SchoolWorks Lab Retreat at Cragged Mountain Farm in Freedom, NH
August 16-20, 2010

Two hours north of Boston in the New Hampshire White Mountains lies a gem, Cragged Mountain Farm, an “old-school” summer camp full of rustic cabins that will host artists and educators for a one-week camp retreat. Participants will have time to take their pioneering art experiences and transform them into new thinking that can be used to sustain arts Partnerships in schools. This retreat offers participants, aka campers, the opportunity to live, eat and develop new thinking and new stories about arts integration.

The ETSL (Evidence of Teacher and Student Learning) is an online digital portfolio of student work. Over the past two years this online space has been organized to allow Arts-In-Education Partnerships funded by NYSCA (New York State Council on the Arts), consisting of a cultural institution partnered with a school in New York State, to use the space for:

• planning an arts-integrated unit,
• documenting what happens,
• assessing student learning,
• reflecting on their own learning as educators.

The ETSL RUBRIC (The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc., March 24, 2009) is not yet an official rubric for this work, but due to a variety of requests, a rubric is available. As a school reform strategy, the formal use of Rubrics for grading teacher performance is un-tested. However, the use of rubrics as guidelines for understanding across multiple classroom contexts is viewed as very helpful. The ETSL RUBRIC has five categories, or characteristic benchmarks, organized across a grid with four levels of performance descriptions.

RACE TO NOWHERE is a close-up look at the pressures on today’s students, offering an intimate view of lives packed with activities, leaving little room for down-time or family time. Parents today are expected to raise high-achieving children, who are good at everything: academics, sports, the arts, community-service. The film tackles the tragic side of our often achievement-obsessed culture, with interviews that explore the hidden world of over-burdened schedules, student suicide, academic cheating, young people who have checked out.

RACE TO NOWHERE asks the question: Are the young people of today prepared to step fully and productively into their future?

We hear from students who feel they are being pushed to the brink, educators who worry students aren't learning anything substantive, and college professors and business leaders, concerned their incoming employees lack the skills needed to succeed in the business world: passion, creativity, and internal motivation. The filmmakers take viewers to schools across the country to talk to teachers, parents, students, and experts including:

Denise Clark Pope, author of Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Mis-educated Students

Madeline Levine, author of the best-seller, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Materialistic and Unhappy Kids

Deborah Stipek, Dean and Professor of Education at Stanford

Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg, an adolescent medicine specialist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and author of an American Academy of Pediatrics report on the importance of play; and

Sara Bennett, founder of Stop Homework and co-author of The Case Against Homework: How Homework Is Hurting Our Children and What We Can Do About It.

Wendy Mogel, author of the best-seller, The Blessing Of A Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children

RACE TO NOWHERE is a call to families, educators, experts, state and national leaders to examine current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become the healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens we need.

Click here to view trailer

I want to give our workshop participants an easy way to access our handout entitled: "Helpful Tips for filling in the Evidence of Teacher and Student Learning (ETSL) Template. Below please find most of the text without any of the diagrams...

What is the relationship among the major components of the ETSL project? assessment IS THE GLUE OF THE
RELATIONSHIP OF ETSL COMPONENTS. Evidence improves if assessment demands it. Assessment improves if it shows better evidence of student learning. Student learning improves if assessment supports learning. Teacher learning improves if assessment yields better evidence.

HELPFUL ASSESSMENT TIP: Improve your assessment process because it drives teacher and student learning and collects the evidence of improved student learning.

IMPROVING YOUR ASSESSMENT PROCESS

HELPFUL ASSESSMENT TIP: Embed the assessment. Gather better evidence. Ask students what they have learned. Sample Pre-, Mid- and Post- learning statements for stronger validity and reliability.

OUTCOMES

How do “Outcomes” measure the relationship of teaching and learning? The outcome of teaching is a conversation that results in improved teaching and student learning, normally measured in a set of outcomes.

HELPFUL ASSESSMENT TIP: The best evidence of the learning process comes from learning statements that show the outcome of student learning. You have to ask for these learning statements from students and your self in order to capture it as you go along, otherwise, the learning process goes un-assessed.

