TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL 6 (3), 236–246
Copyright Q 2008, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Judy Hornbacher
Research
editor
Review
Editor’s Note: Nick Rabkin is uniquely qualified
to review Studio Thinking by Hetland and Winner.
He has advocated for the arts and for teaching
artists many years in many capacities, most
recently as Executive Director of the Center for
Arts Policy at Columbia College Chicago where he
was the co-author of Putting the Arts in the Picture:
Reframing Education in the 21st Century (2004).
He was a founding member of the Chicago Arts
Partnerships in Education, which focuses on
transforming public schools through the arts.
As a senior program officer at the John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Nick was
instrumental in publishing Champions of Change:
How the Arts Impact Learning (1999). His work in
Chicago and at the national level has given him a
truly global understanding of role the arts play in
education and in the democracy. He brings that
broad vision to this review.—J.H.
Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Education
in the Visual Arts.
By Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley Veenema,
and Kimberly Sheridan Teachers College Press,
2007ISBN 978-0-8077-4818-3 $24.95, paperback
Review by
Nick Rabkin
236
Americans have long valued education as a
doorway to social mobility, a strategy for
developing individual potential, and the key
to a sustainable democracy. But the design
and practice of public education in America
reveals another agenda. From the beginning
our schools have been charged with ‘‘Ameri-
canizing’’ a burgeoning immigrant popu-
lation, providing an ‘‘objective’’ basis for
sorting and stratifying students by race, eth-
nicity, social, and economic status and pre-
paring most for a life of dull and
unimaginative work. Is it any wonder, then,
that arts education has never found a secure
home in our schools and that its advocates
have been adapting arguments to defend it
from the start of public education. The long
debate about the value of arts education has
always been framed by this tension over
schools’ fundamental mission—between our
highest educational ideals and our systemic
practice.
What’s more, the complex association of
the arts with privilege and high social status
compounds the problem.We might like to
think that arts educators have been consist-
ently on the side of equity, democracy,
inquiry, critical thinking, and all that is
good in our schools, but advocates have
sometimes resorted to narrow pragmatic or
TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL
opportunistic reasons for arts education.
Today we can still hear echoes of old argu-
ments for arts education that are complicit
with the regressive purposes of schools: the
arts will ‘‘civilize’’ the poor or teach them the
‘‘discipline’’ that they lack.
At the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, of course, John Dewey argued for a
progressive education that embraced the
arts. But his notion that the arts are a domain
of inquiry and learning every bit as generat-
ive as science or history has never won wide
acceptance in education policy circles. In
some respects, the era of No Child Left
Behind may be the nadir of his in£uence.
On the other hand, in the last couple of
decades researchers have found scienti¢c
evidence that Dewey’s fundamental idea
about education—that knowledge, under-
standing, and meaning are constructed by
the learner through experience—was
sound and that the project-based, hands-on,
engaging experiences typical of the arts are
genuine and deep learning experiences.
Still, all the noise about what schools are
really for has overwhelmed and obscured
understanding of what students learn in the
arts, and what value that learning might
have to them in other domains.
What do high school students learn
when they study visual art ? That is the ques-
tion that Lois Hetland, Ellen Winner, Shirley
Veenema, and Kimberley Sheridan took on
in the research that led to their recent Stu-
dio Thinking: The Real Bene¢ts of Visual
Arts Education. Over the 2001^2002 school
year, the four closely observed ¢ve highly
respected studio art teachers doing their
jobs in two arts-centered high schools in the
Boston area.What were their teaching
methods ? What were their teaching objec-
tives ? And what were their students learn-
ing ?
In a marvelous foreword, David Perkins,
the former director of Harvard’s Project
Zero, identi¢es the world of the visual art
237
studio classes the team studied. Unlike most
Research Review
classrooms, the studio is a world in which
most of the time is dedicated to making art
objects, not listening to the teacher or read-
ing books—a world in which new infor-
mation is transmitted to be used
immediately, not for next week’s exam or
‘‘when you grow up.’’ ‘‘Studio activities are
fully developed junior versions of what we
would like learners to get better at and do
more of later. Good studio activities capture
the full motivational, technical, and creative
dynamic of creating works of art as a pro-
fessional artist or a serious amateur might
do later in life’’ (iv).
