Minneapolis Public Schools: Arts for Academic Achievement (AAA)


Minneapolis Public Schools: Arts for Academic Achievement (AAA)

Contact: Pat Teske , Director of Comprehensive Arts 807 N.E. Broadway Ave. Minneapolis, MN 55413 Phone: (612) 668-5346		Fax: (612) 668-5305 Email: pteske@mpls.k12.mn.us Web Address: Visit web site
Approach: AAA is a successful school reform model that creates collaborations between classroom teachers, artists and arts organizations. AAA is designed to improve student achievement and teacher practice through engaging lesson design, the use of data, strong content focus and arts strategies. Partners: Ford Foundation Keep Arts in Schools University of Minnesota Center for Applied Research for Educational Improvement Perpich Center for Arts Education A myriad of arts organizations and teaching artists Description: The vision for the arts in Minneapolis Public Schools: All the arts— visual, dance, music, theater, and media—engage all students, enabling them to learn and to find success, meaning, and understanding of themselves and others throughout their lives. Mission of Arts for Academic Achievement: Arts for Academic Achievement seeks to increase student achievement, improve teacher practice, and positively impact school culture through arts-based and arts-integrated learning. The mission remains the same while the program continues to evolve to take into account emerging research on the brain and how humans learn. Job embedded professional development. AAA offers a range of professional development to support the continuum of teachers’ understanding and experience with arts integration. Various entry points and levels of engagement are provided along a continuum known as Pathways. Collaboration. A teacher team receives funding to collaborate with an artist to improve student achievement. Teachers and artist learn to work together as collaborators by first identifying specific learning goals in the arts, in non-arts subjects, and in positive behaviors that promote student success. Arts integration possibilities are tried and developed; alignments with standards are made. Exploratory Professional Development Embedded with Reflection. Teachers, artists and students meet in mid-course and final reflections to assess learning and understanding. They make adjustments to ensure that all students are on track to achieve the learning goals. Students demonstrate their learning to their communities through performances and exhibitions of understand. A vision for moving the work to a deeper level of student learning evolves over one to two years. In-Depth and Intensive Professional Development Strategy Skill Set with Coaching. Strategies that have been validated as improving student achievement are disseminated. Examples include observational drawing integrated into the science notebook and tableau, Readers Theater, and poetry writing integrated in language arts. An AAA staff member works collaboratively with a teaching artist to design and deliver the skill set to teachers. Following the experience, the AAA staff member and the collaborating artist visit each teacher’s classroom to model the strategy. On subsequent visits the teacher takes more and more responsibility for applying the strategy in their lessons as the staff member and teaching artist move into the position of coaches. The expectation is that the teachers will use the strategy independently by the end of the cycle. Professional Learning Communities. AAA staff co-teaches a series of staff development workshops with another district content specialist and/or teaching artist. They focus on a particular family of strategies to integrate the arts into non-arts content. A cadre of teachers participates as learners; they experience and reflect on the strategies and choose one to implement in their classroom. As the series of meetings progress, the teachers design and deliver lessons using the strategy, then bring back student work from their classrooms for examination by the study group. Lessons are shared and tuned, based on the student work. Use of tools and protocols. A variety of methods are used to maximize quality in arts integrated collaborative projects. Teams use a planning process based on Understanding by Design (McTighe and Wiggins). Reflective Protocols are used to facilitate the examination of student work, the tuning of work in progress, and descriptive and critical responses to lesson and program designs. Strategies: Theory of change. Arts for Academic Achievement, the district arts specialists, and their partners have created a strategic plan for arts integration and arts education that has been ratified by the Minneapolis Board of Education. Known as the Comprehensive Arts Plan, it is integrated with the strategic improvement plan for the district as a whole. Coordinated Effort. To implement the theory of change, Arts for Academic Achievement and the Fine Arts Department of the Minneapolis Public Schools have combined their efforts as Comprehensive Arts. Resources: In 2007, Minneapolis Public Schools arts integration/education was nationally recognized through a $500,000 Ford Grant in support of Arts for Academic Achievement. The Ford Foundation’s 3-year grant expands opportunities for Minneapolis Public school students. Additionally, the AAA program joins the Ford Foundation’s Arts Education Initiative, a broad-based coalition that includes organizations from Oakland; Baltimore; Jackson, Mississippi; St. Louis; Cleveland; Dallas, and Washington, D.C. As part of this group, Arts for Academic Achievement participates in national meetings to gain access to a range of technical and professional services, including a national evaluation firm. Since 2002: Arts for Academic Achievement has worked in partnership with AchieveMinneapolis, a foundation that exists to galvanize community resources to help all Minneapolis Public School students to succeed. In addition to a substantial allocation in the district's budget, through Achieve. AAA reaches out to a range of donors including, public grantmakers, private organizations, foundations, and individuals. From 1997-2002: The Minneapolis Public Schools received an Annenberg Challenge Grant that was matched 2:1 by public and private funds. Findings : As of 2006, AAA a new cycle of research with the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement was in progress. From past evaluations by Ingrahm and Seashore (Minneapolis Arts for Academic Achievement): Significant relationships among arts integrated instruction and gains in reading and math, including: As arts integration deepened (see useful tools VAI for units), 3rd graders reading scores raised by 1.02 points As teachers integrated math and arts (for every VAI unit increased), 3rd grade math scores were 1.08 points higher. Move towards educational