The visual and performing arts provide avenues for students to investigate and develop a positive sense of self, place, and purpose. Framed in personally relevant and culturally responsive learning, the National Core Arts Standards (NCAS) address essential questions and skills to support students in this investigation through five arts disciplines: Dance, Music, Theater, Visual Arts, and Media Arts. NCAS outline critical components of the creative process under the umbrella of four domains (Create, Perform/Present/Product, Respond, and Connect) to guide students through rigorous exploration of skills in artistic literacy. These standards (and arts education in general) emphasize transferable skills through growth-oriented and participant-driven creative outlets to prepare students for college, career, and life.
Continuity of Learning: Arts Recommendations
Regardless of learning model, students should continue to develop and sustain skills in artistic literacy while demonstrating proficiency in the National Core Arts Standards. Considerations and recommendations for providing these opportunities are described in the Continuity of Learning: Visual and Performing Arts Recommendations and Resource Compendium document. The purpose of this document is to support Vermont programs in providing a holistic learning experience to students while upholding the Education Quality Standards as they pertain to the arts. These considerations can serve to support preservation of the arts in schools and the essential skills and qualities obtained from arts education while balancing the myriad demands on schools and educators during the pandemic:
A Vermont Portrait of a Graduate & the Arts
The visual and performing arts can serve as a pedagogical tool for supporting the performance indicators in the Vermont Portrait of a Graduate. Embedded in the Portrait are key concepts explorable through the arts:
Learner Agency
Ownership • Voice & Choice • High Expectations
Instruction which emphasizes metacognitive processes is critical in supporting self-assessment and self-regulated learning among students, both of which are teachable skills that will prepare students to be independent, life-long learners. Through arts education, students can explore their learner identity and develop a sense of self in a personalized format across media; they can apply their own experiences, skills, and learning preferences to an inquiry- and choice-based artistic challenge.
NCAS Essential Questions: How do life experiences influence the way you relate to art? How do artists determine what resources and criteria are needed to formulate artistic investigations? How do artists and designers determine goals for designing or redesigning objects, places, or systems?
Global Citizenship
Interdependence • Diversity Appreciation • Cultural Awareness
The visual and performing arts have long served as a platform for engendering social change; the arts are a form of accessible communication with which issues of social justice can be addressed to a wide audience. Additionally, they exist globally and across cultures, making it a valuable source for culturally sustaining pedagogy and development of cultural awareness. These factors can guide students through making meaning of the world in which they live via the arts, thus developing a sense of place and belonging for themselves and others.
NCAS Essential Questions: How does art help us understand the lives of people of different times, places, and cultures? How is art used to impact the views of a society? How does learning about art impact how we perceive the world? How do people contribute to awareness and understanding of their lives and the lives of their communities through art-making?
Academic Proficiency
Application • Revision • Essential Concepts
In any of the arts disciplines, students are able to determine an overall concept, how they gain understanding and knowledge needed to communicate that concept, strategies to refine and improve upon skills and ideas, and how an idea is best performed or presented to an audience. Adding to both a student’s proficiency and learner agency, arts education allows for monitoring thinking, refining and reflecting ideas, adapting to a challenge, and applying essential content knowledge and skill through critiques and documentation (e.g., sketches, models, rehearsals, performance, products) of collaborative and individual processes.
NCAS Essential Questions: How does knowing and using art vocabularies help us understand and interpret works of art? How do artists and designers determine whether a particular direction in their work is effective? How does refining work affect its meaning to the viewer or audience?
Communication
Perspective • Non-Verbal Strategies • Variety of Media
Communicating effectively through the arts can add to a student’s collaboration skills. Analysis and interpretation of works and pieces from diverse groups of artists supports students in considering multiple perspectives, allowing them to empathize when working in groups, fully reflecting on feedback and critiques, and consider the perceptions of the audience when developing performances, presentations, or displays.
NCAS Essential Questions: How does collaboration expand the creative process? How do artists and designers create works that effectively communicate? How does collaboratively reflecting on a work help us experience it more completely?
Critical Thinking & Problem Solving
Authentic Inquiry • Collaboration • Innovation
Critical and creative thinking are at the core of arts education, specifically through exploration of media & concept, ideation, and inquiry. To create a thoughtful and informed work or performance, students must respond to a creative challenge through an authentic process. In the arts, this can be done in a real-world or personally relevant context; students can synthesize information from other disciplines, conduct research on a topic about which they are creating work, respond to an important experience, and determine a personally selected solution to a challenge.