The researchers identi¢ed three funda-
mental studio teaching modes used by all
¢ve teachers in di¡erent combinations: lec-
ture-demonstration, students-at-work, and
critique. Using those three modes, they
found that the students were taught the
craft of the visual arts (principles, techni-
ques, materials, and tools) and they were
taught about the art world beyond the stu-
dio (art history, visual culture, galleries and
museums).
They also found that the students were
taught a ‘‘hidden curriculum’’ of ‘‘at least six
other important kinds of general cognitive
and attitudinal dispositions’’ Richly
described with concrete descriptions of
lessons and learning, these cognitive dispo-
sitions (they are alternately referred to as
studio habits of mind and thinking inclina-
tions) are what make learning the arts valu-
able for all students.What are they?
. Engage and persist: Students learn to
embrace relevant problems and cultivate
focus conducive to working at art tasks.
. Envision: Students learn to imagine men-
tal pictures of what cannot be seen and of
possibilities.
. Express: Students learn to create works
that convey an idea, feeling or personal
meaning.
238
. Observe: Students learn to look more clo-
sely than ordinary looking demands, and to
see more and more deeply.
. Re£ect: Students learn to question them-
selves and their own work, to explain it to
others, and to evaluate their work and their
process (and the work of others).
. Stretch and explore: students learn to chal-
lenge themselves, to work spontaneously,
to embrace opportunities, and learn from
mistakes.
For many teaching artists these six cogni-
tive inclinations may seem rather old hat. Art
education is a ¢eld in which practitioner
knowledge is generally well ahead of research
and policy. But naming the studio habits has
enormous signi¢cance. The practice of art
teachers and teaching artists is profoundly
misunderstood and requires translation for
other educators This hidden curriculum,
these inclinations brought to the surface by
Hetland et al. can be explored, tested, ques-
tioned, and used. Their enumeration is a
genuine contribution to arts educators who
can become more conscious and re£ective
about their own inclinations and practices,
and better translators for others.
Hetland and her colleagues have a notion
that these inclinations are likely to be culti-
vated by the study of all the art forms, not just
visual art, and I am con¢dent that is true.
Teaching artists in every arts discipline are
likely to recognize the six inclinations in their
own teaching and art-making practice,
though the balance among them and the best
words to describe them are likely to vary
among the di¡erent art forms.What makes the
inclinations so signi¢cant, however, is that
few educators, even those most skeptical of
the arts in schooling, would dismiss them as
unimportant. That is because they are not
unique to the arts. They are general cognitive
capacities that can be pro¢tably applied in any
classroom, not just the art studio, and to most
of the problems we confront in our daily lives.
2008 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3
The fact that they are cultivated in arts class-
rooms makes them potent ideas for arts edu-
cation advocacy in the future. But Hetland and
her colleagues refrain from making a claim
that the students in the art classes they stud-
ied applied them outside the studio.‘‘We can-
not yet say whether the dispositions we
identi¢ed in arts teaching and learning do or
do not transfer to other ¢elds.We have not
conducted studies to test this possibility.’’
Instrumental and Intrinsic Value
With this statement, the authors open a can of
worms. Several years ago Hetland and Winner
provoked considerable controversy in the
world of arts education when they reported
the results of several ‘‘meta-analyses’’ of
research on arts education in which they
found no evidence that learning in the arts
transfers to other domains of learning. (Meta-
analysis is a sophisticated statistical technique
that makes it possible to combine ¢ndings
from a scan of varied experimental studies.)
The pair were alarmed by what they believed
was a growing reliance by arts education
advocates on unsupported claims that learn-
ing the arts improves student achievement
generally—that arts learning ‘‘transfers’’ to
other domains of learning, and that the arts
have an ‘‘instrumental value’’ to general edu-
cation. They argued that it was scienti¢cally
irresponsible and politically incautious to
make a case for the arts’ place in schools on
that basis. Rather, the arts should be in the
curriculum because of the intrinsic value of
the arts themselves.
