Striving for a culture of thinking, local, national and international educators gathered in Traverse City last week for a three-day forum on Visible Thinking and Artful Thinking.
After three years of work, study and evaluation, educators with Traverse City Area Public Schools welcomed 60 visitors from as far away as Amsterdam, Mexico, Hawaii and South Carolina to a three-day conference on incorporating art into curriculum.
The conference, which also drew 180 district staff who attended when they could around teaching duties, showcased the results of a three-year, $800,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The Art in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant Award partnered the district with Harvard's Project Zero program. Project Zero began in 1967 at the university's Graduate School of Education with a mission to understand and strengthen how learning happens and to promote it as well as creativity and critical thinking in all subjects.
The Visible Thinking and Artful Thinking conference included seminars, classroom visits, tours and discussions for educators, who ranged from elementary to college level plus administrators. Going from zero to full-fledged conference sharing a new paradigm has been a wild ride for members of the district involved in the grant.
"We promised to create a new model for integrating art into the curriculum and over the course of creating the model, we promised to disseminate it,” said Alison Arnold, communications and grants director for the district. "A lot of learning went along with that journey, it was an exciting journey but we really had to learn and test.”
One facet of the grant included rigorous evaluation of the methods and Arnold pointed to notable successes in participating schools — Traverse City West Senior High School, West Junior High and Silver Lake Elementary Schools. Teachers there reported that students boosted achievements and became more involved in the classroom.
"I think teachers have reported that before there were some students who wouldn't have easily engaged in whatever the subject matter was but with the art component, it expanded the ways of getting them into the conversation,” Arnold said. "We're probably going to do, by the end of the year when the fall MEAP information comes back, we will probably do a broad report back to the community about the full three-year picture.”
The conference provided snapshots of success while outlining methods and challenges. Attendees such as James Rees, a high school art teacher and district art specialist from Provo, Utah, said the forum inspired him to rethink approaches with colleagues.
"Arts are really a way of connecting things,” said Rees. "The trend is that the arts are getting gleaned out by the pragmatic science and math. I know Utah is raising the required number of math and science and English credits for graduation.”
Shari Tishman of Harvard's Project Zero, noting that this program began from scratch in 2003, felt a good vibe during the conference. The exchanges of information and excitement generated during the three days provided excellent feedback on three years of work.
"As a person who's a researcher in a university, this is a dream come true,” she said. "It's infectious and people are thinking in some really interesting directions. What's exciting to me is that there seems to be a real collective understanding, yet each person is tailoring it in their own individual way and adapting it well to individual contexts.”
Deeming classroom visits the highlight of the conference, participants learned how teachers in subjects ranging from science and government to economics and language bring art alive for students as it relates to the subject matter.
"It's really focused on having teachers reflect on learning and making thinking very much a part of the culture of the classroom,” Arnold said of the Art in Education Model Development and Dissemination Grant and the conference.