Sharing Good Practice
Why teaching the Arts is integral to
helping students develop 21st century skills
By Ms. Cory Wilkerson
O
ne of the best testimonies to the
value of arts education came
from a principal I met while in
Dubai presenting for the KDSL
MENA conference. He told me about
the art teacher in his primary school,
who was teaching 4 year olds about
perspective. She did it by helping them
create a snowman picture.
You all know how to make a snowman;
three balls of increasingly smaller sizes
stacked atop of one another with a
carrot nose and charcoal eyes. She
asked them to do this, but then she
took them deeper. She asked them to
imagine that they were able to fly like a
bird and see the snowman from above;
and then create a picture of what the
bird would see. The bird of course
would see three nested circles with a
carrot jutting out to one side.
“And that sold my school,” said the
principal, “I had parents signing up just
because of that one exercise.” Because
of course, what the art teacher had
done was to connect abstract concepts
to concrete physical activities so that 4
year olds could participate in critical
inquiry. Herein lies the power of the
arts to engage students in the skills
they need for the 21st century. At its
core, arts education involves creating,
innovating,
generating,
making
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products, presenting, responding,
critically thinking about product and
processes; as well as connecting with
the world.
Arts Standards Website a Treasure
Map for Designing Instruction in
and through the Arts
Visitors to the National Core Arts
Standards interactive website will
find The global processes and their
corresponding overarching eleven
anchors which, define the way the
brain and body make art. Finally, the
site maps the anchor standards to
grade level discipline specific learning
targets for planning instruction and
assessing learning in Dance, Media
Arts, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts.
Returning to our snowman story, let’s
imagine the art teacher aligning her
lesson with the standards so that
she could define focused learning
targets and assess student learning.
Beginning with the artistic processes,
she might have identified creating
(students were making snowmen) and
responding (students were critically
thinking about artwork) as the focus
of this particular lesson. Searching
through
the
anchor
standards
Creating Anchor #1, “Generate and
conceptualize artistic ideas and work,”
Class Time
and Responding Anchor #8, “Interpret
intent and meaning in artistic work,”
jump out as overarching goals.
These align quite nicely with the
Common Core Geometry standards
for Kindergarten. “Describe objects
in the environment using names of
shapes and describe relative positions
of these objects using terms such
as above, below, beside, in front of,
behind, next to”. Using the custom
handbook function of the website and
choosing the filters of “Visual Arts”,
“Grades PreK & K” “Creating” and
“Responding” brings up grade level
standards aligned with these Artistic
Processes and Arts Anchors which
serve as learning targets to evaluate
student learning and focus instruction.
“VA: Cr1.1.K engage in exploration and
imaginative play with materials,” and
“VA: Re7.2.K describe what an image
represents.”
This example shows how the new
process based national core arts
standards and their interactive
home form a map for learning
which allows educators to easily
connect their lessons to 21st century
learning in the arts. Stop by often,
you’ll find the buried treasure at
www.nationalartsstanards.org.