Arts Integration Lesson Audits

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Well, hey there, friend. Welcome back to another episode of Artworks for Teachers. I’m your host, Susan Riley. And today, I think you’re really going to enjoy this episode. It’s a very tactile episode. It’s very practical. It is called our lesson audit episode. So what’s a lesson audit? We actually do this with our clients, our private school clients who come to us who do a lot of in -person work. We do this with our school certification clients. And…

When we do this kind of work with schools, oftentimes it’s because schools are asking us, especially leaders, but also any kind of department lead or team lead or somebody who is working at coaching others on how to use arts integration. The first question that they typically ask us when we’re looking at lessons is, how do I know if something is a good arts integration lesson or not? Because…

Let’s talk about it. When we take a look at arts integration, one of the first things that many people do is Google a free arts integration lessons, right? Certainly the first thing that I did as an arts integration specialist when I first started working at my very first school with arts integration, right, was I went in search of example lessons. And I found a lot, right? And this is way back when…

But I found a lot at the Kennedy Center. I found a lot at other schools that were using it at the time. But just because you find a lot doesn’t mean that they’re actually any good. And so when you start to use them, you’ll start to see that some lessons do really well and some flop. And the sad part about that is that we don’t have time for a lesson to flop, right? And especially if an initiative is new, you really, really don’t have the time or the space for a lesson to collapse or to have a flop because if it does, the teachers around you who haven’t yet bought in are going to go, oh yeah, we definitely don’t have time for this and poof, your opportunity is gone, right? So especially if you’re first starting out, you got to know what do I look for to see is this a good lessonso that when you’re searching the internet and you’re scouring for free lessons, you know right away, is this a good one or is it not in order to try it, right? And then the second part about looking for a good arts integration lesson, like what constitutes a good lesson, is when we’re starting to develop our own lessons. And this is what we train our arts integration specialists to do in the certification program.

Like once you start using a lot of free lessons, then you start thinking about, well, I could do this, right? Like I could write my own lesson because none of these is really fitting the bill for what I really want to do in this area of my curriculum. So I should just write my own. But how do you do that? Right. And how do you structure it and what does it look like? And so that’s what this episode is going to share with you today. So I’m going to do two lesson audits with you. I’m going to share with you our look for list and these are specific items that we look for in a lesson to make sure that if these elements are present then you’re looking at a pretty good solid arts integration lesson. And then I’m going to get into two lessons that I found randomly on the internet and they’re not our lessons. No.

And they’re not our students lessons either. I wanted to share lessons that are totally blind to me. And I think that’s important because that’s exactly what you would be doing, right? I don’t want to bias this at all. So we’ve also taken out the names of anybody who is, it happens to have written them. I’ve taken out any kind of identifying information because this is not about.

showcasing anybody or ripping anybody down. This is truly a learning experience for all of us so that we can kind of take a look at just like you would be scouring the internet finding free stuff. What’s a good lesson? What’s not a good lesson and why so that we can all get better together, right?

So that’s how this podcast is gonna be structured. We’re gonna start with a lesson that’s not so good and why and what’s missing and what could be improved. And I’ve done that audit already. That was actually one that I did previously as a Facebook Live, just as a share.

And then I’m going to hop back on with you during the episode. I’m going to share one together that is a good lesson that I found could use a couple of tweaks, but still meets most of the characteristics of the look force so that you can see the difference between the two and still how we could still improve and get better. Because even I got to tell you friends, even when we have a good solid lesson, there are still things that we can improve and much to the chagrin of many of my Arts Integration candidate friends, when they submit their lessons at the end of Sprint 1 for review, even if it’s an amazing lesson, I guarantee you our evaluators are going to find at least one little tweak that we can do to make it better. Because we’re always learning, there’s always something we can improve, right? So that’s how I want us to approach this episode.

