Toward Inspirational, Lifelong Arts Learning: Concept-Driven, Inquiry-Based Curriculum for Visual & Performing Arts Classrooms

As skills-based disciplines, students' arts learning often consists of practicing as many skills as possible in the available class time; but mastery of skills may or may not lead to transfer.

This two-day institute will focus on using skills as the foundation for conceptual learning and will scaffold a process for curriculum design in the arts that empowers teachers to intentionally plan for and teach toward students' lifelong understanding of and engagement in the arts.

CONNECT & ENGAGE

Arts teachers have big dreams for what we want for students and the world through understanding and creating art. Working in both like-content and school/site-specific collaborative groups, we’ll begin by reconnecting with why the arts matter to us, our students, and our communities. Grounded in our “why” for the arts, we’ll envision and outline the most important learning we want for students in our classrooms and why it matters to individuals, communities, and the world.

LEARN

By understanding how the brain allows for transfer, we’ll look at the relationship between skills, knowledge, and concepts as we learn to use skills in our art forms as the foundation for conceptual understanding.

By taking the highest-priority understandings, we’ll use a backward design approach to create a scaffold by which teachers can plan and – most importantly – students can employ their arts learning outside arts classrooms for self-expression, connection, and positive change.

REFLECT & APPLY

Using the curriculum design approach outlined above, teachers will work with both like-content colleagues from other schools, as well as school-/site-based colleagues to outline a unit for use in their own classroom. Provisions for arts-team-wide unit planning will be provided so the work begun during the workshop can be continued upon participants’ return to school.

OUTCOMES

• Reconnect with their own experience of arts as transformational in their own lives;
• Collaborate with like-content arts teachers from other schools;
• Reflect on the highest-priority arts understandings for students, schools, and communities;
• Learn how skills form the foundation for conceptual understanding in the arts;
• Experience a backward design curriculum process for scaffolding arts learning toward conceptual understanding;
• Outline a unit of study for their own art classroom using the concept-driven curriculum design model defined above;
• Consider and identify next steps for continued progress of arts curriculum development at their own school.

• Please bring your laptop/tablet to this session.
• View Nyssa Brown's video.

Save paper and effort where possible!

For your convenience, and to support our efforts in being "green", all handouts/files posted here have been notated with an A, B, C or D indicating the following:

(A) hardcopies needed at workshop
(B) electronic version on laptop is sufficient (for viewing during the workshop)
(C) required reading PRIOR to the workshop
(D) file not needed for workshop itself, but simply material of additional interest/reference

(B) CBI Unit Planner Template