Introduction ]|[ Standards ]|[ Resources ]|[ Process

Look in the Mythic Mirror

The ARTSEDGE INTEGRATED CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT PROJECT
AUGUST-OCTOBER 1998
A MODEL FOR SMALL-GROUP CURRICULUM DEVELOPMENT

Background ]|[ First Meetings ]|[ Philosophy and Strategy ]|[ Communications ]|[ Curriculum Development Model

Background on the ARTSEDGE Project

In mid-August 1998, ARTSEDGE embarked on a new collaboration with five Washington-area educators, hired as consultants for an Integrated Curriculum Development project. This project, the outgrowth of an agreement with WHRO-Hampton Roads public television under a US DOE Technology Challenge Grant, was the first in which ARTSEDGE has made a contractual agreement to design a curriculum on behalf of another organization. Members of the ARTSEDGE staff agreed to contribute to this project based on their backgrounds in humanities, arts education, and curriculum development, the overall mission of the ARTSEDGE Web site to provide high-quality, standards-based resources, and the Kennedy Center’s well-established connections with arts educators. The intended product of the project was a ten-week, Web-based middle school curriculum that integrates music, visual arts, and language arts.

The five teachers participating in the project represented diversity across the grade levels, as well as in the arts and language arts curricula. Ironically, none of them were currently teaching middle school, but their varied experiences with different age groups and their areas of expertise in language arts, humanities, theatre, and music were invaluable to the expected outcome we were to produce. The curriculum was to be completed in approximately 40 hours of on-site collaboration, and 40 hours off-site, both on- and off-line. The project was due to WHRO-Hampton Roads public television on November 1, 1998, meaning the group had a little more than two months to complete the curriculum. Simultaneously, WHRO was to coordinate with an evaluator to test the curriculum in Norfolk-area classrooms.

The First Meetings

The development of an integrated curriculum began with a three-day seminar held at The Kennedy Center August 19-21. It seemed a natural outgrowth of the opening "get to know you" conversation to discuss one another’s perspectives on whether arts education should be discipline-based or integrated into the traditional core curricula (language arts, social studies, science and math). Since this is an integrated curriculum project, we agreed that we would uphold the spirit of the ARTSEDGE mission -- to provide both discipline-based and interdisciplinary resources for arts educators. Therefore, the integrated curriculum we develop will require a place for the discipline-based arts educator (e.g., a music instructor, a part-time artist/teacher, etc.), team-teaching with and/or augmenting the lessons of the core-curriculum classroom teacher. We also discussed the project background, goals, and philosophical underpinnings, which are embedded in the strategic plan for the ARTSEDGE Web site and the new Curriculum Studio.

Despite an expansive agenda for the teachers’ work with ARTSEDGE, it was obvious from the start that the process for developing curriculum would be shaped by the group of teachers themselves, not by the staff from the Kennedy Center. We could provide them a loose set of guidelines, e.g., start with standards, incorporate relevant assessments, integrate music, arts, and language arts, etc., but they, ultimately, would come up with a comfortable working plan. The role of the ARTSEDGE at the Kennedy Center was that of facilitator in the beginning -- guiding, bringing together, and refocusing the group, as needed, while at the same time documenting the group process.

A big part of the first three days was spent discussing standards as a basis for developing a lesson. The group was led through a presentation by The Education Trust, a non-profit, Washington-based organization dedicated to putting the standards into practice as a means of equalizing education across the country. Throughout the presentation and thereafter, we worked to find the intersections of the national standards for language arts, visual arts, and music. The dominant four standards with which we ended the three days were adopted by the group as the basis for the ten-week curriculum framework. Additional standards were added throughout the coming weeks, though four remained the dominant standards. Those four directly relate to the outcomes that were to be demonstrated in the culminating task at the unit’s end.

It should be noted that starting with the standards is a new paradigm for teaching, and it was not grasped easily and wholeheartedly by any of the five educators working on this project. One of them stated in her journal, "I am accustomed to starting with a theme, building a curriculum around the theme, and seeing which standards are covered from that theme. I am not sure I agree [that the standards are not effectively met in this way]. " She goes on to state that starting with standards may be the way to effectively rectify the disparity between schools and to set an equal goal for all students to achieve, but she remains ambivalent, as do the other teachers, about whether the standards are really the place to begin. They all agree, however, that the standards do need to be considered, and they agree with the process we have set forth with this project, whereby the assessment tool (the "scoring guide") will be directly related to the specific standards set forth to be met by students in the lesson.