Keep an open mind. We are a growth mindset. We are always improving. We are always learning. Okay. All right. So we’re going to start. We’re going to hop in with the look for list first. And that’s really what I want to start to frame this episode with. Now the look for list, and I’m going to share it in a minute, but I want us to contextualize this first. The look for list is a set of items that you can use for two different purposes. One, and the way we’re gonna use it today, is to kind of use it as a checklist of items when you’re developing a lesson or when you’re evaluating a lesson for its effectiveness. So if you’re randomly scouring the internet, pulling free lessons, and you wanna know, is this one gonna be something that I should attempt, right? Is it gonna be worth the time to attempt it?

Is it going to be a solid lesson? This checklist is going to help you. The other way that this could be used is as a tool if you’re reviewing somebody who’s doing a lesson. So oftentimes, one of the strategies that we’ll use with schools is called peer reviews. This is not an evaluative measure, right? Although administrators can use it as a walkthrough to get a good sense of who’s using arts integration, who’s not, where people are in their journey in using the method. But oftentimes we encourage this to be done by peers and colleagues rather than an administrator. It’s less intense and it’s also a good learning experience for both teachers, right? The teacher who is instructing the lesson and also the teacher who’s watching the lesson because the teacher who’s watching the lesson and using this checklist is looking for very specific things and they are therefore looking at the lesson from a lens of learning and the teacher who’s instructing the lesson is guiding the lesson from this aspect as well because they also have that checklist and they’re thinking about how am I delivering this lesson to ensure that I’m meeting each of these look -fors.

So the look for checklist is extremely helpful for both guiding a lesson as well as observing a lesson and selecting a lesson, right? There’s a lot of different use cases for it. And that is why it is this week’s freebie. So when you go to artsintegration.com forward slash artworks and you select today’s episode, you’re going to find this as the freebie that you can download our look for checklist. So I think that’s going to be super helpful for you today. All right, so let me go ahead and share with you my screen so that you can see the look for us. Okay, all right, so this is again the freebie that you’re going to be looking at. The first thing that we’re going to take a look at is the district curriculum being taught, right? So this is the first thing clearly, you would think that this is a yes for most people, but it’s not always.

Sometimes people go rogue, but it’s the first thing that we want to take a look at, right? Like is the curriculum that we are instructed to be using actually being taught, right, in this scenario? Number two, are the objectives from both disciplines being addressed in the lesson? Which means, am I addressing an arts and a content standard together? Do they make a natural fit?

Right? Are they aligned? Are they making a natural fit? Am I using them together? Is one being used in service of another? Right? Or are they used on an equal plane? Right? So that’s another one. So I want to, I’m going to show you how this works when we get into the lessons. But these are just the items themselves. The next one. Does the lesson support a dynamic learning environment? So as I’m going through the lesson plan or as I’m looking at the lesson, am I seeing a lesson that is engaging? Am I seeing students or opportunities for students to be able to critically think about something, to collaborate, to be engaged in those 21st century skills? Is there a high level of student engagement going on? Or if I’m looking at a lesson plan, is there an opportunity for that to be happening?

Are there a variety of strategies in use to check for student understanding? So, right, like there’s a one size fits all doesn’t work. We learned about that a couple of weeks ago with Carol Tomlinson, right, when we’re talking about differentiation. So this is how that naturally embeds in an arts integrated lesson. So looking for that differentiation of strategies and tools from your toolkit.

Again, is the instruction differentiated to support student needs? So that’s different than number five. Strategies are looking for checking for student understanding. So that’s around assessment. Five or six is around looking for instruction being differentiated. So those are two different things. Okay. So we’re looking at assessment in number five and instruction in number six. Number seven, go back to assessments. Are the assessments being used across both disciplines and are they being used to guide instruction? So this is a two -parter. Are the assessments, are we assessing both disciplines? Are we assessing the art and the content area in this lesson? Or are we only assessing one of those areas? And are those assessments being used to guide instruction? This is super important and it’s sometimes something that when we look at lessons, it’s missing. This is the missing ingredient. Sometimes our lessons go off track because there’s no clear ending, right? The ending is what is supposed to guide our lesson. This is where our students are supposed to end up. And so that ending is really what our students are supposed to be doing, right? So we’re looking for that in this lesson. Are there natural connections evident between the two disciplines that we’re talking about? So this is, is there a natural fit here, right? Can we bridge the gap between the two subject areas?

