Why Standards?
As a dance educator, one of the most useful resources I’ve found for building curricula and setting class outcomes and goals is The National Core Arts Standards (NCAS). This set of nationally recognized standards covers every area required by the 50 States in depth, and their focus on the arts can help us build a more balanced and well-rounded arts education for our students. Whether we teach in school settings or specialized studios, these standards are relevant to what we do, and can also help us in our advocacy for continuing arts education. If you visit the NCAS website (www.nationalartsstandards.org), you will find customizable resources that you can tailor to your needs. This website offers guides for Anchor Standards in Music, Visual Arts, Theater, and Dance, along with Model Cornerstone Assessments to assist with developing your own assessments, among many other resources. This first series of blog posts will focus primarily on the Standards themselves and provide practical applications for them.
As an educator, it’s helpful for me to know where I’m trying to get to before I build my curriculum. The Standards give me an end goal. I know what my students must accomplish and know by the end of the year or before they can effectively move forward to the next level. My focus this year has been on implementing the standards from all four processes - creating, performing, responding, and connecting - in my classes. Here is a brief breakdown of each process for the dance discipline:
Creating - The creating process is made up of three process components: Explore, Plan, and Revise. During the exploration part of a project, dancers can do research, listen to music, and search through many different stimuli to find inspiration for a piece. They also play with movement quality, tempos, space, and other elements of dance to find movements they feel “work” for their concept. Planning involves the organization and development of a piece. It also defines the purpose and meaning behind the movements being developed. The Revising component helps students provide clarity to their intentions and students will find ways to document the work and revised versions of their work. The larger foci of Creating are to find concepts and ideas for the purpose of creating dances, develop those ideas and concepts, and refine the work created by students. This is also the first step in guiding the creative process. As I generally tend to use collaboration as a way to teach dance, creating already has a strong presence in my studio. The NCAS have served to help me create more focused and intentional exercises for my dancers.
Performing - The performing process also contains three process components: Express, Embody, and Present. Expression entails the greater development of meaningful movement through changes of movement energy, tempo, and space to make the piece more dynamic. Embodiment of dance is not solely about the body executing the correct movements, but doing so with practiced skill and care. Healthy practices and routine for the body and the class as a whole is also part of this component. Presenting work is a natural part of dance education, and in this case it includes the demonstration of leadership, etiquette, documenting and implementing notes from rehearsals, and identifying and utilizing performance elements that will make the piece the best it can be. In my classes, utilizing the NCAS has provided a deeper understanding of why we perform, and to appreciate the other components of performances on a deeper level.
Responding - The three components of responding are Analyze, Interpret, and Critique. First dancers look at movement patterns, use of dance elements, style, etc. and determine how these things work to demonstrate the artistic intention of the piece. Interpreting dance happens when dancers examine different dance pieces and discuss their meanings and intentions. Dancers enter into the critiquing component when they can explain how the use of elements of dance were used effectively or ineffectively to convey meaning and artistic intention. In my experience, most dance studios focus primarily on creating and performing process, In my 8 years of teaching dance, the Responding and Connecting have accidentally fallen by the wayside, and it was not until recently that I discovered the value of these other processes.
Connecting - Synthesize and Relate are the final two components of the HS Proficient Dance Standard. Synthesizing the knowledge and experience gained from the first three processes and learning to apply it to new projects and other parts of life by collaboratively conducting research on the pieces dancers observe, creating an original movement problem, and finding a solution to the problem. Relating works from varying cultural and historical contexts to a student’s current experience promotes a deeper understanding of the world around them. It offers alternative ways to see the people around them and opens students to new ideas and thoughts about their own perspectives.
As I intentionally incorporate NCAS concepts into my lesson plans, I’m discovering many more reasons to continue using them. I’ve noticed that many of my students possess strong leadership skills, which I attribute to our many collaborative assignments in class. In addition to building leadership skills, students also have a strong sense of community in the dance studio and on campus. They often state that our dance community is their family, and that it’s a place where they can come and enjoy themselves, while also finding challenges that make them better people.
The Standards encourage creative thinking, emotion management, the skills to find alternate solutions to problems. Students are seeing a world outside themselves. They are seeing the world through another’s perspective, because the Standards encourage an inclusive look at arts and cultures from around the world. The Standards foster holistic learning, because students use the information they gain in their arts courses and apply it to other areas of life.
The beauty of the National Core Arts Standards is that they cover a lot of ground in only a few exercises. Many of the Standards sections happen simultaneously, and many of these segments overlap and fit together without a lot of effort on our part. Knowing where and how these can work together strengthens our lessons and units. I also love to use the standards to guide my assessment processes to make sure I’m on track with what my students are learning. I can look ahead at what they should be learning next, which helps me provide a better foundation for them now. This also gives arts educators the solid ground they need to advocate for their programs.
I should note that because I teach at a school, I have a wide variety of levels and experiences in my classes, and their proficiency levels in each process vary. The goal is to help bring them toward the Advanced level of functioning, but we often start at levels much lower than the standard high school proficiency. As an arts educator who believes in process over product, the fact that my students perform at different levels never worries me. Education is a process that lasts the rest of our lives if we choose. For the sake of this blog series, however, I will focus on the HS Proficient Standards, examine the use of the standards in my high school dance classes, and provide practical exercises and ideas that you can replicate in your own studio.
Honestly, I love these Standards, and I hope the posts in this series will be an inspiration and encouragement to arts educators everywhere. Happy reading!
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