Other notable education researchers
responded by citing compelling evidence the
arts contribute to higher achievement which
had been excluded from the Winner^Hetland
meta-study for technical reasons. Some also
argued that the conclusions in the Winner^
Hetland study were designed to support
an elitist ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ perspective that
was being challenged by innovative ‘‘art for
TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL
learning’s sake’’ pedagogy. Here in Chicago,
one of many places where teaching artists
were inventing new ways to improve
schools by connecting the arts to other sub-
jects, practitioners felt that the meta-analysis
implicitly dismissed their work and contri-
butions. For those more committed to arts
education traditions, though, the meta-
analysis buttressed the case against ‘‘arts
integration’’ and for ‘‘sequential and disci-
pline-based instruction’’ in the art forms.
In Studio Thinking, Hetland,Winner,
Veenema, and Sheridan acknowledge that
transfer to other domains is possible (and
believe that their new study ultimately may
contribute to proving it), but they stand by
the position that it is the arts’ intrinsic quali-
ties that make them valuable in schools.‘‘The
arts must stand on what they teach directly.
If along the way we ¢nd that the arts also
facilitate academic learning in other sub-
jects, then we have a wonderful side e¡ect.
But in justifying arts programs on an instru-
mental basis, we devalue the arts and fall
prey to the anti-arts or arts-as-frills strain
that accompanies the back-to-basics move-
ment in the United States’’ (3).
In identifying the studio habits of mind,
Hetland and her colleagues believe they
have captured the intrinsic cognitive con-
tent of arts learning. Did they?
The authors are clear that the studio
habits are general cognitive dispositions
and that they are valuable to the pursuit of
knowledge and understanding in virtually
any domain, not just in art. Competent
mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, or
historians must learn to engage, observe,
envision, re£ect, and stretch, just as good
artists do. Conventional classrooms are less
likely to be fertile environments for devel-
oping these dispositions than the studio, but
laboratory science, hands-on math, or pub-
lic history classrooms may be equally gen-
erative. It would seem that the studio habits
are not intrinsic to art or any other single
239
domain of learning. Art, science, history,
Research Review
and philosophy all demand the dispositions
called studio habits, but none can claim
them dispositions as uniquely their own.
They are not intrinsic to any one domain of
learning. Rather they are intrinsic to learn-
ing itself.
That is likely to be the reason why there
is evidence that learning in the arts
improves academic performance in general.
Perhaps the distinction between the intrin-
sic and instrumental value of the arts is no
more than an academic distinction and less
than useful in the real world of classrooms
and learning.
Hetland,Winner,Veenema, and Sheridan
give an approving nod to Elliot Eisner, the
venerable arts education researcher and
theorist, for his e¡orts to identify the les-
sons the arts teach. They claim that their
dispositions ‘‘bear some striking similarities
to those that Eliot Eisner, in his book The
Arts and the Creation of Mind (2002), has
argued the arts teach’’ (5). But several of Eis-
ner’s ideas have no close correlates among
the studio habits. He argues, for example,
that in the arts, qualitative relationships
matter most, not measures and rules. He
posits that the arts encourage the sense that
problems have more than one solution, and
questions more than one answer. He argues
that the arts teach that subtle and small dif-
ferences can have large e¡ects. These ‘‘les-
sons,’’ as he calls them, are vital to the
lifelong task of making meaning in the
world.
Eisner’s work suggests that there may be
more cognitive dispositions cultivated in
the arts than Hetland and colleagues found
in the studio classes. And we can imagine
more: Does it take a di¡erent kind of obser-
vation to distinguish negative from positive
space? What about the capacity to both sim-
plify and abstract complex ideas or feelings ?
What about the inclination to identify pat-
terns or to create patterns and order ? What
240
about ¢nding analogies among dissimilar
things ? What about the most basic operation
of making visual art—the capacity to under-
stand one thing that represents another, the
capacity to make things that represent others ?
That cognitive inclination, which we might
think of as metaphor, strikes me as utterly
fundamental to all the art forms, but also to
our ability to think and communicate at all.
The Habits of Teaching Artists
Teaching artists generally work in school
contexts that are quite di¡erent from studio
classrooms, and they may cultivate cognitive
dispositions that vary from those in the studio
classrooms. The studios observed for Studio
Thinking were quite remarkable, and they
were in exceptional high schools—two
schools that take teaching and learning the
visual arts seriously and devote large blocks of
time to studio classes. Hetland,Winner, Vee-
nema, and Sheridan selected them precisely
because they were not typical. The focus in
those classrooms made them excellent
sources of data.
