School Type: Public	School Setting: Urban
Level: High	School Design: Traditional
Content Presented By:
The Education Alliance at Brown University
ArtsLiteracy Project

Design and Implementation

An important aspect of the ArtsLiteracy Project's (ArtsLit) design is how it connects to university resources. Housed within Brown University's Education Department, ArtsLit plays a vital role connecting Brown's academic resources with local, professional performing artists; teachers; and elementary, middle, and high school students. An undergraduate/graduate course at Brown serves as the Project's "think tank" on arts and literacy. Constant documentation and evaluation of Project work inform its design.

The following section describes two key facets of ArtsLit's design and implementation:

• Ongoing professional development, which includes intensive summer training, yearlong coaching, and supplemental workshops;
• The grounding of work in The ArtsLiteracy Curricular Framework: The Performance Cycle, whose philosophy and strategies support adolescent literacy best practices (e.g., collaborative learning; vocabulary development; an emphasis on reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking; and metacognition.)

Ongoing Professional Development

In ArtsLit professional development, teachers participate in the following:

• Professional development lab school for teams of local teachers and actors who co-teach a course entitled "From the Page to the Stage" at Brown Summer High School;
• In-school and after-school partnerships where teachers transfer the summer training to their classrooms during the academic year with ongoing support of the Project mentor teachers;
• Weekend and weeklong workshops, in which experienced teachers and artists lead novices through the Performance Cycle.

Professional development lab school:

At Brown Summer High School, teachers and actors work together with a class of high school students to "bring a text to life."

Coached by experienced mentors, teachers and actors work in pairs to research, plan, and teach a daily two-hour course, entitled "From the Page to the Stage," to high school students. The teacher-actor pairs observe one another teach, debrief, reflect, and participate in a range of workshops. They launch a culminating performance at the end of the summer as an exhibition of the students' understanding of the text.

This intensive summer training introduces teachers to the ArtsLit curricular framework and strategies, which are later applied to teachers' public school classrooms during the academic year.

In-school and after-school partnerships:

During the school year, the in-school and after-school partnerships involve two levels of professional development components:

1. Workshops - Through weekend and weeklong workshops, ArtsLit models how the arts can be used as a tool in the classroom to enhance student literacy. Participants analyze a challenging text through discussion, writing, reading, and performance.

2. Classroom Application - Artists and teachers actively work together in classrooms to apply the methodologies practiced in workshops to the specific needs of the students. Artist-teacher collaboration might take three forms: (1) artist modeling tools for teacher, (2) teacher and artist co-teaching, and (3) teacher teaching while artist supports. An experienced mentor teacher coaches artist-teacher teams and facilitates reflection on each day's work and on the overall process.

Most school-year units last about six or seven weeks and involve twelve artist visits based on the following structure:

• Week One: Building Community and Entering Text
• Weeks Two and Three: Comprehending Text (This portion might last as long as a month depending on the length and the amount of text read in class and at home.)
• Week Four: Creating Text
• Weeks Five and Six: Rehearsing/Revising Text
• End of Week Six: Performing Text
• Week Seven: Reflection (discussion and writing)

While any text can be used, the following are recent examples: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Othello and The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
St. Joan by George Bernard Shaw
Aida (both the folk tale and opera)
The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Cider House Rules by John Irving (both the novel and play)
The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
Antigone by Sophocles
Metamorphosis by Ovid
poetry by Langston Hughes
stories from students' lives

Weekend and weeklong workshops:

ArtsLiteracy workshops for teachers and artists are offered on weekends in the fall and spring and for a week during the summer. The workshops address how ArtsLit strategies can be incorporated meaningfully into daily classroom practice. They offer participants a chance to learn from one another as they refresh and refine their skills. Teachers of all levels have an opportunity to learn arts-based literacy strategies alongside artists and students. Artists have the benefit of drawing on their performance experience while collaborating with teachers, other artists, and youth to develop arts-based literacy curricula.

The ArtsLiteracy Curricular Framework: The Performance Cycle

The Performance Cycle serves as an instructional model to all teachers and artists who participate in The ArtsLiteracy Project (ArtsLit). Through the Performance Cycle, teachers guide students in reading and comprehending text, writing original scripts, and producing a quality performance.

For a full description of the Performance Cycle and activities for each element, see http://www.artslit.org/handbook.html

The ArtsLiteracy Project Performance Cycle

The following describes how the seven elements of the Performance Cycle relate to key components of the Adolescent Literacy in the Content Areas spotlight.

