Arts Education

In partnership with teachers and the State Education Agency Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE), CPS developed standards-aligned scopes and sequences for courses across four artistic disciplines: visual arts, music, theatre, and dance.

In the development of these scopes and sequences, partners utilized Universal Design for Learning methods, best practices in standards-aligned curriculum development, and the components of quality arts assessments throughout the project. Each of the more than 1,000 Illinois Arts Learning Standards were unpacked, a process that involves: (1) articulating a given performance standard’s connection to the anchor standard, essential questions, and the process components; (2) identifying skills (verbs that describe what students should be able to do); and (3) identifying knowledge and concepts (nouns that describe what students should know).

Teacher-led writing teams selected prioritized standards in order to ensure coverage across each of the four artistic processes (creating, performing, responding, and connecting), as well as distribution across grade and course levels. Utilizing an Understanding by Design methodology, each writing team developed student learning objectives, and wrote assessment overviews detailing how student learning objectives could be assessed summatively at the end of the unit. This culminated in a collection of unit overviews for each grade level and course.

The Illinois Arts Learning Standards identify five artistic disciplines (dance, music, media arts, theatre, and visual arts). However, in Chicago Public Schools, and across Illinois, media arts is an emerging artistic discipline. With this in mind, instead of generating a standalone scope and sequence using media arts standards, those standards have been integrated across each of the other four artistic disciplines. These media arts integration suggestions could be used for cross-content curriculum planning, media arts extension opportunities, or alternative approaches to learning content.

These Skyline scopes and sequences across the four artistic disciplines are designed to be used by educators when aligning existing arts curricula, making updates based on new standards, or enhancing professional learning opportunities. The scopes and sequences will serve as the foundation for Skyline courses that will be developed and released in the coming years.