A boost from the arts in core curriculum subjects can improve cognitive skills and engagement and motivate hard-to-reach students. As the director of fine arts for Georgia's Clayton County Public Schools, I work with other district leaders to integrate the arts—drawing, dance, theater, and music—into our classrooms. By targeting our school's leadership teams before building staff capacity, we ensured that teachers had the full support they needed to reshape the learning climate for creativity.
I have seen the benefit of arts integration firsthand in my own classroom. When I began my career, I taught math at a school of the arts, which required thinking outside the box of traditional math instruction. During a fractions unit, I would discuss how the musical time signatures, which indicate the number of beats in a measure, are also fractions. Students would compose short pieces of music consisting of various meters to demonstrate their understanding. This strategy made the subject more relatable. I began to see a change in my students' engagement and math achievement.
Integrating the arts throughout the core curriculum in Clayton County has required a similar change in mindset among our teachers, just as I had to shift my own perspective years ago. To begin, we enlisted the help of our principals and teacher leaders to make sure everyone had buy-in.
The Support Behind Arts Integration
As educators, we tend to be skeptical of new ideas. We don't believe something works until we see that it's working in a school or a district similar to our own. That's why presenting research to support our proposal was vital to convince principals of its importance. The 2011 report "Reinvesting in Arts Education" from the now-defunct President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which discusses the key role of the arts in a well-rounded education, was particularly helpful. We showed leaders the link between integration and richer engagement, the potential for higher achievement in other subjects, and the arts' improvement of students' innovative skills. We began our integration with a small group of schools where principals were firmly behind the idea.
We tailor integration to each school instead of using a cookie-cutter approach. At every participating school, we formed creative leadership teams of principals and teacher leaders who started to transform staff teaching practices and infuse the arts. Some schools implement arts-integrated lessons once per unit; others do so once a week. Teachers are engaged in the planning, so they determine the best fit for an arts-related lesson.
To build staff capacity, we partnered with a few organizations for professional development. Although visual art is the easiest form to implement, we wanted to be sure teachers knew how to infuse dance, theatre, and music, into lessons as well.
First, we received a state grant through Georgia's Innovation Fund and partnered with PD organization ArtsNow to train teachers at two elementary schools in arts-integrated math instruction. Teachers' comfort level grew significantly during the trainings. As a result, students in grades 3–5 increased their scores on the state math assessment, with 65 percent of students scoring as developing learners and above in 2017, up from 48 percent in 2016. This rise indicates promising evidence of integration benefits.
In addition, we are in our second year of implementing creatED by Crayola, a PD program focused on project-based learning through the arts, at several schools. This training is geared toward instructional coaches and leaders and includes strategies for changing the culture of the school. Leadership teams receive advice on how to overcome the anxiety that teachers often feel about trying something new. For example, when I was a principal, I always told my staff, "Move slow now to move faster later." Start small with a team that will show success and expand to more classes over time.
When you walk into some schools, you see examples of the artwork that students have created in their core content learning displayed throughout the hallways, evidence of enthusiasm for this effort.
Secrets to Success
My advice for other district leaders would be to approach building-level leaders first. If you can show principals proof that arts integration is effective, they'll get behind your initiative. Grants have been another key to our success. Besides the $150,000 state Innovation Fund grant, we received a $1.9 million federal grant for arts integration that we share with a nearby district. We also don't overlook smaller grants. They can add up.
An important aspect of our training programs is that they are backed by supporting materials, such as webinars and sample lesson plans. Unlike other training sessions that stop at the initial workshop and don't supply continued resources—including emotional support—for teachers to be successful, our PD gave teachers the confidence to go back to their classrooms and apply their learning.
Integrating the arts into the core curriculum can be powerful, but it requires strong leadership and funding to establish a vision and support teachers throughout the process. When these elements exist, students can harness their creativity for learning and engage in ways that spark their imagination.