Coinciding with National Arts in Education Week, we have news from the New York State Education Department: the Board of Regents has approved revised New York State Learning Standards for the Arts. For artists and organizations involved in arts education, these revised standards and accompanying resources can be a valuable guideline in your work. You can use them to refer to benchmarks on what students should be able to do in a specific arts discipline at a certain grade level, seek guidance in how to think about the artistic learning process, or look for inclusion strategies.
The new NYS Arts Standards are based around 4 artistic processes: Creating, Performing/Producing/Presenting, Responding, and Connecting. These processes are common to all arts disciplines.
The arts standards are supported by a variety of discipline-based instructional resources, such as the Conceptual Framework, Enduring Understandings, Essential Questions, discipline-specific glossaries, and an Implementation Guide to support administrators, parents, teachers and guidance counselors unpack the standards. These can be found at http://www.p12.nysed.gov/ciai/arts/ and http://www.nationalartsstandards.org .