Despite all the time we spent on the standards and the scoring guides – while they provide a meaningful foundation – we still came back around to the more natural (though perhaps conventional) method for developing an interdisciplinary unit with five people, that being a theme-centered form of development. It seems that working with a theme allowed for a group of teachers to find an intersection between their subjects and areas of expertise, and it served as an "umbrella" over the dominant standards the group has adopted.

Another key part of the opening sessions was to define "Web-based lessons." Working from the ISTE publication, Virtual Architecture: Planning Curriculum-Based Telecomputing Projects for the Classroom, by Judi Harris, the ARTSEDGE Program Manager presented a working definition and helped the group to begin thinking about how the curriculum they were to develop could be designed for the Web and include projects that incorporate the Web. The Web would also be the primary mode of delivery of the curriculum to teachers across the country.

Developing a Group Philosophy and Strategy

Throughout the course of planning for the curriculum development, the teachers considered different models for presenting the curriculum. They agreed to develop a 10-week framework around the theme of Mythology. Each person provided her expertise and perspective for lessons that comprised ten weeks, e.g., the teacher from Duke Ellington School provided input about music that could be used in the lessons. All of the teachers came to consensus on a philosophy that drives their work. This philosophy helped to preface to the entire curriculum, though it was edited as the development progressed:

• We want to provide a framework that clearly matches the standards.
• The framework will be provided in two forms: as a skeleton that teachers can fill in with details that suit their curriculum and classroom settings, and as a fleshed out example using Mythology as the central theme.
• The Mythology curriculum we develop will encompass all of the following components: the study and writing of classical and modern mythology, pattern and non-pattern poetry, classical and modern dance, study of classical and modern paintings, expression through drama, connections between music, prose, poetry and artwork.
• We will develop a set of scoring guides for evaluation purposes throughout the unit. The scoring guides will match the expectations of standards to be achieved, as set out at the beginning of the framework. This will serve to model a new paradigm for developing lessons.
• The dominant standards we have selected serve as our guiding principles; they are the foundation for the development of the curriculum. Secondary standards (subordinate) will also be incorporated into components of the curriculum.
• The curriculum unit that we set forth will ultimately require teachers to sit down and negotiate how they will work with the framework to make it relevant to their classrooms, their students, their schools.
• Professional development is an essential part in the integration of this framework.
• We believe, and will model through our lessons, that arts teachers are a necessary and important part of the collaborative process.

Communicating Between Sessions

Throughout the coming weeks, we met three more times on-site. Those collaborative sessions allowed time for the teachers to share their lesson development and its place in the 10-week curriculum, and to set a course for individual work and online communications in the weeks between.

It was determined that as a part of the project, ARTSEDGE would provide five laptop computers. These computers, a newly-created listserv and e-mail accounts were provided to facilitate online communications among teachers. ARTSEDGE staff members also participated in the discourse. The computers proved to be an important component of the participants’ experience with this project. By providing them, the Kennedy Center sent a clear message about the expectation to communicate online, to use the Web as a resource in lesson development, and to prepare all lessons in electronic format. The computers also increased the status of the teachers’ consultancy, paying them with both a consultant’s fee of $1,000 and the unlimited use of a computer and online services for two months. All of the teachers responded well to this special "perk."

Between the first three-day session and the meeting on August 25, 1998, teachers were asked to communicate via their laptop computers. Two of the teachers were already well-versed in communications through email, though attached documents seemed to pose a problem. The other three teachers would have benefited from some training by the ARTSEDGE staff, and though assistance -- on-site, on the phone, and through written instructions -- was provided, these forms of "training" did not help one of the teachers get online. She merely had too many technical problems dialing in from a remote location and using an ARTSEDGE 800 number. For this reason, it was truly essential that we maintained a regular schedule of meetings face-to-face. This is an issue that will have to be addressed in further projects of this nature.

A Model for Curriculum Development

While this project was intended to produce a model curriculum, (and while it did serve that purpose ultimately), the process of developing the curriculum became as important as the written curriculum itself. There is no question, however, it was not an easy process! When five people from different teaching perspectives come together to write a comprehensive, consolidated plan, it is challenging to find ways to bring it all together. In this case, it was essential to have an objective person involved in the process: ARTSEDGE served that role. This is most likely because this curriculum was in many ways extraneous to the work of the teachers hired by ARTSEDGE, all of whom were from different schools and districts. It would most likely be different if the five teachers are working within the same school or school division to achieve a common purpose.