And finally, is there a seamless flow between the two content areas during instruction? A couple of episodes ago, we’ll link to it in the show notes, I talked about the Mosaic Method. And in the Mosaic Method, I talked about the seesaw, right, of being able to go back and forth between arts content and then the curricular content, right? So if you’re doing a math and an art lesson is going between the visual art, math. Visual art, math, kind of like a seesaw, right? So that seamless flow is what we’re looking for here. So that this way we can kind of see throughout the whole lesson that learners have the opportunity to interpret that information that they’re learning through multiple lenses in a variety of ways and gives them an opportunity to learn in multiple modalities, right? All right, so those are our nine look-fors those again that’s really important it’s going to be a part of your your freebie for today okay so make sure you go back to today’s lesson so that you can download it plus it’s a pretty download right it’s really easy all right so that being said now we’re going to take a look at two lessons and we’re going to audit them using that checklist so the first one again i’ve done this one before we’re going to cut over to that audit you’re going to hear me go through each of those areas and you’re going to see how we use this as an opportunity for learning. This upcoming lesson is a lesson I found randomly on the internet on teacher pay teacher, which is a common area where most of us go. And it’s just something that I found when I typed in arts integration lesson. And you’re going to see how each of these nine areas are indicated or not in that lesson. And then once that lesson is done,

I’ll meet up back with you and we’re going to go over a different one that I found just on a Google search.

This one is a lesson that I pulled off of TeacherPayTeacher and it was a free lesson. So I just happened to download it and this was what was provided. I was able, the lesson plan itself looks like this. That’s it. And then there are links to a PowerPoint that is used with students. Okay, pretty basic. Now, the learning objective here says that students are going to respond to a work of art through careful observation, description, and creative writing as a form of interpretation. Then they’re going to brainstorm nouns, verbs, and adjectives suggested by the work of art and use a word bank that they’ve created to write a collaborative poem inspired by the painting. Okay, so just at first glance, let’s take a look at this learning objective. 

First of all, I don’t see any standards present. And for this to be a true arts integration lesson, I got to see standards for both the content area and the arts area. So while this is addressing some standards that exist in visual art and some standards that exist in reading, unless we’re explicitly stating what they are, we could easily lose track of number one, what we’re trying to teach, and number two, and maybe more importantly, the true meat and potatoes of that content area. The last thing that we want to do in arts integration is dilute either the content or the arts area, right? The fastest way to do that is by eliminating our standards. So I would want to see standards at the top of this lesson, hopefully side by side, so that they, again, achieve equal weight. 

In terms of the learning objective itself, though, when we take a look at this in terms of cognitive demands, when we talk about cognitive demand, we’re thinking about, at what level are we asking our students to work? What kind of brain power is needed here? So first of all, they’re going to respond to a work of art. So they’re not just passively looking at it, they’re having to respond. So that’s a little bit higher of a level of cognitive demand, not quite as high as creating, of course, but certainly more than just taking a look at it. So we’re asking them to respond to the artwork. We’re asking them to interpret that artwork. Again, respond is different than interpret. So respond is just asking them, what do you see? 

Maybe what do you think? What do you wonder? Interpret is, what do you think is actually going on here? It’s a different level of cognitive demand. So now you’re asking students to do two different things with the art. Let’s take a look at what they’re trying to do with the nouns, verbs, and adjectives. We’re We’re going to have to kind of tap into looking at that work of art and then having to create our own list of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. That’s a very high level of brain power that’s working there. And then we’re going to use that word bank to create a collaborative poem inspired by that painting. So again, we’re at that create level. So in the reading area, we’re asking students to operate at the highest level of cognitive demand, pulling create out as our action word there. 

