Arts Integration Articles

The three articles on arts integration really made me think long and hard about the arts integration going on in my school. In the first article "Benefits of Art in Elementary Education," I found myself thinking that I've heard this before as it is discussed often as the reason to continue integrating the arts in our school. I appreciated reading on the connection to NCLB, because we do often take assessments in the room. I was keeping a count at the beginning of the year and finally gave up. I think it is interesting that the arts could help our students become more successful, as they are constantly using higher orders of thinking, but it doesn't change the fact that those assessments often do not require the higher orders of thinking.
The second article with the success stories was really great to read about. The portion discussion how uncomfortable some teachers get with the requirement to integrate arts is really interesting to me. I would always want to try something new, especially if it is something that is proven to help students throughout their life.
The last article made me think the most. I often say, "Oh yes this is an arts integration activity," but it made me think about whether the activities are enhancement or integration. I plan to think more about that in the future when writing plans. This article also touched on the idea that students are using higher levels of thinking when doing arts-integrated work, and they show that they fully or better understand the content based on their writing. The students observed went from writing sentences using vague vocabulary like "made sense" and "I think" to being able to give examples of what they know and how the arts helped them.
There are several ways I could use this information to help in my classroom. As I previously mentioned, I plan to think more about what I am planning to make sure I am fully integrating. I also think it will be vital to integrate arts in more subjects. The articles proved that students who find the information or the instructional method "boring" remember less than those who enjoyed it, so I plan to problem solve with our building's arts integrationist to make sure that I am including the arts in more content areas, rather than the subjects that it is "easy" to create an integrated lesson or unit.

Hello Mattie,
I think you and I took away alot of the same thoughts after reading. I know I was supposed to begin thinking about art in terms of how I could incorporate it in my classroom, but like you, I focused more on how important it really is. I never really understood the correlation between art and success in the core subjects.

I can identify with the portion about teachers struggling to add art into their room. As a special education co-teacher, part of my job is to make suggestions, modifications, and accommodations to the general education teachers curriculum in order to help the curriculum meet all student's needs. Often, this makes the general education teacher uncomfortable. In an article by Schwartz (2015) she suggested as much as to have an art specialist co-teaching in the classroom to to assure that art was properly integrated into the classroom. I've began to wonder if our need for so many bodies in the room is partly because of our lack of willingness to change as educators? I am not saying this is every educator, but we all have the same data and research, but we often still fight the new techniques that are suggested to us. I too am willing to try new things, and with this new information from these three articles, I am going to begin to attempt modifications to instruction that include art whenever I can . Of course, this will take some time and research, but with some baby steps, I am hoping to find some new ways to accomplish this.