NEW National Core Arts Standards

Yesterday (June 4th) at 1:00 p.m. the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE) on behalf of the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS) rolled out the new set of Core Arts Standards for our nation. This set of standards has been a long process, a long-time in review, under the discretion of many sets of eyes throughout the country. The arts in these standards are Dance, Media Arts, Music, Theatre And Visual Arts.

The standards for general music are arranged into 3 different artistic processes--creating, performing, and responding. A 4th artistic process, connecting, is essential during all artistic processes in music, so it is used open-ended throughout all of the processes, unlike some of the other arts.Within these artistic processes there are a set of anchor standards, which each include enduring understanding statements, and essential questions, along with performance descriptors for each anchor at each grade-level (PreK-8)

Also, there are model cornerstone assessments (MCA) available at several grade levels for students. At the elementary level, these are at grades 2 and 5. These assessments include strategies for inclusion for students with disabilities, strategies for differentiation in the classroom, a variety of resources to assist in task implementation, several rubrics, and instructions with teacher checklists and materials for task implementation.

Finally, as teachers, we have the option to customize our own handbook, weeding out our "necessary" information from all of the various arts and grade levels. This is a wonderful feature! I can't wait to get started. The new website was posted yesterday on the web (link is below), and the NCCAS says they will be continuing to do updates to it as they move forward in the upcoming months. The second link (below) is for the NCCAS wikispace, which is where all of the work for this project has been done up until this point, including the original Launch Webinar from yesterday at 1:00.

www.nationalartsstandards.org
www.nccas.wikispaces.com