The process we undertook went as follows:

1. A common set of standards, philosophy and mission were established by the group.
2. Each teacher constructed an outline of ten weeks that achieved the stated standards.
3. ARTSEDGE consolidated the ten week plans of each teacher into a spreadsheet so overlaps could be discussed and worked through.
4. Teachers came together and determined that they had to have a theme, regardless of the fact that the curriculum was built on standards. They established mythology as a working theme, as it was the one topic that seemed to easily incorporate all of their ideas up to this point. They divided up the spreadsheet, beginning with one teacher who was responsible for weeks 1-5 and another for weeks 6-10, combining the work of all five teachers. This work was reviewed by all five teachers at the next meeting.
5. In the meantime, a specialist (Heidi Hayes Jacobs) reviewed the spreadsheet and made recommendations about next steps. The specialist critiqued the work, remarking that (not uncommon to this stage of the process), the unit seemed like a lot of activities for students to complete in ten weeks. What was missing was how students were demonstrating that they achieve the standards set forth at the start of the unit. The assessment was missing.
6. Based on the specialists’ recommendations, teachers worked collaboratively to determine a set of essential questions that would guide and organize the work from this point forward. The essential questions helped to focus the entire unit. (Essential questions are questions students can answer by the end of the unit, based on the collective experience of the ten weeks.)
7. Once essential questions were written, the teachers went back to the original ten-week combined sequence of activities and tried to fit them under the essential questions. This meant the ten weeks’ activities were taken out of sequence, and again, each teacher went home to work individually before sharing the work they had accomplished with the group. There was a great degree of frustration at this point, because it felt as though we were taking the same information and just chopping it up in a different way, without seeing clearly how it all moved across ten weeks, or how it really addressed the questions of student attainment of standards or authentic assessment. However, once the next step occurred, it was obvious the essential questions really had focused the group’s work, and they were much clearer about what was missing from the ten week plans.
8. As the teachers came back together to share their "take" on how essential questions could organize the unit, they began to agree on which aspects of the unit could not be accomplished in the ten-week time frame. They started to become realistic about what was feasible in the regular middle school classroom, and about what students would be ready to learn at various points throughout the unit. This was difficult, because a lot of work had gone into writing at this point, and each teacher was reluctant to give up things she had struggled to produce. However, they were able to see what was needed to complete the unit.
9. One thing that was evident was that the group needed to agree on a midpoint and a final assessment tool. Both needed to include the Internet in a meaningful way, and thus, one of the teachers undertook conceptualizing how this would be possible. ARTSEDGE assisted in the development of the Web-based projects, as well.
10. Aside from bringing more focus on the potential of the Web in this curriculum, at this point, the facilitation of the ARTSEDGE staff member became essential to the completion of the curriculum. It was clear someone had to take what all five teachers had done and put it into a format so that they could all see the "holes." The format that was ultimately used was the Curriculum Studio submission form, developed in the summer of 1998 by the ARTSEDGE Teachers’ Advisory Council. Some additions were made, such as the essential questions used by the group to focus its work.
11. When the group returned to complete the lessons that comprised the unit, teachers read through the ten weeks and established objectives for each week. They checked to be sure that we had included appropriate assessment tools that would aid a teacher in determining if objectives had been met, and if students had indeed learned what the lessons set out to do.
12. Scoring guides, links and extensive resources were added to round out the unit and make it more accessible for a teacher outside of this team.

In simplest form, as a result of the work of this curriculum development team, a specific set of actions was defined for curriculum development:

• Define standards to be achieved.
• Define a theme.
• Define a set of essential questions.
• Develop objectives for each lesson.
• Determine the teacher and student instructional process.
• Define a set of products to be used for assessment.
• Check to assure the standards, essential questions, objectives and assessment are all related.

Process documentation compiled by Kate Santhuff, Program Manager and facilitator of the Integrated Curriculum Development project, ARTSEDGE.

This curriculum was written and compiled by the following educators: Jennifer Ashburn, Bryant Alternative High School, Fairfax County Public Schools, VA; Mary Jane Ayers, The Duke Ellington School for the Arts, DC Public Schools, Washington, DC; Susan Born-Ozment, Oyster Bilingual Elementary School, DC Public Schools, Washington, DC; Jayne Karsten, The Key School, Annapolis, MD; Sheri Maeda, Thomas Jefferson Specialized Secondary School, Fairfax County Public Schools, Alexandria, VA.

Facilitated by the staff of ARTSEDGE at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington, DC.

With assistance by consultants, Heidi Hayes Jacobs of Curriculum Developers, New York, NY and Eleanor Dougherty of The Education Trust, Washington, DC.