The schoolrooms in which most teaching
artists work, however, are not in exceptional
schools, and the students they teach do not
choose to be there, as they did in the Studio
Thinking schools. Though there is much evi-
dence that the arts can capture the interest of
students who do not do well with other sub-
jects, those students are sometimes reluctant
arts learners as well. Good teaching artists
know there is no learning unless there is
engagement and their ¢rst challenge is to
engage students. Some dazzle them with
charisma or virtuosity, but the best know that
the strongest engagement comes from a focus
on material that matters to the students. So
teaching artists consistently look for themes,
ideas, feelings, and issues that matter, and
many ¢nd that their students are superb
sources of ideas, concerns, and passionate
interests. Art in their classrooms character-
2008 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3
istically has content that extends into realms
that are meaningful to students. By using stu-
dent interests as a basis for some curriculum,
teaching artists model a fundamental learning
disposition—that thoughtful investigation of
matters of personal concern leads to satisfy-
ing learning experiences^that is at the heart
of lifelong learning.
Does that mean that teaching artists are
diminishing the integrity of the art they
teach? Not at all. In fact, they may capture the
dynamic of creating a work of art even more
fully than ¢ne teachers in studio classrooms.
Teaching artists, like many contemporary
artists, bring powerful questions and experi-
ences from the broader world and from the
lived experience of their students into the
classroom. And engaging the world is every
bit as intrinsic to the arts as is engaging the
material, tools, or techniques of the art form,
as intrinsic as envisioning and planning,
re£ecting, or exploring.
In fact, one could argue that the world of
the studio classroom is actually a retreat
from the rich and fully complex dynamic of
art making. If the art world consistently
engages di⁄cult social, political, and cul-
tural questions (and the contemporary art
world certainly does) the art classes
described in Studio Thinking actually
reduce the level of complexity by attenuating
the connection of art making to content
from beyond the world of the arts.
My point here is not to critique studio art
classes or advocate for social deconstruction
in every art class. There are times when a
retreat from the maddening complexity of the
real world in which students live is essential
for cultivating the attentiveness and the time
required to make good art. It is a very good
thing for students to take classes that permit it
and a pity that so few do. It is terribly impor-
tant that the world of the arts be opened to all
students. But it is equally important that the
world be opened to all students through the
arts. Neither of those tasks is easy under
TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL
current conditions.When they are well exe-
cuted, both should be celebrated.
There is a good deal of evidence that
people learn best in groups, so they can learn
from each other as well as from a teacher. It
may well be that the capacity to trust and
participate in a community of learners is, like
the studio habits, a fundamental cognitive
capacity that needs to be cultivated and
developed. Students who do not or can not
participate in learning communities are
likely to learn less and learn less well. Clearly,
in schools like those in Studio Thinking
students share an a⁄nity for the arts, and
they appear to have a head start toward
becoming communities of learners. The art
teachers in Studio Thinking do not need to
spend a great deal of time or energy con-
vincing their students that it is a good idea to
be attentive to the lecture demos, commit to
their art projects, or participate thoughtfully
and actively in critique sessions.
But all too often teaching artists work in
schools driven by high stakes testing that
atomize students and break down com-
munities in the classroom. They must, as a
result, become quite expert in building a
feeling of trust and community in class-
rooms that are sometimes chaotic and hos-
tile. That is why teaching artists often begin
lessons with introductory exercises and
warm-ups and why community building art
exercises are often a part of their classroom
routine. The heightened engagement and
deep learning that often happens in their
classrooms is linked closely with the level of
community the students feel with each
other and with the artist, just as it is in the
studio classrooms. These overt e¡orts to
build community and trust cultivate a learn-
ing disposition that recognizes the cognitive
advantages of multiple perspectives, imagi-
nations, and group energy harnessed to the
same material.
Teachers decide what students should
learn and how to teach them. That does not
241
always mean, though, that teachers are mak-
Research Review
ing those decisions consciously. Curricu-
lum and teaching methods are part of the
culture of schools, handed down from gen-
eration to generation. They are teachers’
default settings. The value of Studio Think-
ing is that it unpacks those defaults in the
visual arts. It identi¢es the real content of
visual art in high schools. And it shows how
good teachers help their students learn. It
also raises a set of new questions: One of the
most important may be what good assess-
ment looks like in the visual arts. Is it all
about the technical quality of student work
(as might be suggested by the approach of
the College Board Advanced Placement pro-
gram) or is it about progress along a con-
tinuum of the studio habits that includes,
but is not limited to, technique.
