After four years of development, Arizona’s College & Career Ready Standards are ready for full implementation throughout the state in the 2014-2015 school year. For educators, this shift offers a unique opportunity to reflect not only on what they teach, but also on how they teach.
Over the next four weeks, the Arizona Commission on the Arts will be presenting a pair of exclusive blog series designed to inspire the creativity of Arizona’s educators and to explore the potential for arts integration within these new standards.
Part 1 of the first of these series, by Lynn Tuttle, the Arizona Department of Education’s Director of Arts Education, can be found here.
On Tuesday, June 17th, we’ll shift the focus to Math and English Language Arts educators with a five-part series by Paul Fisher of Arts Integration Solutions.Â
New entries will posted to the azarts417 blog every Tuesday and Thursday through July 1st.
Connections and Collaborations: English Language Arts
In part 1 of this 3-part series we looked at the background and intent of the AzCCR standards. Today we’re taking a closer look at the English Language Arts standards, how these new standards have shifted the focus of ELA instruction, and how we as arts educators can engage meaningfully with these shifts.
Before we begin, please remember a central component of the AzCCA standards is the expectation that teachers of all subject areas will engage in the development of literacy with their students. While the standards request that we all participate in this literacy “lift,” the standards also state explicitly that the literacy standards complement and supplement the content standards of other disciplines, they do not replace the content standards (paragraph 5, page 5 of the ELA standards).
ELA Instructional Shifts and the Arts
1. The new AzCCR English standards require that, over the course of a school day, students engage with not only fictional text but also informational or non-fiction texts. This is a major piece of educational advocacy, placing social studies and science texts back into the reading block of our elementary students. For arts educators and teaching artists, we often use informational texts with our students. All we need to do is to highlight this practice to our partners (other teachers, administrators) to show how we support students and our colleagues in this area.
2. The ELA standards also require our students to deeply engage with and find answers in texts. No longer can students simply refer to other experiences to answer questions correctly, moving away from the difficult task of deciphering a text in front of them; this set of standards demands that students wrestle with the text and come up with answers to questions based on the text. For us arts educators, this journey is not unlike the work we do with students in art critique or music analysis. In fact, if we use a broad and inclusive definition of text to include any human-created work (of art, music, dance, performance, theatre), then practicing good, old-fashioned critique with our students meets the intent of this instructional shift.
3. The ELA standards place a premium on domain or content-specific vocabulary and language, and ask that our students master rich, domain language in all content areas. Again, this is less about a shift in our practice as arts educators as it is about making explicit the use of our rich content language in our classrooms. And, perhaps more to the point, that our students make use of our rich content vocabulary when they are with us. This, for me, would be a great shift in my teaching practice. While I definitely use music terminology every moment I’m teaching, I’m not certain I always created space for my students to use the terminology in their verbal and written responses. Do you?
4. The ELA standards include an entire content strand on Speaking and Listening. This strand is welcomed back into ELA standards, having atrophied in earlier renditions of English standards because it is hard to measure. With the return of Speaking and Listening, we have a rich place to connect our work as theatre educators directly to the ELA standards,keeping in mind that the Speaking and Listening strand is more about informational and argumentative speaking than about creative work.
5. Finally, the ELA standards emphasize the use of academic language by and with our students. David Coleman, one of the authors of the ELA standards, refers to academic language as “keys to the kingdom” for our students. These are words like synthesize, evaluate, compare, contrast, that show up constantly throughout informational and other texts but are rarely defined for our students – especially our students in middle and high school. If students haven’t gained knowledge of these terms, then their upper-level texts are closed books to them, with little to no meaning.
Here is one area where I believe we, as arts educators, get to play a vital role in making these new literacy standards come to life, for we are one of the few content areas where we can embody academic language, literally, on our artistic, creative processes. Take the term contrast. As dancers, we physically move contrasting ways, shapes and forms. As a musician, I can play loud and then soft – a contrast made of sound and made via my body and instrument. As a visual artist, students, in real time and with their hands demonstrate contrasting shapes on paper and at the wheel. And, on the theatrical stage, contrast is made by students acting out parts, to students running the light and sound boards for a show. Who else gets to help students kinesthetically experience academic vocabulary day in and day out? Making this practice explicit, helping our students realize what they are doing in our classrooms, and how it connects to their English room down the hall, and working with our colleagues to share definitions of academic language, are all ways we can help support our students master and excel in this era of AzCCR standards.
Connections & Collaborations, part 1
Connections & Collaborations, part 3
Lynn Tuttle is Director of Arts Education at the Arizona Department of Education. Her duties include acting as a liaison to the state’s arts educators; providing professional development in Arizona’s Academic Arts Standards, arts assessment and arts integration; and promoting quality arts education programs in Arizona’s schools. She co-chaired the Arizona Arts Education Census Committee, which published the 2010 Arizona Arts Education Census, documenting access and availability of arts education in Arizona’s district and charter schools. She has keynoted for The Kennedy Center’s 2013 Partners in Education conference and the 2013 Biannual Maine Arts Education Conference, and has presented for Americans for the Arts, Arts Education Partnership, the Educational Theatre Association, the Kennedy Center Alliances for Arts Education Network, the National Art Education Association, the National Dance Education Organization, the National Association for Music Education, and the State Arts Advocacy Network. Lynn serves as Past-President for the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education and is one of the leaders of the revision of the National Voluntary Arts Education Standards. Lynn holds degrees from the Peabody Conservatory of Music (valedictorian), the Johns Hopkins University (Phi Beta Kappa) and the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.
 Photos courtesy Opening Minds through the Arts and The Drawing Studio