We’re asking them to operate a very, very high level of cognitive demand. In art, it’s not to that same level. So there’s a mismatch there. It’s approaching that level, but it’s not quite the same. So I would want to take a look at, are you asking equal weight? And again, I’m not seeing equal weight given. to the arts area as well as the reading area in here. There’s a lot of ways that we could quickly adjust that. We would just need to have a little bit better understanding of the process. So let’s look at that. First of all, your materials are pretty simple, but then we’re gonna take a look at the lesson plan itself, right? So this is a lesson plan about Washington crossing the Delaware and taking a look at that very famous painting and then using that famous painting to identify five nouns, observed on that artwork, as well as five adjectives. And then it looks like just one verb, because I don’t see on that lesson plan a specific other than figuring out that verbs are action words and identifying possibly a verb that’s going on. Okay, so we’re looking at the piece of artwork in order to consider it. So I like how it starts with having thinking goals there and asking students to look carefully at the painting for a full minute asking them to then consider that work of art for that minute, but instead of just sharing what they see, now we’re going to give them a specific component to address. I would love to give students a little bit more time here instead of jumping straight into five nouns that you see, if you’re going to give them the full minute to look at the art and if your learning objective is to respond to that work of art and interpret it, I would want to actually interpret it, not just go find nouns that are in the work, right? So I would love to add that piece in there. That’s going to add a robustness to this lesson that would then help students to identify those nouns based on what they’ve interpreted, based on what they’re seeing, right? So I think there’s a little bit of a missing step there. 

Identifying five nouns is fine, right? We’re going to identify those five nouns using sticky notes to record them as a person, place, or thing and identify that in the artwork. That’s great. And then it’ll share some group discussion. Then on the next stack, you’re going to do the same thing. 

You’re going to have five adjectives. And then finally, we’re looking for that verb, right? At the end here on slide seven, it says share some information about the artist with the class. They might find it interesting to hear the history of it. They totally will. But that’s kind of like an afterthought here rather than a really cohesive way of pulling these things together, adjectives, nouns, and verbs. When we look at that in the painting itself, when you’re asking students to interpret those things, I would love a connection here where we start looking at, is there a way that we might have made a different choice as the artist for a different noun or a different verb or a different adjective? Again, it’s small little things, but they make a big difference in how well this lesson is going to do for students. 

But then we go straight into the word pile poem activity, which is when the students are going to use their post-it notes of an adjective, a noun, and a verb. to write a short phrase that describe their thoughts and observations about the work of art. So we are describing this work of art, perhaps responding. I’m not sure that we’re yet interpreting that piece of artwork. And then everybody in the small group has finished writing their words and phrases. They’ll read it together as a small group and then create, using a small group work, kind of create a collaborative poem together. Okay, so in general, I’m going to come back to you. In general, this is a great arts enhancement lesson. So when we talk about the difference between arts enhancement and arts integration, we’re talking about whether or not the art or the music or the dance or whatever it is you’re connecting is superfluous or if it’s being used in service of the other content area. 

So clearly in this lesson, The main objective, the main thing that this teacher wants to have happen is for students to identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives, to be able to recognize them and use them and then create with them, right? The artwork itself is just the avenue to do it rather than an actual linked piece that’s going to help you to understand nouns, verbs, and adjectives. There are different ways to do that with arts. I’m not sure that visual art would be the best way to do it. I would actually take a look at music because you have options of using lyrics to better connect to nouns, adjectives, and verbs. You can do it with visual art, but I would love to see other examples of visual art that showcase nouns, verbs, adjectives, right? 

And then comparing those things and perhaps having students create with them because if you’re going to create a poem, I’d love to see the students create a piece of artwork as well. Here’s the thing. When you’re thinking about the difference between enhancement and integration, it’s like the muffin and the cupcake, right? If I can take the icing off of the cupcake and the cupcake stands alone, that’s an arts enhancement lesson, right? If I can take the artwork off and that lesson stands by itself, that is an arts enhancement lesson. Washington crossing the Delaware away from this lesson. And this lesson would still stand on its own. It would still function, right? You don’t need that piece of artwork to do anything in this lesson, right? 

