Teacher Talk Part 2

In this podcast, the host discusses the difference between art-integrated lessons and art-enhanced lessons. Art-enhanced lessons use the arts as a strategy to support other subjects, while art-integrated lessons involve students constructing and demonstrating understanding through an art form. The host gives examples of how different subjects can be combined with art, such as using visual arts and ELA to teach about emotions, or combining social studies and music to analyze the influence of history on music performances. The host also provides resources for finding art integration lesson plans and emphasizes the importance of using art to teach culturally responsive teaching. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Teacher Talk. I am your host for today, Fabiola Vassat. In our last podcast, our host, Bradley Watson, went over the benefits, methods, and strategies of art integration. In today's podcast, we are going to dive deeper into art-integrated lessons and how to teach them. The first thing to know is the difference between an art-integrated lesson and an art-enhanced lesson. Many teachers, just like me, get them confused. The Kennedy Center does a great job of explaining the two. An art-enhanced lesson is when the arts are used as a device or a strategy to support other career-driven areas, but no objectives in the art form are taught. Essentially, the arts are used as a hook to engage students in learning. For example, students sing the ABCs to remember the letters and sequence of the alphabet. However, the students are not learning about melody, so structure, or developing a specific singing skill. In contrast, art integration is an approach to teaching in which students construct and demonstrate understanding throughout an art form. Students engage in a creative process that connects an art form from another subject area and meets evolving objectives in both. When students engage in an art-interior lesson, they are forming connections between an art form and another subject area to gain an understanding of both. I know this is a lot of information, so I find it easier when it is sequential to both. An art-enhanced lesson only includes the learning objectives of a core subject, such as math, reading, or social studies, and an art-interior lesson includes the learning objectives for both the art subject and any other subject you choose. Let's say you write a lesson plan, but you're not convinced it is art-interpreted. A way to check is to make sure you're using objectives for both the art and the core subjects. I'm going to use a lesson I wrote in the past as an example. In my lesson plan, I used visual arts and ELA to teach a lesson on emotions. We read the book, The Color Monster, where the main character changes colors based on how he is feeling. In this lesson, students learn about color theory and use their reading comprehension skills to answer questions about the book, such as how the colors help tell the story and if they can think of other colors that can express emotions. This led to a discussion on how artists use color to emote emotions. I gave the students examples of colors and emotions, like yellow equals happiness, blue equals sadness, red equals anger, pink can be love, and green equals calmness. The students got to design their own color monster, making sure the color they chose correlates with the emotion they are expressing. The students did this in their work and talked about the materials they used and what emotion and color their monster represented. If this were to be an art-enhanced lesson, I would only read the book, The Color Monster, and then ask the students to draw their own monster with their own knowledge of how colors were used to express emotions or feelings. We just learned how visual arts are used to teach a lesson. Now I'm going to go over other forms and how they are used in the course, such as create a lesson plan. If you want to combine social studies and music, you can learn a lesson where students analyze the influence of history on music performances. In this lesson, students will write an analysis of music inspired by historical events with a focus on expressive qualities being used by singers, songwriters, as well as considering their representative views of historical being represented in the songs. Now, if you were to use math and visual arts, you can create a lesson where students identify and describe shapes such as squares, circles, triangles, and rectangles by using the work of other artists' aspirations. In this lesson, students will think about artists and how they use shapes in their art. The students will then create their own art where they use just geometric shapes and the artist's art as inspiration. Lastly, when using drama and ELA, one can create a lesson in which students work in pairs to develop the physicality of literary characters or historical figures. This lesson asks students to create a physical character, but to do so, they will need to thoroughly understand the character as evidenced by details in the text. Students will act as their book character by using knowledge they learn about the characters in the book to properly portray them. I know what you're going to say. I know that you don't know where to begin or this is way too complicated. Here are some resources that I have found helpful. There's a website called The Art Integration, which you can find great lesson plans. There's a book called Integrating the Arts Across Content Areas. The book, Popular Activities and Strategies, will be used in the classroom. And lastly, you can look at the Department of Education. I was able to find lesson plans of art in a grade of lessons from grades kindergarten to fifth grade. Another great thing about art integration is that the arts are a great way to teach culturally responsive teaching. With art, students can express their heritage and language honoring their background and the voice they want to share with the class. Storytelling, dance, visuals, and songs can help students connect to the community and each other. The most important thing to remember is that one doesn't have to be an artist to integrate art into the curriculum. It is not about being perfect, but about reaching all stages of every ability. That is all I have for today. Be sure to check out our next podcast where our host, Jessica Alexander, will interview two learned teachers where they will discuss the challenges teachers face integrating the arts and technology. I will link the lesson plans I used as examples and all the information mentioned below so you can explore even further. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. Music