Pairing Math & Reading With the Arts
New emphasis on arts integration is incorporating song, dance and painting into everyday courses
By Michelle R. Davis/School Administrator, December 2015


Peeking into a classroom in the Fairfax County, Va., school district, a visitor might see kindergartners dancing to create patterns with their bodies. In St. Paul, Minn., elementary school children may be drawing story characters for a stop-motion animation film based on a book they read. In the Portland, Ore., suburb of Beaverton, students could be acting out an experience from their lives, then describing those actions in writing.

Kindergarteners and 1st graders at Centre Ridge Elementary School in Centreville, Va., work together to build shapes with their bodies using the definitions of the shapes they learned. (Photo by Kristin McClure)

Across the country, school districts are integrating arts programs that pair academic learning with creative pursuits in an effort to improve student engagement and achievement in all subjects. It’s an endeavor gaining both financial support and backing from the federal government, and the outcome data from some programs is showing a quantifiable impact on student learning. The same education leaders who once felt pressured to move resources away from the arts are now looking at arts instruction with renewed appeal.

Arts integration in K-12 education, says Doug Herbert, acting team lead for the arts in education program in the Office of Innovation and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education, is “multisensory, and if you think about the need for differentiation in instruction, it appeals to kids coming at a particular area of content from different places. … They’re able to understand and succeed in the acquisition of knowledge.”

The integration of dance, painting, digital arts, music and theater with subjects that range from math and reading to science and social studies draws in students in new ways and improves understanding and retention.

Proponents see “a natural connection” between art and a wide variety of subjects, says Jennifer Cooper, director of the Wolf Trap Institute for Early Learning Through the Arts, which runs a national program on the arts and science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM, for pre-K and kindergarten students, including those in Fairfax County. “This gets students to care and be engaged … and develop an interest and curiosity about those subjects.”

Authentic Instruction

In the 13 years since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act led to schools and districts being judged primarily on their math and literacy scores, attention to arts education has shrunk in public schools. But a new emphasis on arts integration initiatives is making the incorporation of song, dance, painting and music into everyday courses more attractive to education leaders.

In a 2012 speech, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan noted “the study of the arts can significantly boost student achievement, reduce discipline problems and increase the odds that students will go on to graduate from college.”

Kofi Dennis, master teacher artist for the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, uses a steady beat to teach counting skills to kindergarteners in Fairfax County, Va. (Photo by Scott Suchman, Wolf Trap Foundation for the Arts)

Arts instruction was defined in No Child Left Behind as a core subject and at least 41 states have adopted instructional requirements for arts education at all levels, according to the Arts Education Partnership. For more than a decade, the federal government has poured millions of dollars into grants that use the arts to promote learning in other academic subjects. The Department of Education’s Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination Grants and some Investing in Innovation grants, also known as i3 grants, have emphasized the arts, in particular.

“Arts education has the potential to be more embedded in student learning and outcomes,” says Kathi R. Levin, a policy and legislative liaison and programs manager with the National Art Education Association.

In integration programs, both the arts and complementary academic subjects have parallel roles to play. “Educators have to find ways to explore the learning in each discipline equally and with parity,” Levin says. “There has to be authentic, rigorous instruction and learning in both subjects.”

That’s something that the San Diego Unified District is focusing on with an arts integration program funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education aimed at low-income students. It’s just the latest in a series of arts integration grants the district has received, according to Denise Lynne, dance and theater resource teacher in the district’s visual and performing arts department.

This school year, 22 low-income schools throughout the K-12 system are using the arts to teach a variety of subjects. Teachers received three days of summer training to develop lesson plans with the artists based on the Common Core. They also learned about the artistic discipline they’d be using and work with artists who visit classes once a week for an hour to implement lessons alongside the classroom teacher, Lynne says.

A 5th grader works on collage artwork during a Young Audiences Arts for Learning residency program in Atlanta, Ga. (Photo by Jeff Roffman)

“We have to make sure the artist is going to honor both subjects,” she adds. “The goal is to make them work together.”

For example, as a dancer teaches students to build molecules with their bodies and form those molecules into solids, liquids and gases, the artist must use proper terminology for both science and dance.

And teachers need to learn about the arts, too. That can be a challenge, because some teachers worry they lack an artistic background. Others see it as just another task piled onto an already-heavy workload.