Performance Cycle Elements:

1. Building Community

Through Building Community, ArtsLit promotes safety, support, personalization (not being anonymous to teachers or to other students); student voice; enactive learning; and an important social context for learning and fun.

Building Community as Key Component A practices:

• Making Connections to Students' Lives
• Having Students Interact With Each Other and With Text
• Creating Responsive Classrooms

"We are in the business of transformation. Transforming students into readers, writers, and performers. Transforming teachers into artists. Transforming artists into educators. As you well know, transformation in any environment doesn't come easy. In our organization, what we have realized is that the most important thing we can do is to take care of the teachers, artists, and students we work with, and to create a space where transformation can occur. We create a community where teachers and artists care about each other and spend time with each other outside of our program. This is how teachers should be treated in their professional lives and this is how we want our teachers to treat our students, to create an environment where everyone is valued and taken care of."
Kurt Wootton, ArtsLiteracy Project Director

"We teach how we are taught."
ArtsLit teacher

2. Entering Text

In ArtsLit, Entering Text always takes place before students read challenging text. ArtsLit provides instructional scaffolding by engaging students actively and collaboratively in the concepts and vocabulary that they will encounter in the text. In doing so, ArtsLit also develops teachers' and artists' capacity for using strategies of metacognition, reading for understanding, and student engagement.

Entering Text as Key Component B practices:

• Emphasis on Thinking
• Creating a Student-Centered Classroom

Entering Text as a Key Component C practice:

• Vocabulary Development

"From a literacy perspective, we're particularly interested in the idea of visibility because students' reading processes are generally invisible. When a student is reading a book, silently, it's difficult to tell how they understand it or even if they understand it. The arts are one way of making these invisible cognitive processes visible."
Kurt Wootton, ArtsLiteracy Project Director

3. Comprehending Text

ArtsLit uses highly enactive and collaborative learning to support reading for understanding and continues to integrate metacognition and engagement throughout the Performance Cycle. Activities based on explicit comprehension strategies such as (but not limited to) fluency, prediction, and visualization provide abundant opportunities to practice higher order thinking skills and to master the text.

Comprehending Text as Key Component B practices:

• Speaking and Listening
• Collaborative Learning

4. Creating Text

In the process of creating original scripts for performances, ArtsLit provides an abundance of opportunities to practice and master written language. Students also use writing to interpret the experiences of the characters in the text in terms of their own experiences and to derive meaning from the text.

Creating Text as Key Component B practices:

• Reading and Writing (time on task)
• Speaking and Listening
• Collaborative Learning

5 and 6. Rehearsing/Revising Text, Performing Text

ArtsLit's rehearsal process provides a chance for students to continuously revise their performance. Throughout the revision process, students both give and receive feedback on their work. This feedback from peers and teachers allows for continuous assessment and elevates the work to a higher level of quality.

Rehearsing/Revising Text, Performing Text as Key Component A practices:

• Making Connections to Students' Lives
• Having Students Interact With Each Other and With Text
• Creating Responsive Classrooms

Rehearsing/Revising Text, Performing Text as Key Component B practices:

• Speaking and Listening
• Collaborative Learning

"Students have a range of skills, passions, and talents they can bring into the classroom ? if we extended the invitation. When space is opened in the classroom for students to bring their set of skills and interests, traditional teacher/student roles are inverted. The teacher becomes a student and the student a teacher.

This summer one of our artists put the structure for the performance on the board. A student responded, 'I don't think that's an effective way to end the performance, I think we should end with the other piece.' The teacher responded, 'Does the rest of the class agree with that? O.K, we'll change it.'

Even though the teacher and artist have the ultimate responsibility for the class, such dialogue offers all students legitimate voice in the decision-making process."
Kurt Wootton, ArtsLiteracy Project Director

7. Reflection

After each day's activities and after a performance, deliberate reflection becomes a welcomed habit and opportunity for expressing one's individual voice. It also provides opportunities for supporting metacognition, community building, organizational development, and professional development.

Reflection as a Key Component B practice:

• Emphasis on Thinking: Metacognition and Higher Order Thinking

Reflection as a Key Component D practice:

• Involves Ongoing Support for Teacher Professional Development

"We create constant opportunities for feedback and reflection - in our organization, our professional development, and our classrooms. Our teachers spend three full days at the end of the summer reflecting on our process and how we can improve as an organization. This reflection is critical to our organization's responsiveness to the needs of our teachers, artists, and students."
Kurt Wootton, ArtsLiteracy Project Director

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This resource is developed and maintained by The Education Alliance at Brown University. Seed funding was provided by the U.S. Department of Education. Send comments to: loom@alliance.brown.edu