One of the real beauties of Studio
Thinking is that it can help any educator
become more re£ective. What is the
balance between the studio habits in my
teaching ? What is the balance among the
modes of instruction in my teaching ?
Studio Thinking can also prompt us to go
deeper in our own thinking Are there
other inclinations that are vital to making
art, music, or theater ? That are useful in
other domains of learning ? Are there incli-
nations in Studio Thinking o¡ the mark?
No one knows better than you.
Works Cited
Eisner, Elliot.‘‘Ten Lessons the Arts Teach.’’
In Learning and the Arts: Crossing Bound-
aries. Ed. Amdur Spitz & Associates, 2000.
7^14. Retrieved from http://www.naea-
reston.org/pdf/Crossing%20Boundar-
ies.pdf
Hetland, Lois, and Ellen Winner.‘‘The Arts in
Education: Evaluating the Evidence for a
242
Causal Link.’’ Journal for Aesthetic Edu-
cation, 34.3^4 (2000): 3^10.
Learning Through Music: The
Practice of Teachers and
Teaching Artists
Judy Hornbacher
In early October 2007, I conducted a focus
group of eleven teachers, teaching artists, and
Learning Through Music (LTM) consultants,
all of whom have worked with LTM at Ramsey
International Fine Arts School in Minneapolis
for the last ¢ve years.
I had several goals with this focus group. I
wanted to learn (a) how the practitioners
understood and articulated their involvement
with LTM, (b) if and to what extent their work
with LTM had changed their practice as tea-
chers and teaching artists, and (c) what ele-
ments of LTM seemed to be responsible for
their involvement and perceived changes. In
other words, I
wanted to know how LTM works
in real life.
The questions were as follows:
. How did you ¢rst become involved with
LTM and with what LTM projects have you
worked?
. Has your work with LTM changed the way
you teach? If so, in what ways ?
The focus group was one hour long, taped,
and transcribed. I coded responses and clus-
tered them based on the coding.
Respondents described many kinds of
changes that had taken place at Ramsey and in
themselves since work with LTM began ¢ve
years ago. Those changes cluster into four
areas:
1. Increased connection between Ramsey
classrooms and the community.
2008 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3
2. Increased connection and collaboration
between music and other subject areas
and the impact of those connections on
students.
3. Changed practice of teachers and teach-
ing artists and growing professional
community between teachers and artists.
4. Increased understanding of the need for
and usefulness of assessments.
The quotes in the following article are
taken directly from the focus group respon-
dents. Each quote is representative of a larger
group of comments by respondents. I chose
to use direct quotes instead of summarizing
comments because I wanted to illustrate (a)
the substantive changes that have taken place
and (b) the very concrete ways in which tea-
chers and teaching artists must understand
and articulate their own work to make it suc-
cessful with students.
Cluster 1: Connection Between
Ramsey Classrooms and the
Community
The ¢rst step LTM took at Ramsey was having
a community orchestra, the Kenwood Sym-
phony Orchestra (KSO),1 make its rehearsal
headquarters there. That led to a Pen Pal pro-
ject in which members of the orchestra
donated their time to write and visit class-
rooms of interested teachers at Ramsey. The
Pen Pals and KSO were the ¢rst LTM contact
for most respondents. Those initial steps led
to greater communication with the orchestra
and the inclusion of more teaching artists and
university students.
