"Students gain confidence through performing: The Arts and Learning"
The Advocate, June 9, 2005

Eric Cooper

Fourth- and fifth-grade students at Stamford's Roxbury Elementary School, led by a wonderful and multitalented music teacher, recently demonstrated why the arts must remain an integral part of a school's curriculum. All the students, regardless of scores on academic achievement tests, worked together as a cohesive and functional team, sharing strengths and weaknesses in the making of music.

Together they learned to collaborate, discipline their efforts and hold themselves to standards of performance. There were no disputes, no fooling around, just concentration on the tasks at-hand. They proved to be confident students, secure in their performance. Some were eager to perform solos and others were content to blend their music with the band- one group, one sound.

It was a special moment for parents, culminating months of practice at school and at home. It brought joy to hear sons and daughters perform. But there's something else to be gained by audiences at such school events - the knowledge that such moments lead to broad learning opportunities, as confidence deepens.

I celebrated the performance, but I could not avoid thinking about the many students who do not have the opportunity to experience teamwork, and the collaboration in creation and performance through the arts. I thought about how communities are eliminating what some boards of education have called "non core" learning activities. I thought about how schooling has become primarily preparation for taking a test, and how disconnected learning and teaching have become from the real world - a world demanding the very skills that students learn especially well in and through the arts, as well as during recess and in physical education classes.

Many skills needed in life are, to be sure, learned through academic subjects. But other activities -especially the arts, which are at once creative and freeing, disciplined and patterned- engage learners and enliven all learning. John Dewey, perhaps the 20th century's most influential educational thinker, once said: "Schools should be less about the preparation for life and more about life itself." Eliot Eisner, the renowned scholar at Stanford University, has also made the point that the arts develop cognitive skills in areas that are not learned in other subjects - skills for analysis, forming patterns and developing insight and understanding.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not against testing. Far from it. I am a strong supporter of testing, particularly to gather information useful in adjusting and accelerating instruction. But I do not want testing, or testing only on paper, to get in the way of good instruction, or of students' enthusiasm for learning and for eagerly showing what they know and are able to do in a variety of ways.

The event at Roxbury School was a test of sorts - the kind we experience throughout life. It was the test of performance. It was a culmination of many smaller tests that guided students and their teachers. It showed why it is so important to instill in our children the joy of learning. We need a balance in how we prepare students for tests and how we prepare children for life's challenges. Shouldn't schooling be about instilling in our children the joy of learning? Shouldn't it guide them toward the internal desire to learn, to develop pride and the determination to persevere in the face of challenge?

Roxbury students and other students throughout Stamford who recently participated in the arts and performed for their parents and educators have learned powerful lessons about the importance of teamwork, of perseverance, of practice.

Their teachers and parents guided them toward this commitment, and this experience will sustain and influence their behavior in their studies and their lives. All schoolchildren in this community and elsewhere deserve nothing less.

Eric J. Cooper is a Stamford resident and Roxbury parent. He is also president of the National Urban Alliance for Effective Education, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving learning and teaching for students.