equity. Researchers noted bigger improvement difference for learners not traditionally well served by education. Also, students in special education successfully integrated and performed well in arts-integrated instruction classes. Teachers began to see new strengths in students hindered by negative labels, developing a broader sense of possibility. Intensity counts. “The amount of arts integration matters” (Ingram and Seashore)p.4. The deeper the involvement and interaction of both disciplines and teaching collaborators, the more change. Teachers changed instructional approaches. AAA educators began to facilitate more, using more experiential, child-focused instruction. Their "tool kit" expanded as teachers and partners developed new instructional strategies together. Lessons Learned: Arts integration for student engagement. Teachers have consistently reported that arts integration is a strategy that can increase student engagement in learning. Students who typically don’t succeed in a traditional classroom setting will thrive and excel when the arts are integrated into the curriculum. Collaborative teaching supports reflection. Working together with an arts partner in the classroom allows teachers to see their students with new eyes and increased potential. Since the release of the CAREI report, and despite the increased focus of testing due to No Child Left Behind, teachers are seeking specific arts integration strategies that can address non-arts learning goals. The program continues to evolve to meet the needs of teachers in this test driven environment. Develop personal professional questions. Teams of arts and education personnel form a powerful professional development combination. While a variety of professional development approaches took place during the AAA project, teachers and evaluators found the most powerful learning happened in groups of teachers and arts partner teams. Partners set goals, taught to their plans, and reflected on student learning and what to improve. This collaborative, reflective approach promoted school change (Ingram and Seashore) p.6. Link to required school plans. AAA assessed school commitment to arts integration by monitoring its inclusion in the district mandated plan. Arts inclusion in school improvement plans rose from 43% to 55%. Arts in staff development plans rose from 35% to 43% of participating schools (Ingram and Seashore) p.8. Cultivate district level leadership and accountability. Because the district policies are such an important influence on the life of schools, having the support of and relevance to the district is important. In AAA, teams were accountable not just to the project, but to the district. Educators and their partners constantly examine: ‘How do our strategies impact student learning and teacher efficacy?’ and ‘How can we improve our program delivery to increase its effect for students?’ Having statewide policies in place that support arts education help balance arts integration to make both learning in the arts and the other subjects worthy pursuits (Ingram and Seashore) p.10. Differentiated support to sustain ability to meet needs. AAA applies the concept of differentiated instruction for student learning to teachers. With significant teacher mobility among schools, teachers from their arts integration learning community may find themselves in a school with no experience in arts integration. AAA provides Differentiated Support to teachers to implement arts integration in their classrooms, including: Job-embedded professional development through teaching artist/teacher collaborations Courses in specific arts integrated teaching strategies Workshops in specific arts integrated teaching strategies Time constraints for teachers and limited experience in arts collaborations have made it critically important for AAA staff to provide modeling and coaching to ensure high quality rigorous arts integrated teaching and learning. Exemplars help to model effective arts integration. Teacher mobility has been also addressed by efforts to increase equity in access to arts integration across the district. Teachers who formerly were in an AAA site and are forced to move to another site are able to continue participating in district wide professional development opportunities. Intradistrict connections with other achievement programs. AAA collaborated across the district on the Principles of Learning framework to help teachers understand that arts integration is not an add-on, but an integral part of the arts curriculum that needs to be incorporated. AAA collaborates with the instructional leaders of the district's literacy and math initiatives to incorporate arts based strategies into core instruction. Useful Tools: Varieties of Arts Integration (VAI) Framework Matrix to rate level and depth of arts integration educational opportunity. Includes a way of looking at the nature of arts disciplines, the non-arts discipline integration purpose, and the level of interaction among the disciplines. Developed during the initial years of the Arts for Academic Achievement (AAA) Project by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (University of Minnesota). Useful in quantification and evaluation. http://cehd.umn.edu/CAREI/Reports/AAA/VAI-Intro.html Arts Integration Implementation Models Profiles five types of implementation found in AAA projects on a continuum of depth and involvement by teaching collaborators. Models described as: residency, elaborated residency, capacity building, co-teaching, and concepts across the curriculum. (Ingram and Seashore) Artful Teaching and Learning Handbook Provides blue prints for a versatile arts education model. Full of tools, processes and examples from its field sites, the handbook offers the practitioner research-based support for building arts based and arts infused learning. http://www.mcae.k12.mn.us/pdr/HANDBOOK6_7.pdf References: Ingram, Debra, and Karen R. Seashore. Arts for Academic Achievement: Summative Evaluation Report., http://cehd.umn.edu/CAREI/Reports/AAA/docs/Summative2003Rev.pdf 2003. McTighe, Jay, and Grant Wiggins. Understanding by Design. Virginia: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 2005. Perpich Center for Arts Education. Research, Assessment, and Curriculum. 2006. Web Page. URL: http://www.mcae.k12.mn.us/. 12 May 2006. University of Minnesota. CAREI: Arts for Academic Achievement: Varieties of Arts Integration Presentation, Intro. 2006. Web Page. URL http://cehd.umn.edu/CAREI/Reports/AAA/ 12 May 2006.

Target Population:
Arts Specialists

Classroom Teachers

Other Population

Teaching Artists

Arts Discipline:
Dance

Interdisciplinary

Interdisciplinary arts and other subjects

Music

Other Discipline

Theatre/Drama

Visual Arts

Entry Points:
Inquire

Rally

Deepen

Connect

Transform

Sustain

Education Thread:
Education Reform