Teacher Evaluation and Creativity

We've all seen the posters.  Music is math, music is reading, music is history, etc., but most of all, music is music.

Why put the most important thing last?

Fine arts educators have to admit some culpability here.  Because we are not regarded as a core subject by the average person, we have worked hard to advocate for ourselves.  That often includes attempts to highlight the non-artistic benefits of arts education.

Unfortunately, some educators are reaping what we have sown.  After decades of comparing the arts to so-called academic subjects, fine arts teachers are now being evaluated on reading and math.  These teachers often feel de-valued, and are rightfully concerned about the validity and reliability of such measures.

We need to refresh our efforts, and we need to Start with Why.

The purpose of the fine arts is not to improve literacy and mathematics.  Indeed, visual art was often used to convey ideas to pre-literate citizens.  One purpose of art is to create works in a medium that embody feelings.

The Why has three parts:  creativity, the medium, and feelings.  If this is Why we have fine art, then these elements should drive instruction.  Teacher evaluation should examine the effectiveness of this instruction - not literacy and mathematics.

Many Professional Learning Communities get caught up in the wrong Why by assuming that creativity cannot be assessed.  This leads these PLCs to rely on standardized literacy tests to evaluate fine arts teachers.  However, we can clearly assess whether something is novel, expressive, or engaging.  We do it all the time in our daily life.

While there are many technical papers about the assessment of creativity, fine arts educators might have better luck citing Grant Wiggins when trying to convince PLC administrators of this point.  Wiggins is the co-author of the widely used Understanding by Design framework, and he is a known and respected name in the field.  Wiggins states simply that we can assess creativity, and we should assess creativity.  Check out his outstanding article at http://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/on-assessing-for-creativity-yes-you-can-and-yes-you-should/

Fine arts educators have always needed to educate stakeholders about the value of our work.  However, we are now seeing the dark side of over-selling arts education.  Let's redouble our efforts, but let's stay focused on the right Why.  It's the only way to have genuine advocacy.