Making Room At the Table: An Interview with the Author of a Needs Assessment for Arts Education and Special Needs Students in NYC Public Schools

RK: What were the goals of this needs assessment and what were the key findings?

DG: Richard, thanks for providing this opportunity to share the findings of this study. Stephen Yaffe approached VSA arts with the idea to conduct a needs assessment on the status of arts education for students with disabilities in New York City. We saw it as a way to invest in an important study that could inform the work of our local affiliate and like-minded arts organizations, as well as provide us with an example for conducting needs assessments in our affiliate network. I worked with Stephen through-out the process, but I’ll let him provide the key findings since he was the Principal Investigator.

SY: Thank you, Don. This needs assessment was conducted to ascertain primary obstacles to and opportunities for providing quality arts education to students with special needs in New York City public schools. The chief purpose was to help practitioners and policy makers – in the school and arts communities in New York City – to gain a deeper understanding of the field and its complexities, as well as provoke reflection and action.
Professional development (PD) for teaching artists (TA) working with this population was considered at length. The majority of teaching artists who participated in a focus group and interviews called their primary means of training “trial by fire”. Over two-thirds of a broader survey of teaching artists also cited “trial by fire” as their initial experience in learning to work with students with special needs. 33% of the survey respondents said that they have never received professional development regarding these students. The other 66% who had undergone such training, did so as noted below:

click here to view table.pdf

To say this another way, in thirteen key professional development areas, slightly more than 40% of teaching artist respondents currently working with students with special needs in New York City public school classrooms – self-contained and/or inclusion – have received professional development in one domain – “special needs classifications”, and anywhere from 33% down to 11% have received training in the other twelve.

This is in the process of changing. More and more art organizations are recognizing the need to provide training to their TA’s in working with populations with special needs. In fact, 78.6% of arts administrator survey respondents said their organizations offer such PD. However, the majority of arts administrators interviewed and who participated in the focus group also spoke of the need to go further in their professional development efforts.

RK: Did you find anything that surprised you?

SY: Absolutely. The biggest surprise was in discovering many contributions that inadvertently undermined the arts education opportunities for students with special needs, and that such contributions were sometimes made by those most supportive of the arts. An example of an inadvertent consequence is the practice of “clumping” classes for arts residencies. There are two major forms of clumping: (1) two or more self-contained classes are combined; or (2) a self-contained class and a general education class are combined.

While arts organization administrators by and large felt the practice was not a good one, most did not want to jeopardize school partnerships by turning down a request to combine classes. Schools also wanted to get the most bang for their buck in residencies and were unable to justify spending the same amount of money on a class of, say, twelve students as on a class more than twice that size. As you know, self-contained special education class sizes can be considerably smaller than general education ones for sound educational reasons.

For some populations, notably those on the Autism spectrum, practices like class clumping can bring new and unfamiliar circumstances to young people who require consistency, routine, and ease-in-transition. For others, especially those with severe behavioral issues, combining classes could prove volatile. In the end, the students, nor the arts organizations are served well. Clumping inadvertently diminishes the quality of arts education by forcing an instructional environment that is known to be pedagogically unviable for and unsuitable to students with special needs.

RK: What did the assessment indicate about teaching artists, classroom teachers, and certified arts specialists?

SY: As I mentioned earlier, there is a greater need for professional development as more students are being diagnosed as special needs, and more students with special needs are being moved into increasingly inclusive settings. Consequently more classroom teachers, arts specialists, and TA’s are working with this population. These educators recognize the need to build capacity and knowledge and identified their professional development needs in response to this study:

Arts Specialists:

• Adaptive curriculum planning, especially for inclusive settings

• Adaptation of the NYC Blueprint for students with special needs

• Special needs classifications

• Documentation/Evidence gathering and how to best use it to teach others – especially classroom teachers, administrators and parents – the value of arts in education

Classroom Teachers:

• Special needs classifications
• Disability-specific instructional approaches

• How to better work with para-professionals

• Arts assessment

• Curriculum design

Teaching Artists:

• Understanding special needs classifications

• Targeting achievable outcomes and planning/implementing appropriate curriculum

• Differentiating instruction

• More professional development in general

RK: What are some new structures, resources, approaches, etc., that you would like to see developed?