NCAS Essential Questions: What conditions, attitudes, and behaviors support creativity and innovative thinking? How do artists determine what resources and criteria are needed to formulate artistic investigations?
Well-Being
Interpersonal Skills • Self-Expression • Persistence
Students of the arts explore relationships among colors, lines, forms, shapes, sounds, rhythm, and movement to develop personalized and authentic strategies for self-expression. A major aim of arts education is to support students in understanding their positive attributes and how to use them to help themselves and others (i.e. a sense of purpose). To do this, students must recognize their fixed and growth mindsets and how each either hinders or supports their development as a citizen. Whether it’s through creating or interpretation of performances or work, the arts education experience provides support for this recognition; students engage in a pursuit to refine techniques and concepts throughout the creative process.
NCAS Essential Questions: How does engaging in creating art enrich people's lives? What factors prevent or encourage people to take creative risks? What role does persistence play in revising, refining, and developing work?
Resources
Learning Target Bank
The Vermont Arts Learning Target Bank is a collection of learning targets aligned to the National Core Arts Standards. The targets are available for all five NCAS arts disciplines: Dance, Music, Media Arts, Theater, and Visual Art. The NCAS performance standards for Kindergarten to Advanced High School have been “unpacked” into learning targets. Educators can use them to communicate targets with students or apply them to measurable criteria in a specific domain or medium.
The learning targets were created and vetted by Vermont educators to help implement the National Core Arts Standards. They are available to all Vermont educators as they continue to implement personalized, proficiency-based classroom systems.
- Introduction to the Vermont Arts Learning Target Bank
- How to Use the Vermont Arts Learning Target Bank
Dance
Media Arts
Music
- Kindergarten Learning Targets
- 2nd Grade Learning Targets
- 5th Grade Learning Targets
- 8th Grade Learning Targets
- High School Proficient Learning Targets
Theater
Visual Art
- Kindergarten Learning Targets
- 1st Grade Learning Targets
- 2nd Grade Learning Targets
- 3rd Grade Learning Targets
- 4th Grade Learning Targets
- 5th Grade Learning Targets
- 6th Grade Learning Targets
- 7th Grade Learning Targets
- 8th Grade Learning Targets
- High School Proficient Learning Targets
- High School Accomplished Learning Targets
Title IV, Part A and the Arts Resources
- ESSA and the Arts Introduction
- Level of Evidence and the Arts
- ESSA and the Arts: Title IV, Part A and FAQ
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Impact and Outcomes of Title IV-A: Advancing children’s success through access to a well-rounded education
The NAMM Foundation, together with the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), collected evidence in early 2019 about school district use of Title IV-A funds, or the Student Support and Academic Enrichment Grants (SSAEG) in ESSA.
Newsletter
National Coalition for Core Arts Standards Resources
- The philosophical foundations and lifelong goals establish the basis for the new standards and illuminate artistic literacy by expressing the overarching common values and expectations for learning in arts education across the five arts discipline. For a full explanation of artistic literacy please see the Conceptual Framework.
- NCAS has listed Model Cornerstone Assessments (MCAs are linked at the bottom of the webpage) for grades 2, 5, 8, and at three levels in high school. MCAs provide models to aid in the development of performance assessments for students. These assessments were piloted in a diverse array of classrooms across the United States. These MCAs are not the definitive assessment but rather, they are a model to support and inspire educators. The MCAs include assessment tools such as rubrics and benchmarked student work that were used as evidence toward Creating, Presenting, Responding, and Connecting.
- NCAS has a series of glossaries for arts assessment, dance, media arts, music, theatre, and visual art.
- The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has released Guiding Principles for Inclusion: Students with Disabilities and the Core Arts Standards.
- The Arts and the Common Core: A Comparison of the National Core Arts Standards and the Common Core State Standards was published by the College Board shortly after the release of NCAS. The goal of alignment between the Common Core and the National Core Arts Standards was to highlight the instances of overlap in the types of habits and thinking skills that are emphasized in each document.
- Arts Education for All Students: A Shared Endeavor provides an overview and model for the role of certified arts educators, certified non-arts educators, and community arts providers.
Questions?
Email Kyle Anderson.