MEASURING THE LEARNING PROCESS

How can we track and measure the learning process? The learning process is formed from opinions, which you can track as learning statements over time. The key is to measure learning before the action of teaching takes place

HELPFUL ASSESSMENT TIP: Choose a teaching and learning moment that highlights student demonstration of learning. Choose to display what students know before and after the event. Highlight their learning and yours. Describe the difference between their pre- and post- learning. Capture a mid- learning moment to increase accuracy.

HOW CAN WE MEASURE THE OUTCOME OF THIS LEARNING PROCESS?

The difference between a Pre- and Post- learning statement is the measureable progress in learning. Although learning statements seem like nothing more than opinion, compared to other learning statements recorded at the same time, they take on assessment meaning. Display before and after learning statements together
and compare them to each other and to other students.

HELPFUL ASSESSMENT TIP: The DIFFERENCE between PRE- and POST- LEARNING STATEMENTS is the progress in learning that you have documented.

So sorry to have been offline, but the new year (Happy New Year!) will bring forward the fruits of our hard work in constructing a new way for artists to share their work: the Online Evidence of Teacher and Student Learning (ETSL) Database is an on-line space and a tool for collaborating on:

• planning an arts-integrated unit,
• documenting what happens,
• assessing student learning,
• reflecting on your own learning as educators.

The database is hosted online by the Empire State Partnerships (ESP). ESP was launched in 1996 as a joint initiative of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and the New York State Education Department (NYSED). These agencies united with the goal of raising standards for students and integrating and reinstating the arts into classrooms throughout New York State. ESP is a program of the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) and is fiscally supported by the Metropolitan Opera Guild. ESP is dedicated to identifying, supporting and developing promising practices in collaborations between cultural organizations and schools. The focus of the project is on the achievement of the New York State Learning Standards and contributing to the improvement of teaching and learning in New York Schools. My organization (The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc.) is the evaluator of these Partnerships and our role (Amy Chase Gulden, is an artist and our Senior Researcher) is to provide evaluations that constantly improve the rigor of arts-integrated work.

An ETSL Unit is a portfolio of documents, resources, and journal entries that shows how an arts unit works in a K-12 public school setting. Users can attach documents, photos, audio clips, and video. As the unit unfolds, users can continue to enter information into the ETSL Unit throughout the project and refine their "portfolio" as the work progresses.

An ETSL Unit generally:

• documents the story of an arts-integrated unit of study in one classroom,
• has a teaching artist and a classroom teacher as its editors and creators.

The goal of the ETSL Unit is to show evidence of teacher and student learning through data collection, assessment and peer-to-peer documentation and evaluation. The first year of piloting, 2007-2008 follows many years of hard work by the field of funded partnerships to improve their work. This year, 2008-2009 we have switched to a fully digital module hosted on the ESP Website.

ETSL is for anyone engaged an Arts-in-Education partnership. Currently, only recipients of the following grants can register for the the Online ETSL Database:

• ESP School-wide
• ESP Project-based
• Local Capacity Building Regrants (LCB)

If your partnership is not currently recieving funding through any of these granting opportunies, you can download the PowerPoint version of the ETSL Unit, downloadable below:

ETSL Template- PowerPoint Version

I hope you enjoy hearing and seeing this new effort in New York State!

The world of arts integration is inter-connected. And yet, where are we? We are everywhere and yet we are invisible to the larger community. I am currently blogging on the Scholastic website (Strategies for Arts Integration) and out of the ten blogs on different aspects of education, my blog on arts integration is getting the fewest hits, so help us become more visible, hit the link just mentioned, and MAKE A COMMENT! How do we improve our public community? By publicly sharing our knowledge, our professional opinions and our wisdom about the success we promote in students. Don't forget to access other bloggers and artists besides us! Leave comments, share ideas or let people know about us. I know this is a kind of an odd thing to say, but it seems to be true on the internet, that when you want to start a community, invite the other members and bloggers to join by referencing them and their work!

When you go to my blog, you will see all the references I have found to arts integration happening all over the world, for example, The Wilson Arts Integration School in DC, arts integration in California and bloggers everywhere. That is why I say that arts integration is everywhere. Let's make it more visible, OK? Thank you.