Framing Student Success – FAQ – Studio in a School

Framing Student Success is an Arts-in-Education model designed by Studio in a School to investigate the value of rigorous, sustained visual arts instruction as an integral part of a balanced and coherent core curriculum   The model is based upon collaboration among administrators, classroom teachers, a full-time art teacher, and a visiting artist from the community who provides a single period of instruction once a week in regular classrooms.  Arts instruction is planned to develop artistic competencies described in the NYC Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts, with deep conceptual and/or skill connections to literacy and math goals that are planned in collaboration with classroom teachers and coaches.  For more about the Framing Student Success curriculum, click here.

From 2009 through 2013, the national research and evaluation firm Metis Associates conducted a randomized control study of Framing Student Success, with an additional post-project assessment of sustainability.  Six inner-city Title I schools, all of which had been designated “Schools in Need of Improvement” under the No Child Left Behind Act, volunteered for this project and then were randomly assigned to treatment and control status. One cohort of third graders were followed through fifth grade, with 266 treatment students and 227 control students participating in all three years of the study.  For more about the research results, click here.

Studio in a School’s Framing Student Success is an approach to arts integration that makes connections across the curriculum without sacrificing depth, integrity, or rigor in any of the disciplines–including the arts.  

To fulfill the objectives of our AEMDD project, we have created this tool kit to share what we have learned about making rigorous art an essential part of the core curriculum.  In this kit, we also provide tools—such as unit plans, supply lists and rubrics—that can be used to replicate or adapt what we have done, in other settings.   Feel free to pick and choose, adapt and change, any of the ideas you find on this site.  And, please, do let us know your thoughts, ask questions, and share your own related teaching ideas or tips in the Teacher Forum section, found alongside each unit plan.