As politicians made education competitive among different nations, unique standards were applied to each subject and grade to understand what students are expected to know. These standards were not created with evidence from research, but were simply ideas from multiple committees of credible art scholars. Standards help create a method of quantifying qualitative information. When applying standards, art educators must use judgement because there is a lack of systematically recognized measurement, which mathematicians have thorough individualized units, such as the meter.
In art alone, there are 256 standards which are divided into four main categories: creating, presenting, responding, and connecting. These four qualities are implied to be the key elements in learning art. With that, anchor standards were designed within these categories to capture the larger goal of the arts compared to elaborately analyzing all 256 standards individually. There are two types of standards among all four categories in the visual arts: content and performance. Content standards are what students should know and be able to apply in the discipline of the arts. When art educators plan a lesson, these standards address what the teacher plans to do in the lesson. Performance standards refer to the expected level of achievement from students. This type of standard is typically seen in rubrics of art educators. Content standards are also known as the inputs to learning art and performance standards are also known as the outputs. One way to differentiate between both types of standards is to note the descriptive language within their concise composure. Performance standards will use words and groupings of words such as, basic, proficient, very high level, and highly effective, to demonstrate the degree of success.
When applying standards to lesson planning, it is helpful to first write a lesson plan that you instinctively know is beneficial to students learning and then look for standards that match your objectives. A good lesson plan will meet the standards without any prior knowledge of the standards. In fact, there are nearly no standards which encourage students to take risks. This is a very important aspect of creating art, since it promotes divergent thinking and has the potential for students to create art that has never been thought of before. As much as art educators dream of hitting all 256 standards, they should direct their goal towards meeting standards that are only enriching their student’s education. It’s not about how many standards an educator hits, but the quality of the ones they hit. Even with the 256 standards currently designed for art, an educator needs to use their best judgement, as mentioned previously, to be sure their student’s educational needs are being met.
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