For many years I was an educator working as a classroom teacher.  For the past two years I have been working as an Arts Integration coach and teaching artist.  I came to my present work with the eye of a classroom teacher and often had to remember to look at my teaching through an artist’s lens.  Now I sometimes find I have to remember to look at my teaching through my classroom teacher’s lens.  Ideally, when teaching an Arts Integrated lesson, you are looking through both lenses at the same time to ensure you are fully realizing all the potential inherent in the experience for both your art and other content area. One thing that makes this work so satisfying for me is I am constantly finding ways to deepen the experience for my students and improve my teaching in both areas.

Over the past few months I have been teaching science lessons integrated with dance to third, fourth, and fifth graders.  The lessons are pretty heavy on the science so I try to emphasize the dance as much as possible.  For some of the classes I teach I am introducing these science concepts so I have to be careful to be sure they understand the science for the dance integration to be meaningful.  The creator of these integrated lessons not only choreographed dance that demonstrates the science concepts but wrote some catchy chants or raps that serve as the rhythmic basis and inspiration for the dance movements.

Initially when I was introducing the various raps, I was focusing on the rhythm and articulation of the words as well as the scientific meaning behind them.  One day recently, however, I had an “aha” moment.  Rather than just having the students repeat the rap line by line after me and then asking about the meaning of the various vocabulary words I could guide them through the rap as I might have them approach any non-fiction text.  When I started to ask them questions about the text of the raps I was shocked at how often the students misunderstood the question or had difficulty extracting the correct information especially discerning the difference between an example of the term and a definition of the term.

I recognized what a rich opportunity this was to strengthen the students’ ability to analyze text and help them appreciate what a wonderful source of science information these raps really are.  My “aha” moment became their “aha” moment as they came to understand how helpful learning and rapping these chants could be.  And I was reminded once again to be careful to always teach looking through both lenses.