‘‘I had a Pen Pal through Kenwood
Chamber Orchestra.. . .That is the ¢rst
association, and last year I worked with LTM
and the University students (the Guided
Intern Program) to create a mini-musical in
second grade based on our cultural studies
TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL
curriculum. . ..’’ (second-grade classroom
teacher)
‘‘I started out with the Pen Pal concert,
primarily working with the ‘Sorcerer’s
Apprentice’ (a piece played at the KSO con-
cert) and our science unit on water.. . .We
did a lot. . .using vocabulary from the
poetry of the ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’
and. . .making water sounds on our vio-
lins. It was a lot of fun. . .then we did Read-
ing to the Beat project where I worked with
kids who (were) having a tough time read-
ing. . ..’’ (fourth-grade teacher)
‘‘Ken Freed. . .our conductor introduced
the program. . .I went to a few meetings
and started working with (a classroom
teacher). I really appreciated the dedica-
tion. . .and I like the idea of working with
kids through music.’’ (KSO teaching artist)
‘‘I got involved through the Pen Pal pro-
ject and (KSO Teaching Artist) became my
pen pal to our classroom. . .three or four
years. We’ve done Vivaldi, Fall,Winter or
Spring. . . .He (KSO teaching artist) brings
in the musical aspect of the piece to the
poetry or I bring in the poetry aspect to the
music, I don’t know, we sort of work
together on that. . . .(It) has been nice; his
daughter has also come and been involved
in my classroom. And last year we had a
poet that also taught the poetry part of
Vivaldi so that has been a really good
relationship.’’ (third-grade teacher)
Cluster 2: Connections and
Collaborations Between Music and
Other Subject Areas: Impact on
Students and Teachers
Focus group members spoke extensively
about the growth in understanding
between the music department and other
classrooms during LTM’s tenure at Ramsey.
They also spoke about their increased
243
understanding of the connections between
Research Review
music and other subject areas. Several of
these comments illustrate the importance of
the LTM music and curriculum consultants
working with teachers in ‘‘job embedded’’
sta¡ development. Several also illustrate the
impact LTM has had on students and the
quality of work that is done at Ramsey.
‘‘I was unaware of all the academics
that they were using in a string lesson and
have been at fault in the past in maybe
making disparaging remarks about the
music department not teaching aca-
demics. My ¢rst major thing with LTM was
having a pen pal. Ken (Ken Freed, director
of KSO and violist with the Minnesota
Orchestra) went on tour with the Minne-
sota Orchestra. (He called himself Major
Scale and he was always lost and couldn’t
read coordinates). . .and we had this
activity where the kids would get an e-mail
everyday from Major Scale with a clue
about where he was supposed to be. . .so
the kids had to take the map coordinates of
the city and then. . .transpose them into
musical notation. . . . By the end we had 12
overlay transparencies. . .so it actually
looked like a piece of music (which) the
kids played for Ken and Ken said ‘play it
backwards.’ Well, (student) who was an
excellent cellist, just completely froze. He
could not play it backwards. He could play
it beautifully forwards but could not play
it backwards and I’m. . .going ‘he doesn’t
have reversibility in math either.’And all of
a sudden. . .I could teach math di¡erently
by thinking about music. . . .Whoa, this is
good stu¡.’’ (Former Ramsey fourth-grade
teacher, current LTM curriculum consult-
ant)
‘‘What’s really helped is the integration.
I know when I did my geopolitical divi-
sions unit. . .I worked with the (strings tea-
cher) to emphasize crescendo and
decrescendo which are mathematical
symbols as well as musical symbols and it
244
also applied to size of geopolitical units. So
the kids brought their violins to class and
played crescendo and decrescendo and
were amazed that it ¢t into more than one
subject area. I don’t have a musical back-
ground. . .so I am learning with the kids and
they’re showing me. (Last) spring we did the
‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ (by Minnea-
polis composer Carl Schroeder) and so I tied
the whole lesson on the Civil Rights Move-
ment (to the music) and how that history
was interpreted through music. . . .The com-
poser even came to our classroom and gave
me a copy of the CD.’’ (sixth-grade teacher)
‘‘I have learned that I could go into a
classroom and just sort of wing a les-
son. . .but there’s just so much more that you
can do if you just delve a little bit into it and
try and make the connections between dif-
ferent things. I get to work with seventh-
grade math students and we are trying to
connect the math to Bach and Beethoven
melodies. . .and I know that with some of the
kids it really began to make sense. . .and it is
hard to reach middle school students!’’
(musician=composer teaching artist, music
consultant, LTM)
‘‘I am a kind of in-house consultant for
teachers because I help (the LTM consultant)
(with) her questions about music. And I
helped (seventh- and eighth-grade math
teacher) to generate ideas. I try to bring in
the math (into strings class) and the things
we do all the time but to say to the kids,‘Hey!
