Proposed+Standards+Details+Consensus+Document

SEADAE consensus as of August 31, 2011
 * Proposed Details of Next Generation National Arts Standards **
 * 1) National Arts Standards should extend **__PreK-14__**.
 * 2) Extending to 14 (college sophomore) will enable standards writers to work with higher education colleagues to delineate college general education arts expectations that articulate with Pre-12 expectations and might also apply to students in technical/community/junior colleges.
 * 3) Such general education expectations would provide the basis for new AP and other exams/courses in the arts, designed to enable students to master and demonstrate their mastery of college-level work.
 * 4) Based on the work described above, designers of teacher preparation can then treat teacher standards in part as what students who //major// in an art form should learn beyond the core standards for //all// college-educated students.
 * 5) National Arts Standards should include **__Big Ideas/Enduring Understandings__**. At least some of these will be shared across art forms.
 * 6) National Arts Standards should help teachers **__focus__** their work, rather than providing an unrealistically broad scope.
 * 7) In other words, standards should make more choices for schools/teachers than recent eclectic curricula and standards have been willing/able to make.
 * 8) Thoughtful choices will cause some initial controversy, but ultimately be a great boost to education in the field.
 * 9) National Arts Standards should explicitly reflect embedded **__21st century skills__** (we’ll need to look at both the Kay/Partnership and ISTE models).
 * 10) National Arts Standards should be based on the expectation that students, regardless of later elective choices, learn a **__common body of skills/content__** in each art form **__Pre-8__**.
 * 11) National Arts Standards should be **__grade-by-grade__** from PreK-8 in each arts area.
 * 12) To accommodate delivery systems that vary from district to district and state to state, writing committees will consider whether to “level” standards – i.e., outline successive levels of competence – in secondary electives strands in all of the arts. Designers must be sensitive to the possibility that substituting titles such as “emerging,” “novice,” and “intermediate” for specific grade level expectations might offer states/districts/schools that care less about arts learning the “wiggle room” to embrace a lower standard of expectation for their students.
 * 13) To create standards delineated grade by grade, writers will need to incorporate specific content to an extent that the original standards avoided.
 * 14) Writers could create outlines of key categories of content, more specific than those provided in the NAEP framework.
 * 15) Within those categories, writers could provide “literature lists” and other helps. Such helps could also be generated as part of a wiki-ish process.
 * 16) National Arts Standards should be differentiated for electives.
 * 17) Standards should be developed for NCES elective courses/codes, as revised in 2010 with input from professional arts education organizations.
 * 18) Electives may begin at least as early as the introduction of elementary instrumental music, or as late as a college arts course to fulfill a general education elective.
 * 19) Elective standards should take the form of **__“value added” outcomes__** – they should delineate what students making a particular elective choice should learn //beyond// the core PreK-8 standards expected for all.
 * 20) With the help of higher education/research colleagues including College Board, standards writers should base grade level (or possible cluster) expectations on what **__research__** reveals that students can do when provided with quality instruction over time.
 * 21) Standards writers should, to the extent possible, validate National Arts Standards’ research-based-but-still-somewhat-theoretical expectations by examining **__student work__** uploaded by skilled teachers – perhaps using wiki (or EdSteps?) tools – that demonstrate what well-taught children actually do, and also provide the basis for benchmarking (anchor sets), pre-service and in-service teacher training.
 * 22) This student work might be based on published indicators, or even on common assessments that distill discrete expectations into more complex performances with scoring tools.
 * 23) The next generation of www.CTcurriculum.org, which will be completed by spring 2011, is one tool that could facilitate this process; another is the SCASS/Arts database of on-demand assessment items.