Teaching Through The Arts

Kinesthetic learning or movement is a staple in our courses;  we use it all the time. We know it's effective with all ages from kindergarteners to graduate students, but do we have any brain-based research to back it up? In his book How the Brain Learns David Sousa provides one explanation: "When we sit for more than twenty minutes, our blood pools in our seat and in our feet. Within a minute [of getting up], there is about 15% more blood in our brain. We do think better on our feet than on our seat! Students sit too much in classrooms, especially in secondary schools. Look for ways to get students up and moving, especially when they are verbally rehearsing what they have learned" (34). This also speaks to the fact that as arts-based educators we need to have the language to explain our methods to others. So next time you have the students up and moving and your principal comes into your room wondering what's going on, simply relay this information and then ask h...

For some people this statement may be unbelievable, after all can't we improve SAT scores (or any standardized, high-stakes test for that matter) only by drilling students to death? Not so. Those of us who teach through the arts understand the power it can have on student learning and how that learning can be transferred in many ways. David Sousa in his book How the Brain Learns offers the following:on this topic as he cites the work of Vaughn and Winner from 2000 saying the study of the association between students taking arts courses and their SAT scores is one of the largest of its kind taking several years and involving over 10 million American high school students. -Students who took arts classes had higher math, verbal and composite SAT scores than students who did not take arts classes. -The more years of art classes, the higher the SAT scores -Acting classes had the highest correlation with verbal SAT scores while Acting classes, music history, music theory or apprec...