5 Things We Know About Quality

Quality is perhaps the most important characteristic of a successful arts education and creative learning program. While it is a major accomplishment to increase the raw numbers of creative learning opportunities throughout a city as large as Dallas, the opportunities must also be high-quality to have an impact...thus that is an area on which we've focused our Research & Assessment lens for the last 2 years.

1. Get out your yardstick. Though it may seem too qualitative or subjective, quality of arts education and creative learning MUST be measured. One of the greatest contributions of Thriving Minds' work to date is the design of both a framework for understanding the dimensions of quality teaching and learning and a set of tools that measure it year to year.
   
2. It takes a village. Our effort to examine quality in this rigorous way has been aided by a team of nearly 50 practitioners and researchers, including local teachers, arts organization representatives, Big Thought staff and national experts in various creative learning subjects. It has been based on over one hundred observations followed by discussions and further refinements of the tools. In short, measurement of quality takes the participation and collaboration of many, many people, all committed to securing the best possible education for the city's children.
   
3. The more you know. High-quality learning opportunities require high-quality instruction. In order for today's teachers and instructors to be prepared and capable of teaching at a high level, they need to pursue continuing education and professional development. Data from the quality panels indicate that in-school and community instructors alike need to build more time for creative choice make as well as assessment and reflection into their curriculum. Professional development workshops have been designed to provide strategies to promote more of this type of teaching and learning.
   
4. Take time to make time. Another aspect of quality is in the area of teaching or instructional time. Quality panelists often found that instructors feel pressed for time and often this is why they feel unable to open their lesson to students input and creative choices. Thus, students are limited to always following instructions and never having time to innovate. Armed with this information, the Thriving Minds After-School Program decided to lengthen creative learning from 45- to 90-minutes instructional blocks.
   
5. The results are in. One of the most compelling studies we've done involves the creative work of students involved in ArtsPartners. Student writing was collected and compared before and after participating in community creative learning programs chosen to support classroom curriculum. Community programs strengthened students’ achievement. Here is an example of the change in one student’s writing, as illustrated in our research publication “Enriching Minds, Growing our Future.”