Brian Schneckenburger

I serve as the Educational Specialist in Visual and Performing Arts for the Baltimore City Public Schools, where I oversee implementation of curriculum, assessment, and some aspects of teacher evaluation. The district is concluding a six-year period that has been marked by several large-scale reforms that included the implementation of a funding model that placed unprecedented decision-making power in the hands of principals, as well as expanded school choice options for students.

The system is now turning its attention to several transformations that have a direct effect on teaching and learning in the arts. As in other districts, City Schools is overhauling its curriculum to align with the Common Core State Standards. Additionally, City Schools is undertaking a ten-year overhaul of the district’s buildings including modernized spaces for the arts, and developing processes to ensure instructional and leadership effectiveness that allow for professional growth around not only arts-related content, but in the unique ways that arts learning supports Common Core principles. The district has also instituted new support systems that govern the ways that leaders and teachers are supported, developed, and evaluated.

Effective leadership is an important component of any successful school system. To support administrators and teachers, City Schools has piloted and implemented an Instructional Framework that has taken into account effective teaching practices in all disciplines. The framework parses the act of teaching into three areas: plan, teach, and reflect and adjust. These three areas follow a cyclical pattern, where reflection and adjustment inform planning.  Current work in progress includes the formulation of a set of key teaching actions that outline instructional procedures and techniques germane to arts education. The key actions documents will act as discipline-specific complements to the techniques listed in the framework, and will provide administrators with a valuable reference with which to guide support and evaluation conversations.

The arts are poised to take a leadership role within these reforms. As has been written and commented on extensively elsewhere, there are several natural connections between learning in the arts and the Common Core State Standards. These include creative problem solving, abstract thinking, perseverance, and engagement with complex texts. Professional development in the arts over the course of the past three years has consisted of high-quality experiences with local authority figures in arts education. Additionally, the district has offered professional development in arts integration to all teachers in each arts discipline. Teachers receive professional development credits, which count toward salary increases, for their successful completion of these classes.

In addition, the district has implemented Cycles of Professional Learning, which have standardized the district’s language around Common Core literacy principles. The fine arts curricular areas have taken a lead role in this process. For example, the most recent Cycle involves rich and rigorous conversations about a common text. Texts exist in different forms in the arts, and one of the greatest leaps is in the recorded or live performance of a musical work. Professional development in this area involved scaffolding the conversation with background information about the text, discussion questions, norms for discussion, and content, language, and social goals for the activity. For music teachers, the common text used was Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, and the instructional technique utilized was guided listening, something that commonly occurs in all instructional settings in music (e.g., general music, chorus, band, or orchestra). Discussion about the work happened in large- and small-group settings, with teachers experiencing the process as if they were students. They then designed lesson plans about the ways that they would implement this into the music classroom. These types of professional development activities punctuate the need for teachers to realize that, through their effective instruction, they already address aspects of the Common Core, and that the implementation of these new standards is not tantamount to learning a foreign language.

The professional development support systems described above not only support Common Core implementation in ways that are authentic to the art form, but also embody several traits of highly effective teaching embedded in the Instructional Framework. These include 1) using strategies and tasks to engage all students in rigorous work, 2) facilitating student-to student interaction and talk, and 3) building a positive, learning-focused classroom culture.

Within the context of all of these reforms and support/ evaluation mechanisms, the focus remains on how these changes affect the readiness of our children to enter college or career pathways following graduation. These support mechanisms will enhance arts instruction by specialists, as well as build the capacity of classroom teachers to infuse the arts into the curriculum in innovative ways. First, through support of the Common Core Standards, students will understand the existence of multiple modes of literacy in addition to traditional conceptions of text-based literacy. Even more pertinent that these ancillary benefits, a comprehensive, sequential education in and through the arts will provide students with unique frames of knowledge and cultivate a holistic worldview that only a quality arts education can foster.