SY: Ongoing Exchange and Dialogue: However much professional development is called for, designed and offered; however much pertinent and valuable resources are brought together and made available; however much suggestions made in the study are implemented, the value of open conversation, sharing, and reflection among peers and across stakeholder groups in building and deepening knowledge, understanding, and capacity cannot be overstated.

Providing venues for such dialogue can greatly contribute to increasing the quality of arts education offered to students with special needs in New York City public schools. The study calls for a new kind of inclusion – in building knowledge and capacity, preparing, implementing, structuring, partnering. Throughout the needs assessment, I was struck by how what one constituency did not know another did or could help profoundly with and – not surprisingly – how much people working in this field want to help others.

Professional Development for Para-professionals: Arts specialists, classroom teachers, teaching artists, school and arts administrators often spoke of the value of having para-professionals assisting in classrooms:

• The ability to work in small groups

• The ability to provide more individualized instruction as needed

• The ability to draw off the often-deep knowledge that some para-professionals have of students.

However, the quantity and quality of para-professional assistance was often called into question. This was largely due to lack of their experience and knowledge regarding arts education. Offering para-professionals professional development in arts education for students with special needs that includes a mentoring component is a strong and viable entry point. It is also a timely one.

The NYC Department of Education and the New York State Education Department recently increased the required number of college credits newly hired, full-time para-professionals must earn by the end of their third year of service. This is generally seen as part of an effort to professionalize the position of paraprofessional. If PD for arts education could be provided for course credit, all the better.

Looking at Student Work: One way of further connecting teaching artists, arts specialists, and classroom teachers- and possibly, of linking their collaborations with whole school effort – is providing opportunities to collaboratively examine samples of student work. Looking at student work can play a key role in deepening knowledge about student learning and the role of the arts in special education. Engagement with the arts can reveal abilities and, sometimes, hitherto unknown capacities. For example, highly non-verbal students have been known to break into spontaneous speech during improvisation, or to sing fluidly to music. This is valuable information not just for classroom teachers and arts specialists, but for speech therapists. Similarly, physical and occupational therapists may benefit from watching motor activities of students engaged in dance, creative movement and/or visual arts.

Of course, to do this requires building the capacity of these constituencies in looking at the art work of special needs students. This presents an entry point for those organizations who might offer such training and an important opportunity for the field of arts in special education. Providing such professional development could well draw jointly upon the resources and expertise of NYC DOE and outside cultural organizations.

RK: What else would you like to add?

SY: The field of arts in special education is tremendously rich, greater than any one of its stakeholder perspectives or needs, greater than all of its stakeholder parts. If it is to meaningfully move forward and deepen the quality of arts education for special needs learners, there must be room at the table for all these voices. It is necessary for these groups to engage in ongoing dialogue, to seriously address the field’s differences from general education arts education, to follow the lead of its own needs and requirements, and to understand it has much to offer teaching and learning – not only in special education, but to education in general.

DG: I want to thank Stephen for sharing the key findings of the needs assessment study, and note that when Stephen is not conducting needs assessments, he is an instructional coach for our Communities of Practice and Teaching Artist Fellowship programs. As a coach, he facilitates discussions around examining student work and fostering inclusive arts instruction. In other words, he provides teaching artists with feedback on how to include more students, remove barriers to the curriculum, and improve their arts instruction for a range of students, which by the way, are some of the general professional development needs and entry points identified in the study.

RK: What else are you both working on?

SY: I’m also evaluating numerous arts education programs, and am the co-chair of The Arts in Special Education Consortium, a NYC-based organization dedicated to bringing together stakeholders in the field to share ideas, build capacity, understanding and sense of value.

DG: VSA arts is exploring the relationships between inclusive arts teaching and learning and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Ideas, tools, and processes that we have introduced in our conferences, professional development institutes, and online professional learning communities, are now supporting teaching artists in our program and affiliate networks to understand and apply the Universal Design for Learning guidelines to their arts residencies (i.e., providing multiple, flexible options for representing content, engaging students, and demonstrating knowledge and skills).
Over the next year, VSA arts will be sharing various examples and case studies of what inclusive arts teaching and learning looks like in practice. Most of our rich examples have come from our professional learning community teams. We hope to add a team from our NYC or New York State affiliate next year to contribute to our inquiry into inclusive arts education!

Click Here to View Presentation of Report–Making Room At The Table.pdf

Stephen Yaffe, is an arts and education consultant. He has evaluated