School Reform & the Arts

Editorial note: This summary was compiled from the recommmendations of state arts education coordinators and NEA staff. All summary statements are drawn directly from each listed program's published information. For the most complete and up-to-date understanding of these models, be sure to contact the sponsoring organizations.

Mission/Philosophies of Some National Models for Arts Education
(and other interesting information)

Arts Centered Learning Models

A+ Schools that Work for Everyone
Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts
PO Box 10610
Winston-Salem NC 27108
910/722-0338 (fax) 910/722-0081

The A+ Schools program is an approach to teaching and learning grounded in the belief that the arts can play a central role in how children learn. It represents a viable option for schools seeking a focus based on similar beliefs. A+ Schools cover the North Carolina Standard Course of Study through interdisciplinary thematic units, combined with arts integration and hands-on, experiential learning, including daily arts instruction by arts teachers. A+ Schools also develop strong partnerships with parents, area cultural resources, local colleges and universities, and the media.

The A+ approach to learning is based on Howard Gardner's 15 years of research on multiple intelligences and is also supported by more recent brain research and other theories of intelligence. A+ Schools combine interdisciplinary teaching and daily arts instruction, offering children opportunities to learn through all the ways in which they are able. The arts are taught daily to every child: drama, dance, music and visual arts at least once each week. Teaching the required curriculum involves a many-disciplined approach, with the arts continuously woven into every aspect of a child's learning.  

Different Ways of Knowing
Different Ways of Knowing (often called DWoK) is an inquiry-based, arts-infused, interdisciplinary professional development initiative. It's also a curriculum. For most participating educators, DWoK is a central part of their school's and district's plans for continuous school improvement. The academic and social success of every child forms the motivation for their work in the classroom and with one another. Click here for website.

Different Ways of Knowing, then, is a philosophy of education, a model curriculum, and a design for the development, practice, and sharing of knowledge about effective classroom teaching strategies. The vision we have for all students is stated best by Eliot W. Eisner (1997) in his description of two especially important aims of education:

We would like our children to be well-informed-that is, to understand ideas that are important, useful, beautiful, and powerful. And we also want them to have the appetite and ability to think analytically and critically, to be able to speculate and imagine, to see connections among ideas, and to be able to use what they know to enhance their own lives and to contribute to their culture. 

H.O.T. (Higher Order Thinking) Schools
Connecticut Commission on the Arts
755 Main Street, One Financial Plaza
Hartford CT 06103
860/566-4770 (fax) 860/566-6462

As communities of students, parents, educators and artists, Higher Order Thinking Schools create a school culture in which learning in, about and through the arts, in a democratic setting, enables each child's voice to be celebrated. Through innovative, arts infused curriculum, Higher Order Thinking Schools promote intellectual and academic growth allowing each school to continuously work towards its unique vision.

LEAP (The Lakeview Education & Arts Partnership
Chicago Teachers'Center
770 N. Halstead, 4th Floor
Chicago IL 60622
(312) 733-7330
(fax)(312) 733-8188

In 1993, the Lakeview Education & Arts Partnership (LEAP) formed with the singular objective to increase student achievement by integrating the arts across the daily curriculum. Initially funded by the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education (CAPE), LEAP has received full implementation support from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which will continue through the year 2000. The LEAP network includes one high school and three of its feeder elementary schools. Also in the partnership are two arts organizations, a regional library, the local chamber of commerce and a local university, which serves as anchor organization. Currently, the program involves over 20 artists teaming with 67 teachers to create integrated curriculum units which address state goals and objectives. Over 2,000 students receive the benefit of this rigorous arts academic initiative. Central to the partnership vision is the necessity to connect the community to the schools. This includes an active parent component, an advisory council, biannual community meetings, an end-of-the-year exhibit at the Beacon Street Gallery, on-going transition to high school activities, an arts academic summer school, and an urban/suburban exchange.

The core of LEAP's work is the Integrated Curricular Lesson (ICL). The ICL is a unit in which artist is teamed with teacher to present a unique and creative approach to learning a core curricular subject. It is not a residency. The artist will plan with the teacher prior to going into the classroom and together they will fashion a lesson plan that address state goals and objectives. The artist will then visit the classroom 12-15 times over the course of 3-6 weeks (at least twice a week). The artist and teacher team teach the unit and as a result of this creative collaboration, students become more engaged in their own learning. They are excited about coming to class and are not bored. They truly learn the material.

SPECTRA + III
Fitton Center for Creative Arts
101 South Monument Avenue
Hamilton OH 45011-2833
(513) 863-8873
(fax) (513) 863-8865

Since being developed, SPECTRA+ has emerged as one of the nation's leading efforts to demonstrate the effectiveness of quality daily arts experiences in the traditional neighborhood elementary school. A few primary components that have led to this success include:

• dedicated Principals willing to be flexible and take risks .
• supportive Superintendents and Boards of Education .
• teachers always ready to accept new challenges and willing to share their talents and insights to develop the program .
• a local arts agency (Fitton Center for the Creative Arts) providing leadership and central values and beliefs upon which to build the program. Click here for website.