You’re doing math. These are the same sym-
bols you use in math.’ So the kids realize that
(math) is not just in the classroom, that it
also comes into the music classroom. And I
think we. . .in the string department, have
been trying to. . .bring in more aspects of the
crossover so the kids get that.’’ (Strings tea-
cher at Ramsey, bassist KSO)
Referring to a project composing Aztec
music and studying Aztec culture:‘‘And it was
so much more than composing. . . it was
composing, it was concentration, it was
2008 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3
them developing as a group and then per-
forming as a group. . .it’s that group experi-
ence that is important. . . .We rehearsed it
and rehearsed it. . .the kids knew what to do.
They understood how it was supposed to
work. I think there were just great strides
made for those kids. . . .We speci¢cally picked
the kids that usually are pretty disengaged
in the classroom. . . .They’re usually not suc-
cessful in school and they are just either
very quiet and hoping no one calls on them,
or never turn in any work or have behavior
problems.’’ (teaching artist)
‘‘And we made sure that every kid had a
solo and there was no leader or power;
everybody was doing a lead role. Then we
tied it into teaching the role of music in a
culture, how they made their instruments
and the performance was the culminating
test. Some kids who normally score 20, 30
percent were getting up into 70, 80, and 90
percent.’’ (sixth-grade teacher)
Cluster 3: Changed Practice of
Teachers and Teaching Artists
Growing Professional Community
Between Teachers and Artists
One of the major threads emerging from the
focus group was how much both classroom
and music teacher practice has changed over
the ¢ve years. Teaching artist practice has also
changed and a professional community of
teachers=artists is developing The changes
seem to have come about through the pres-
ence of the LTM consultants on site and pro-
fessional development led by Larry Scripp and
other LTM program personnel.
‘‘(LTM Consultant) approached me to
teach the odes, kind of team-teach the odes
in my fourth grade classroom. . . .So we
talked about it beforehand, the children
were familiar with‘Ode to Joy’ (played by
fourth and ¢fth graders in strings) (Now)
TEACHING ARTIST JOURNAL
they were going to write their own. And I
thought, oh, you know, no big deal, the
kids can handle that. So the (LTM consult-
ant) comes in and it was like a lesson that
really £opped badly, went poor-
ly. . .because the kids didn’t know rhyming
and I assumed they could rhyme. . . .They
had no clue. I thought (putting words into
syllables) would be so simple. But a 9 or 10
year old. . .struggled with that. So what (I
thought) should have been a one-day les-
son turned into two weeks. (But) I learned
a lot. One, not to take anything for
granted, but really start with the basics.
And then, once the kids got it, oh my gosh,
the work they produced, it just gave me
goose bumps. . . .It was worth the e¡ort.’’
(fourth-grade teacher)
Referring to the fourth-grade opera:‘‘I
had a kid last year (and) we were listening
to a song that the orchestra was playing.
We’d heard it a lot of times in class and all
of a sudden it clicked into what was play-
ing, he sat up in his seat ( ¢rst time he had
sat up) and he went ‘That’s my song!’ And
that kid was totally, totally entranced with
what was (happening) on stage because
the ownership was there. He felt like that
was his song.’’ (musician=composer, teach-
ing artist, LTM consultant)
‘‘We were just doing our little left-hand
position technique which is the story of
Schmo and Adele and the dancing mon-
keys. Then she (LTM curriculum consult-
ant) happened upon it and she’s like ‘You
realize you’re doing this, that and this and
that?’And she wrote it up.’’ (Ramsey strings
teacher commenting about importance of
having the LTM curriculum consultant be
in her classroom to see what strategies she
was using and how useful those strategies
could be to classroom teachers)
‘‘Read to the Rhythm was absolutely
fabulous when I ¢rst did it with a music
person in the classroom. The kids who
did it made huge gains over a very short
245
period of time. When I tried to replicate it
Research Review
by myself, it fell apart horribly because
I don’t have any rhythm.’’ (fourth-grade
teacher)
‘‘I don’t have a whole lot of rhythm
myself so I had a student who has rhythm.
He leads and we all follow and it’s been
very successful. I do it (in Reading to the
Beat) all the time. I start it out with a very
basic rhythm and then the kids take over.
