out ) Law program uses a theater focus to engage kids – teachers are trained to guide students to do the thinking, talking, decision making and problem solving as they work toward clearly articulated learning goals

QUESTIONS/IMPLICATIONS · **We know about the high value regarding teacher collaboration. How will we structure helping teachers to:** o **define common (or not) learning values?** o **truly understand each other’s benchmarks?** o **develop a system to communicate instruction progress?** o **develop a system to document and communicate formative and summative assessment data?** · **Will there be a site specific arts integration “mission statement”?** · **If curriculum maps are an effective entry point for arts integration, will we help teachers map at least a part of their curriculum first?** · **How will we engage teaching artists? Make contacts? What will training include? How will pay be set up?** · **Theater seems to have many natural connection points for arts integration. Is there one art content area that may serve better to illustrate the integration process? Kind of an exemplar model?** · **Is there the possibility of arts integration that occurs between schools? Perhaps via technology? What would that look like?**