Whole Schools Institute
Mississippi Arts Commission
1750 Brentwood Blvd. Suite 207
Jackson MS 39201
(601) 359-6030
(fax) (601) 359-6008

Over the past seven years, the Mississippi Arts Commission has piloted and evaluated an arts-based, interdisciplinary curriculum that seeks to provide every student in the school with regular instruction by certified music, visual art, drama and dance instructors. In addition, the arts educators meet regularly with classroom teachers to enhance the regular instruction by using the arts as a bridge to learning other subject material. Click here for website.

Other Pertinent Information

The Center for Arts Education
The Center for Arts Education
225 West 34th Street, Suite 820
New York NY 10122
800/721-9199

The Center for Arts Education is an independent, not-for-profit organization committed to restoring and sustaining arts education as an essential part of every child's education in the New York City public schools. We identify, fund and support exemplary partnerships and programs that demonstrate how the arts contribute to learning and student achievement. We are dedicated to influencing educational and fiscal policies that will ultimately result in the restoration of arts education in all of our city's public schools.

Harvard Project Zero
Project Zero
Harvard Graduate School of Education
321 Longfellow Hall
13 Appian Way
Cambridge MA 02138
(617) 495-4342

Harvard Project Zero, a research group at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has investigated the development of learning processes in children, adults, and organizations for over 32 years. Today, Project Zero is building on this research to help create communities of reflective, independent learners; to enhance deep understanding within disciplines; and to promote critical and creative thinking. Project Zero's mission is to understand and enhance learning, thinking, and creativity in the arts and other disciplines for individuals and institutions.

Kennedy Center: Performing Arts Centers and Schools Partners in Education
Education Department
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Washington D.C. 20566-0001
202/416-8806 (fax) 202/416-8802

The Performing Arts Centers and Schools: Partners in Education program of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is designed to assist performing arts centers and presenting organizations throughout the nation develop and expand educational partnerships with their local school systems with a special emphasis on the professional development of teachers. In 1992, this program was awarded the Association of Performing Arts Presenters' Dawson Award which recognizes innovative and successful projects.

The Performing Arts Centers and Schools program is based on the belief that the professional development of teachers is an essential component of any effort designed to increase the artistic literacy of young people. The Kennedy Center's extensive experience with its local professional development program, established in 1976, provides the basis for this national program. Currently, 67 communities in 37 states participate in the program.

Partnership teams consist of a representative of a performing arts center/presenting organization and a representative of a neighboring school system. The program includes:

• a five-day Institute that offers partnership teams program models and planning strategies for establishing or expanding professional development programs in the arts for all teachers;
• follow-up consultation to assist in program development, and current information on legislation and policy affecting schools and arts education;
• annual meetings to assist teams in their partnership and program development; and special access to Kennedy Center touring programs.

Lincoln Center Institute
Lincoln Center Institute
70 Lincoln Center Plaza, 7th Floor
New York NY 10023-6594
212/875-5535 (fax) 212/875-5539

The purpose of the Lincoln Center Institute is to foster the development of aesthetic education as an important part of learning through educational partnerships with school districts. The focus is on developing skills of perception through greater understanding of art forms, of how artists make choices and how these understandings relate to other aspects of life.

The Institute provides New York metropolitan area elementary and secondary school teachers and their students with opportunities to explore the aesthetic dimension of the human experience through encounters with a broad spectrum of the performing and visual arts.

The Institute's approach to aesthetic education involves teachers and their students in a process of carefully planned observation and analysis of works of art linked to participation in activities designed to illuminate the relationship between artistic choice and aesthetic response. Toward this end, a working partnership has been formed between schools and the Institute, and between artists and teachers working in classrooms.

The partnership involves long-term commitments from the participating school districts which provide administrative and financial support, as well as time in the school day for school teams to plan with teaching artists in the design, development and implementation of units of study in aesthetic education. The Institute, in turn, is committed to working closely with these schools on a continuing basis to develop the program concept and to serve as artistic resource.
 

Prairie Visions
Nebraska Arts Council
Joslyn Castle Carriage House
3838 Davenport
Omaha NE 68131-2329
402/595-2122 (fax) 402/444-6548

From Education Week on the Web, Feb. 3, 1999:

About 150 teachers from across the Cornhusker State take over the Joslyn every year and plot a revolution for their schools. They come for a weeklong professional-development institute called Prairie Visions, part of a effort by the Getty Education Institute for the Arts to transform the way art is taught in the United States. Sponsored by the Nebraska Arts Council, the institute is led by a team of professors from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, who train the teachers in the theory and practice of discipline-based arts education.

The approach takes its somewhat awkward name from the four disciplines of visual art: art-making, art history, art criticism, and aesthetics. Proponents believe all of these elements are crucial to a comprehensive arts education and should be integrated into the entire K-12 curriculum.
 
President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities: Gaining the Arts Advantage
From the FOREWORD by Harriet Mayor Fulbright and Richard J. Deasy:

This report responds to questions posed by school and community leaders throughout the United States about public school districts that have made literacy and competence in the arts one of the fundamental purposes of schooling for all their students.

Ninety-one school districts are featured in this report. But hundreds more were identified by state and national education and arts organizations as having outstanding arts education throughout their schools. We are grateful to the countless individuals in all of the districts who contributed their time, wisdom, and enthusiasm to make this report meaningful to their colleagues across the country. They knew better than we the questions that needed to be answered. We hope we have recorded their answers faithfully and accurately. Click here for website.