Rethinking Curriculum and Instruction: Lessons From an Integrated Learning Program and Its Impact on Students and Teachers

Abstract

CoTA (Collaborations: Teachers and Artists) is a professional development program that empowers teachers to access the arts in everyday instruction to support student achievement. CoTA schools commit to intense, 3-year collaborations for ten weeks each year where teachers learn to capitalize on arts content and strategies to promote knowledge and skills in other curricular areas, such as language arts and math. Teachers and artists work together to identify the learning needs of students, customize a project to meet those needs (while aligning to the standards), refine the project on a weekly basis through collaborative meetings, and formally reflect on the experience in a cycle of continuous improvement. As the program progresses, responsibility for designing arts-infused units increasingly falls to the classroom teachers as the artists shift into a coaching role. The result is a sustainable model with a legacy of confidence and skills in arts integration for teachers. Researchers from the University of California San Diego are conducting a quasi-experimental study, which features a multi-site, mixed-methods design to examine CoTA teachers’ understanding of arts standards and potential impacts on students in grades 1-6. Data sources include a pre/post-test to measure teachers' understanding of arts standards, teacher interviews that examine implementation, CoTA classroom observations, training documents, and student scores on language arts benchmarks. Analyses include thematic coding of qualitative data, as well as descriptive and inferential analyses of student outcome data collected by the District. This article will present preliminary findings from year one of a three-year evaluation.