Pairing Teachers

At Centre Ridge Elementary School in Fairfax County, Va., the principal two years ago asked for teacher volunteers to integrate the arts in math lessons. Only two teachers, who co-taught a K-1 class, accepted.

“I heard from colleagues that they didn’t feel they themselves were strong in the arts, and it meant extra meetings and extra planning time,” Kristin McClure, one of the participating teachers, says. “But later, when they would walk by and see us doing the lessons and saw how much fun the kids were having, a lot of them said they were kicking themselves for not signing up.”

A special education teacher at Mississippi Creative Arts School in St. Paul, Minn., integrates arts into English language and math lessons as part of the DigitalWorks initiative, a one-to-one iPad program. (Photo by Kia Yang)

With the federal money, 22 elementary schools in Fairfax County focus on STEM areas in pre-K and kindergarten by pairing teaching artists chosen by the Wolf Trap Institute with classroom teachers. They work jointly to devise standards-based lessons using the curriculum already in place. During an eight-week period, professional artists make a series of 30-minute visits to classrooms. Over that time, leadership of the arts lessons moves from the artist to the teacher.

“By the end of the residency, the teacher should be the one doing it and should know the elements of the art form and facilitate the lessons,” Cooper says.

One artist with whom McClure partnered specialized in drama and storytelling, using puppets and props to bring math concepts to life. A folktale about a spider turned into a lesson about patterns and shapes based on the configuration of the spider’s web, McClure says. “She used story elements to make the math concepts concrete and real for students.”

During another session, McClure’s teaching artist specialized in dance. She used students twirling on the stage to illustrate terms like quartet, quintet and duo. But the artist also taught students dance concepts, like how to enter and exit a stage and follow stage directions.

“That stuck with them. They really understood what it meant to take away or add in because they physically did that with their bodies,” McClure says.

External Verification

The Wolf Trap program has more to back it up than just teachers’ positive anecdotes. A four-year independent study of the early childhood STEM learning program undertaken by the U.S Department of Education documented statistically significant, though slight, improvements to test scores compared to control groups.

The federal grants require outside evaluation of the effectiveness of the arts integration activities. The positive data have formed a consistent pattern, says Jan Norman, national director of education, research and professional development at Young Audiences Arts for Learning.

“I was just so tired of having decision makers not respecting the role of the arts in changing how people learned,” she says. “We’ve been able to show that students improve, find subjects more interesting and engaging and easier to learn.”

The 40,000-student Beaverton Public Schools in Oregon have been using the Arts for Learning program for the past five years to teach literacy in grades 3-5 districtwide through a $4 million i3 grant, according to district spokesman Jon Bridges. The district scales up the program gradually each year.

Rebecca Carney, a teacher on special assignment in Beaverton, paired drama with literacy, which helped English language learners and others with limited literacy skills. Students would act out a gesture or a scene in an exaggerated way, then subsequently write about it. “We were getting these really clear descriptions of feelings and what they were doing with their bodies,” she said. “They were doing much more showing a reader what they were experiencing versus telling a boring story.”

Culture of Creativity

Beaverton has not experienced gains in student test scores based on large-scale assessments, such as state reading tests, Bridges says, but teachers report the infusion of arts-related practices energizes their lessons and engages indifferent students.

The fact Beaverton has applied its arts integration work districtwide is meaningful, experts say. A program that extends beyond a single school or classroom permeates the culture of learning across the district, Norman says. The wide use builds capacity among educators and grants access to students in high-income and low-income schools. “You increase the amount of experience both students and teachers have with it, and it becomes an integral part of the instructional approach,” she says.

In St. Paul, Minn., the district is in its third year of a federal arts integration grant, which ultimately will reach students districtwide. The DigitalWorks initiative uses a one-to-one iPad program to infuse media arts into English language arts and math instruction.

Jan Spencer de Gutiérrez, the district’s supervisor of visual and performing arts, says she and two arts specialists work with four schools, coaching teachers and students to use technology with an artist’s eye. For example, when high school students studied lines and slopes in math, they also used iPads to create graffiti based on those math concepts. In elementary school, students learned about metaphors, then created a stop-motion animation film to highlight a story’s beginning, middle and end.

“This is more than enhancing the curriculum,” Gutiérrez says. “It’s making students think about the content and how to use technology tools more effectively.”


Michelle Davis is an education freelance writer in Silver Spring, Md. E-mail: michrdavis@hotmail.com