And they like it.’’ (sixth-grade teacher in
response to previous fourth-grade teachers
concern about not having a good sense of
rhythm)
Cluster 4: Understanding the
Need for, and Usefulness of,
Assessments
LTM has developed a number of assess-
ments for use at its model sites. It has also
provided professional development for tea-
chers and teaching artists on how to identify
what student learning should be in projects
and how to measure whether students
learned what was intended. This section
illustrates how capacity for assessment and
re£ection on learning has grown over time.
‘‘With the (LTM) lesson . . .Classical Lis-
tening, I have created an environment
that helps students become more creative
in their listening skills. I have implemen-
ted playing color-coded bells (purchased
by KSO) to each chord structure and mel-
odic movement in listening to classical
pieces. Students were asked to listen to the
music with their eyes closed to picture
mind movies and then place them on
paper. The outcome was fantastic. The stu-
dents were able to show steps and melodic
movement in their picture. Larry Scripp
has also prompted me to explore phonemic
awareness through the use of various
songs and story books. Students who are
having fun exploring sounds can’t help but
246
want to learn more about reading. (K-8
General Music teacher at Ramsey)
‘‘About the opera meeting last Monday:
the qualitative di¡erence in our discussion
Monday was. . .I wish I had taped it. This is
our tenth year of doing the opera and in the
past we would talk a lot about the logistics
and the organization and those surface
kinds of things that are important to get it to
work. But I would say that over half of our
conversation on Monday had to do with
‘What did the data show us last year ?’ ‘Did
we really measure the questions that we
had?’ We talked about our central questions,
should we continue with those questions, do
they still ¢t? It was just a very di¡erent level
of discussion.
‘‘The same thing happened with the
music circle last Thursday. . . .It was just a
very qualitative di¡erence. . . .We were talk-
ing about what they were each going to
teach and how they were going to measure
it. And were they really teaching music and
behavior concepts? And how could you
translate behavior concepts into music con-
cepts and vice versa.’’ (LTM curriculum con-
sultant, fourth- and third-grade teachers)
The changes in teachers, school, and stu-
dents spoken about in the focus group seem
to have taken place because of the way LTM
was implemented at Ramsey School.
. Partnership with a community orchestra
and the on-going involvement of its players
as teaching artists.
. Professional development in pedagogy and
assessment provided by Larry Scripp and
other LTM personnel.
. Ongoing, job-embedded sta¡ develop-
ment and connection making provided by
the LTM music and curriculum consultants
at the school.
. Multiple ways for teachers and teaching
artists to interact with students and each
other, for example, Pen Pal concerts, drum
circles, fourth-grade Opera project, Read-
2008 VOLUME 6, NUMBER 3
ing to the Beat, interdisciplinary units,
assessments, University of Minnesota
Guided Intern program, local and national
conferences.
The combination of training and on-site
consultants has made it possible for Ramsey
teachers and teaching artists to grow and col-
laborate in ways that had not previously been
possible.And so the question arises:What does
it take to sustain a program like this over time?
LTM in Minneapolis is a complex and
growing partnership. The Learning Through
Music Consulting Group is a 501C3 that raises
money to pay the LTM consultants at Ramsey.
Ramsey School provides part of an on-site arts
coordinator who is the liaison with the
orchestra, the teaching artists, and the class-
room teachers. The school district’s Colla-
borative Arts Department has hired the LTM
consultants to do additional work for the dis-
trict: teach courses on integration, begin LTM
projects and structures at new sites, act as
coaches to other music teachers in the dis-
trict. Finally, the University of Minnesota
School of Music has obtained a grant for the
Guided Intern program.
No program is ever static. There have been
personnel changes at Ramsey: principal, tea-
chers, and coordinators. But at least from the
point of view of the eleven focus group
respondents, LTM has been a major driver in
their changed thinking and practice over the
¢ve years it has been at Ramsey. It has also
proven to be much more than a ‘‘music’’ pro-
gram. It has set in motion a nexus of changes
that is making Ramsey a better magnet school
in all arenas, not just music. Its teachers are
becoming better teachers, its teaching artists
better teaching artists.
Notes
For more information about KSO and the
Pen Pal concerts, see http://www.learning-
through-music.org/currentwork.php