Creative Curriculum: Crafting dynamic learning experiences requires a living curriculum. Engaging students in all kinds of active learning requires planning and maintenance to get students out of their seats, to improvise, critique each other, develop habits of self-regulated behavior and respond in an energetic and focused manner. Lesson planning for arts integration with evaluation as a starting point and democratic instruction will be applied.
1. Burning Questions: We brought some “burning questions” into the conversation to orient each other about the everyday issues that we are tackling with our students right now. The questions included:
- Curriculum Development: How do we organize our great artistic ideas into manageable pieces for instruction?
- Student Creativity: What do we do when it seems like our students have no confidence in their own creativity or imagination?
- Behavior vs. Outcomes: What does it look like when we can teach more about the arts than about good behavior?
- Instructional Design: How do we get through the introduction or “lecture” part of an activity with a rich dialogue?
2. Instructional Design: We engaged in a process for learning that helps us manage all of the expectations that enter into the classroom. The process uses sets of questions that take us from:
- presenting an inviting “spark” idea (How do our feet work?)
- to students associating their own experience (How do we use our feet to get from place to place?)
- to students visualizing whatever you will be doing together (What are the ways that we move from place to place in this school?)
- to transitioning the group into the actual activity (How will we get all of these different walkers from here to the office safely?)
An excellent example from Dr.Judith Burton at Columbia University Teachers College can be found here.
3. Artistic Elements: We examined the quality of artistic engagement that we desire to provide as teaching artists. We analyzed two pieces of music and deconstructed our own language and investigative tools to find that we often stop at the most basic artistic concepts because we are usually so happy to have students “get it” versus challenging them to “go deeper”. Some of the artistic vocabulary that we explored can be found here, and a record of our discussion here.
An example that we explored together was defining “good listening skills”. When working with our students we are often satisfied when they do not talk and when they answer our questions and show that they were listening. These are not truly the skills of listening; they are just the evidence that listening is happening. Good listening skills by (our collective) definition would really be: focusing on specific sounds and the sources of those sounds, following a theme in lyrics or language, identifying characteristics of tone color, articulating a mood or message that they discovered.
4. Realistic Assessment: We returned to our original burning questions and to our own activity design and established what really successful learning would look like, if the instruction followed this rich inquiry. We generated rubrics that would map out the “bite-sized pieces” of learning that could be evident in our work. A rubric by definition is really just a set of criteria. A rubric for good teaching and learning is usually more of an interactive design that is developed between the students and the teacher. Wikipedia actually has an excellent explanation here.
See some examples of model partnerships here.