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

Summary

The practice: Creating a Student-Centered Classroom

• In this English language learners class at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, most students have spoken English for only a few years or months, some for a few weeks.
• The city of Central Falls ranks the highest in the state of Rhode Island for community-wide limited English proficiency (29.5%, compared to the state average of 6.2%).
• These students and their teachers are participating in a literacy development opportunity, offered through Brown University, called the ArtsLiteracy Project (ArtsLit).
• ArtsLit draws on research in language development, literacy, and arts education. The research suggests that acting, speaking, writing, planning, and organizing for a performance is a powerful tool for improving students' engagement in school, and especially in literacy activities.
• The ArtsLit professional development workshops and summer programs ( http://www.artslit.org/programs.html) emphasize the teaching concepts of modeling, apprenticeship, and scaffolding.
• The ArtsLit curricular framework (or Performance Cycle: see http://www.artslit.org/handbook.html) emphasizes high standards, community building, interactive learning, student voice, and connections to life experiences.
• One aspect of the ArtsLit Performance Cycle that contributes to this practice is Entering Text.

The ArtsLiteracy Project (ArtsLit) offers a year-round professional development program that helps teachers and actors link the performing arts to student literacy development. ArtsLit's major focus is to construct a classroom community in which adolescents develop the skills and habits of mind to convey meaning through?and recover meaning from?print text.

The ArtsLiteracy Performance Cycle benefits English language learners by creating a safe, engaging, and welcoming community of learners and by offering an abundance of motivating and purposeful activities for practicing skills in reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Students benefit from the enactive learning activities and collaborative structure of the Performance Cycle. With these supportive elements, English language learners are better able to understand challenging text.

In this English language learners class, students have written stories that share a memorable life event and make a reference to the place where students spent their childhood before moving to Central Falls. As students read their stories aloud, few have problems pronouncing or decoding the printed word because they know the text they have created, but most struggle to project their voices. After each story, the class applauds enthusiastically, and teachers comment on individual progress. On performance day, they will share their stories and demonstrate their skills to the whole student body at Central Falls High School in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

• Making Connections to Students' Lives  
• Having Students Interact with Each Other and with Text  
• Creating Responsive Classrooms  
• Roles of the Teacher  
• Supporting the English classroom through literacy development   
• Utilizes best practices in the area of systemic educational reform.  
• Involves ongoing support for teacher professional development.  

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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