Whereas an arts integration lesson is like a blueberry muffin. If you try to take the blueberries out, the muffin crumbles, right? So in an arts integrated lesson, what you’re going to see are if you take the art out, that whole lesson would collapse on itself because you need the art in order for it to make sense. 

Okay, so hopefully you saw how that checklist was helpful in looking at just a regular lesson that you would find on TPT. And again, this is not about pointing out flaws or negativity or downing somebody else’s lesson idea. This is about helping us all grow and do better, right? And oftentimes a lesson like what you just saw is where many people start when it comes to arts integration, right? What that really is is arts enhancement.

And so understanding that is really important to knowing, okay, that’s an arts enhanced lesson. Now, what does an arts integration lesson look like? So that’s what I’m gonna do next. So let’s take a look at one that I found. I did a Google search for arts integration lesson on math lesson elementary, and this is what I found. All right, so let’s take a look here. This is a grade four math lesson that I randomly found on growing and repeating patterns. I love this idea. I’ve done a lot of different representations of this kind of concept on growing and repeating patterns. In grade four, it lends itself to a lot of different art forms. This, specifically this idea of growing and repeating patterns because it’s a challenging concept for students. Repeating patterns in particular are different than growing patterns. And sometimes students really get that mixed up. So it’s a really helpful concept to be going over, but also it lends itself beautifully to multiple art forms. So both dance and music and art. So taking a look at it from a variety of different art forms also gives it a lot of different flavors, right? So when I found this one, I was really excited.

And I got even more excited as I started to read through it because this is a really good example of a strong arts integration lesson. There are still some things that I would I would improve here, but this is a good one if you were just randomly searching for a lesson. So let’s go through it. You’ll have the lesson title up front. I’ve blocked out the name to save the innocent, right? We have our content area of math and our art form of dance identified. I would put these side by side.

Again, making sure that both are equitable so that we don’t subconsciously think that the math is more important than the dance, right? That by placing one above the other, I would just, it’s a nuance, but that’s how I would do it. I would put math next to dance and then the objectives of math, again, right next to the objectives for dance. Rather than one on top of the other, I’d put them side by side. But again, you have them listed here.

And I like that they have them listed. I would also just for clarity sake, I would also have the full standard listed out. That sometimes it’s overkill. But for me, I like to have it listed so that if an administrator ever walked in and wanted to look at that plan and know what exactly I was covering, it’s there. It covers my butt, right? So a little copy paste goes a long way. But.

What this person did was put it in the I can statements and they did put these side by side. And when I looked up the standards that they have listed here, they are these exact same statements. They just put it into student friendly language for I can statements. So generate a number or shape pattern that follows a given rule. Identify apparent features of the pattern that were not explicit in the rule itself for the math part.

And then for the art form, I can develop a dance alone or with others that expresses and communicates a main idea. So again, if we’re taking a look at these two side by side, do they have an immediate connection? Not necessarily. It took me a minute to really kind of think about how does developing a dance with others that expresses or communicates a main idea have anything to do with generating a number or a shape pattern?

