The Artful Learning school reform model is an arts-based school improvement program. This program encourages teachers to integrate various forms of art into every educational aspect and process. This experimental educational model has only been implemented in a handful of schools, so there is limited data to verify its effectiveness and its success rate.
Conceptual Overview
Art-based learning includes school and classroom components. The classroom focus revolves around teachers using and integrating art into all aspects of curriculum development and execution. This means that teachers use art to help teach math, science, history and social studies. The school focus revolves around professional collaboration and shared leadership. The model was developed from the artistic work and learning philosophy of the American composer Leonard Bernstein, who composed the score for musicals like West Side Story.
This learning model was created by the Leonard Bernstein Center in 1990s and has been sponsored by the Grammy Foundation since the late 1990s. The program is currently endorsed by The New American Schools organization as a comprehensive school reform and achievement result model. Approximately 40 schools have tried out the program and there are usually around 20 schools that actively use the model. This learning model extends and promotes school district-level structures and organizations that best support curriculum development and implementation.
Operational Overview
Art-based learning programs are implemented through art-learning units that are instructional modules organized around the mastery of specific art skills and concepts. Each unit contains a thematic question that is explored during the learning process. The so called Masterwork concept and main question are used to start and organize instructional constructs. The term Masterwork is what most teachers traditionally consider the arts, such as music, painting and literature.
However, Masterwork can also be used to refer to any artistic endeavor or expression of cultural value and significance. Each learning unit is comprised of a single instructional process that comes with four phases. These include experience, which occurs when the student interacts with the masterwork, and inquiry, when the students investigate and research the piece of art. It continues with creation, which occurs when students design their own original artistic product, and reflection, which occurs when students use standard tools to better understand what they have learned and accomplished.
Current Challenges
There is a current lack of school-wide research data across the country. This lack of student- and teacher-level data makes it difficult to accurately identify changes and achievements. This is compounded by the fact that the schools that do implement the program will have a certain amount of teachers who do not individually implement or support the program in their classrooms. The current available data is usually cross-sectional, which means that it is only available per grade from year-to-year. This severely limits the ability of educational researchers to properly asses student and academic changes.
There are also test comparison problems in schools that implement art-based learning programs. State and district-wide tests are always different, so it’s a challenge to compare art-learning and standardized test results together. From a technical standpoint, this lack of synchronization makes data aggregation activities difficult. For example, running inferential statistics to look for overall achievement changes is limited.
The Artful Learning school reform model is an innovative program that integrates art expression, thinking and creation into every subject and class activity. Readers can learn more at the Leonard Bernstein Center’s website here.
