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A recent article in the San Diego Union-Tribune celebrated the Developing Reading Education with Arts Method (DREAM) program that is being implemented in ten school districts in San Diego’s North County. The program trains and supports third- and fourth-grade teachers in incorporating the arts (puppetry, miming, acting, dancing and more) into their lessons.

The results are, as quoted in the article, “astonishing.” Third-grade students whose teachers received a week-long summer training on integrating the arts into their teaching and weekly in-class coaching from arts professionals had an 87-point average increase on a standardized reading test (which is scored from 150 to 600). Students whose teachers received no arts training had just a 25-point average increase. While we know that standardized test scores are not always an accurate indicator of whether students are learning, this model is definitely one to consider as we look for ways to raise the reading levels of all students.

Three things stuck out to me as key lessons we can transfer from the DREAM experience to other educational endeavors:

1) A rich curriculum, including the arts, is important. We at the Learning First Alliance have long recognized the benefits of including the arts as part of a rich curriculum in our public schools, and we have lamented the narrowing of the curriculum in some places due to the testing requirements of No Child Left Behind, as well as the cutting of arts programs as education budgets get tight. Here is further evidence that they are an important component of a child's education. Advocates argue that students who are doing the arts are engaged and more likely to retain what they learn. As Laurie Stowell, a professor of literacy education at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), pointed out in speaking of this program, “[w]hen [students are] doing theater arts, they’re having to make meaning of the story. They’re doing it. They’re not just looking at words on a page.”

2) High-quality professional learning is important. In studying this program, researchers randomly divided teachers and students into three groups – a control group in which teachers received no arts training, a treatment group in which teachers attended a week-long summer institute on incorporating the arts into their teaching, and another treatment group in which teachers attended a week-long summer institute AND received weekly in-class coaching from an arts professional. The article did not specifically address the quality of the professional development that these teachers received. However, the results of the three levels of treatment offered (25-point test score gain for the control group, 42-point gain for the group whose teachers attended a week-long training, and 87-point gain for students whose teachers received both the week-long training and the weekly support) clearly indicate the importance of professional learning in general and ongoing, job-embedded professional learning in particular. 

3) Collaboration is important. The DREAM program is funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education, led by California State University San Marcos and the San Diego County Office of Education, and operating in ten different school districts in the County. The program would not be able to succeed if only one of these stakeholders were acting in isolation - it takes the collective strength of all these entities to ensure results for students. 

Of course, none of these are new lessons. We’ve known all three for some time. But the fact that they continue to reveal themselves in nearly any educational endeavor that shows success (be it a pre-kindergarten program, community school, service-learning program, one-to-one technology initiative or, as here, an arts integration program) indicates that perhaps as we plan for new programs aimed at raising student achievement, we should take care to incorporate them deliberately.