that follows a given rule and then identifies an apparent feature of the pattern that wasn’t explicit in the rule itself. It took me a minute. I was like, it could work. Do the verbs match? So generate and develop. Yeah, they could match. They’re not the same, but they match in terms of the intention, right? And then identify and express. Identify and communicate is a better fit there. So this can work. Is it the strongest connection? Probably not, but what I loved here was the shared curriculum I can statement. I can develop a dance alone or with others that expresses patterns with a given rule. What I loved about this was that it clarified how those two components will work together in this lesson what this teacher is hoping to have happen during this lesson and how the two are gonna work together. So this students are gonna create a dance that expresses a pattern that has a given rule. That makes a lot of sense. Okay, so moving on. Content and art form vocabulary. I love that she’s got both listed here and that I can leverage both within the lesson. There’s a list of materials, music selections to make it easy for people to immediately access behavior expectations and I can statements. Again, those are things that are gonna be particular to you and your school, particularly right now in terms of classroom management. Having behavior expectations on there cannot hurt. And then the lesson outline. Notice how much different this is than the previous lesson, right? There’s an intro, along with exploration and skill development. And there’s timing behind this so that we know how to pace ourselves or what the idea behind the pacing is, the create and perform, and then a cool down and discussion. So there’s some language in here that is artistic language like intro, exploration, create, and cool down. That’s very much a dance language, but also could be working with math like skill development, discussion. We have interchangeable language that can work in each area so that we can identify how is this transitioning. Remember that area of the look -fors that we’re looking to see is there a seamless transition happening? Those are clues for us that intro and warm -up is going to be math and dance. Exploration and skill development.

This is going to be math and dance, right? So create and perform. There’s going to be a lot of dance here, but cool down and discussion. We’re working really math and dance. So you can kind of see where those natural transitions are going to be. I really enjoyed that kind of focus so that you could have some clues coming up. And then in each of these areas, so in the beginning.

We’re going to guide students through an exploration of their movement, so axial and locomotor motions to warm up their bodies. And then we remind students of what those are. Clearly though, students have already had that kind of movement before. So going through this lesson, I can see that students have already, they already know what axial motion is. They already know what locomotor motion is. This is a review, right? So I’m not teaching this for the first time.

Then in exploration and skill development, again, they know, it’s clear they know what a growing pattern is. They know what a repeating pattern is and that this is an application of the learning because we’re identifying what each letter is going to be in terms of the motion. So we have A is going to be a bend, B is going to be a jump, C is going to be a spin and D is going to be a crawl and then listing patterns using those letters so that students can then dance it. So they have A, B, A, C, which would be bend, jump, bend, spin, to show a growing pattern, right? And then they give examples of various growing patterns, various repeating patterns. Then having students in the create, perform area, having them in small groups create their own growing or repeating patterns and then dancing their patterns with their groups. And then in the cool down and discussion, having students have a discussion about what they noticed about the patterns they worked with, what some of their favorite ways of moving were, and if they were axial or locomotor, what other growing or repeating patterns that they know about and what they enjoyed most. So in their cool down and discussion, notice they’re addressing both the math, and the dance component. So we are addressing both areas and we’re ensuring that in this assessment, which is really what this is, we’re looking at a formative way of assessing whether or not students were successful here. They’re addressing both the math and the dance piece. So I would say this is a very successful arts integrated lesson. Now in the bottom, it has a specific assessment, observe how well students perform the tasks throughout the lesson.

Notice how students perform individually as well as how they do with a small group with creating and performing. Student responses in the discussion at the end of the lesson will also provide feedback as to how well they understand the concepts. This is a pretty light assessment. I’d love to see an attached rubric here or a checklist of some sort. Even if students who were watching had a checklist to see is this a growing pattern or a repeating pattern that they’re identifying that even if they just had a right hands go up for growing pattern, left hand goes up for a repeating pattern so that you can quickly assess are they identifying the correct pattern that they’re viewing. Some sort of a tangible assessment. I’d love to see that a little bit more in depth, but outside of that, I think that that’s the area of growth for this lesson that I would put in there. So.

I hope that you see the difference between the two lessons and why one is more arts enhancement and the other one is arts integrated and how we use that look for list to really guide us in determining how each lesson is, where its strengths are and where the weaknesses are. So I know this episode was a little bit longer than most, but I also think that it will help you long -term as you’re looking at collecting lessons and writing lessons in the future. That’s it for me today. Thank you so much, friend. I’m so glad that we were able to spend this time together and I look forward to being with you again next week on another episode of Artworks for Teachers.