On November 4, 2013, WYPR 88.1 FM featured a segment focused on Young Audiences Maryland’s (YA) efforts to align arts instruction with the new Common Core State Standards for math and English/language arts. As the report by Gwendolyn Glenn describes, the Common Core is a set of educational standards that lay out what students need to learn in each grade in the areas of math, reading and language arts, in order to prepare them for college or a career.
“The Common Core is about reading and writing and speaking across the curriculum and is perfectly aligned with what we do in the arts,” YA education director Pat Cruz said in the segment, “because the arts are all about communication and how to better express yourself through language, movement and drama and dance.”
The report also describes how the arts integration strategies implemented by YA can help teachers understand the Common Core standards as well. “Aligning the arts integration strategies with those performance standards of Common Core really makes that connection more visible to teachers,” explained Mariale Hardiman, a Johns Hopkins University education professor. Hardiman, who is currently conducting a study on the connection between arts involvement and student retention, emphasized that teachers should not see an arts activities as “something pasted on to what they have to do” but rather, “part and parcel of the standards they hope to meet with their students.”
Click here to read or listen to the entire segment.
