az-ccrs-logo-long

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 explore the potential for arts integration within these new standards and to inspire the creativity of Arizona’s educators.

First, Lynn Tuttle, the Arizona Department of Education’s Director of Arts Education, will discuss the challenges and opportunities the new standards present to arts educators in a three-part series entitled “Connections and Collaborations”.

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. 

New entries will posted to the azarts417 blog every Tuesday and Thursday through July 1st.

Connections and Collaborations: Introduction

Arizona’s College and Career Ready Standards (AzCCR) were adopted by the Arizona State Board of Education in June, 2010. Arizona, along with 45 others states, engaged in a multi-year, multi-state partnership to create these standards (Common Core), and then reviewed and adapted them for use in Arizona. The AzCCR standards are for English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics, replacing our prior state standards in these areas.

Why did Arizona and other states desire to change their ELA and Math standards? The answer is really quite simple – to help our students be more successful in their lives and to make the United States more globally competitive. Remember that these standards were written during the height of the Great Recession, and the country as a whole was deeply concerned about our ability to compete internationally for jobs. Along with fears of being left behind, we had data showing that our students are falling behind, with almost 60% of community college freshmen needing remedial coursework prior to engaging in college-level work. These standards were designed to meet the challenge of making our graduating high school students ready to enter college, university or the workplace successfully.

Arts EducationThe AzCCR standards are similar to prior standards in English and Mathematics, with the standards arranged by content area (e.g. Speaking and Listening strand) and by grade level (articulation). Several differences occur, however, in how the standards were developed. First, the standards are built with an articulation from college downwards. This is a relatively new way to write standards, and shifts, at times, the expectations of what will be taught when from what we like to teach or think students are ready for to what students must know in order to be ready for college-level work upon high school graduation. Second, the standards were written by content experts, not educators. Educators certainly had multiple opportunities for input; however, the standards writers are first and foremost content experts, focusing on content knowledge. And finally, as mentioned at the top, the standards are based on research showing how our students can be competitive in a global marketplace.

One very distinctive difference between our prior English standards and the AzCCR English standards is the inclusion of literacy standards across all content areas. This means that there is an 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).

Arts EducationHow, then, do we connect the AzCCR standards to our work in arts education? Certainly, there are new challenges for us in establishing such connections, but there are also great opportunities to develop new skills and experiment with new methods. Further, a close examination of these shifts reveals that, in many cases, connections already exist between the work we do (and how we do it) and the AzCCR standards.

In part 2 of this 3-part series, we’ll look at instructional shifts in the ELA standards, and how we as arts educators can engage meaningfully with these shifts. In part 3, we’ll focus on instructional shifts in math. Throughout the series, we’ll attempt to clarify what these shifts mean for you and your work, offer some tips on how to better connect these standards to your work, and outline some key concepts that will help you communicate with your fellow teachers and administrators about your work as it relates to the standards.

Connections & Collaborations, part  2

Connections & Collaborations, part 3

Lynn-Tuttle-4-2Lynn 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 by Anne Guthrie, courtesy University of Arizona Poetry CenterÂ