Why are we revising the music standards now? Discussions on whether to revise the national standards of all arts areas including music have been occurring at the national level since 2002 - almost a decade prior to the formation of the current coalition revising the 1994 National Arts Education Standards. Dance via their newly formed national organization went ahead and did a revision - completing the 2005 National Dance Education Standards. MENC surveyed the field about whether or not standards should be revised back in 2006-2007, and the report was published in 2007. My favorite quote from the report is: The arrival of Common Core State Standards in Mathematics and English
Language Arts - the new standards your colleagues are currently implementing in your school - certainly galvanized arts education leaders to take another look at the revision of the national arts ed standards. 8 national organizations stepped up to begin the revision of the national voluntary arts education standards in 2011. They are:
American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE)
Arts Education Partnership (AEP)
Educational Theatre Association (EdTA)
The College Board
National Association for Music Education (formerly MENC)
National Art Education Association (NAEA)
National Dance Education Organization (NDEO)
State Education Agency for Directors of Arts Education (SEADAE)

The a brief history of the project to date, please visit the timeline. The coalition is named the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards (NCCAS).

States' led revision process - and why this matters
Do states - which ultimately adapt and adopt any set of national standards - want a new set of national arts standards? In early 2011, SEADAE, which are my counterparts across the country - arts education folks in departments of education - surveyed members to find out if states wanted a new set of national voluntary arts education standards. The results were favorable:

1. 72% of states involved in revising standards in the next 3 years were willing to wait to revise after new national standards were created
2. 85% of SEADAErs are the state staffers who manage the revision of their state's arts standards
3. What SEADAErs asked for in terms of new national standards became the basis of the NCCAS Consensus Document

As the National Coalition for Core Arts Standards began to form, SEADAE took on a facilitative and leadership role to support state adoption of the new national standards once the process is complete. NCCAS continues to hold joint meetings with SEADAE members at least annually, the most recent joint meeting was held at the NAfME offices in Reston, VA and included 33 states in early October. As President of SEADAE, I serve as one of the facilitators of the NCCAS arts standards revision project.

How does Research inform the next set of national arts education standards?
This round of national standards is heavily research based, thanks to the work of The College Board, which has provided multiple research reports for the project. All of this research is informing the work of the writing teams, and is available for you as well. Research Reports to date include:

1. International Benchmarks of Arts Education Standards
2. Child Development and Arts Education
3. Recently revised State Arts Standards (what do these look like? What trends do they incorporate?)
4. Media Arts Standards at the State and District Level
5. 21st Century Skills Gap Analysis
6. College Standards, Phase 1 report

Webinars which provide overviews of the research reports, are available on the NCCAS wiki. These brief overviews can help you figure out where and how to dive into the most extensive research reports listed above. The next research report will be: Common Core Connections to the proposed National Arts Standards. Its expected release date is December 31, 2012.

Media Arts as new content area?
In November, 2011, NCCAS determined to write media arts standards. Media arts standards were not included as a discrete set of standards in the 1994 national arts education standards. While not yet widely recognized as a stand-alone art form at the K-12 public education level—for example, few states have media arts standards, or certification for media arts teachers—this is an art form where both artists and students are engaging in creative ways. Therefore, NCCAS chose to try and write a new set of standards to reflect this emerging field of both artistic practice and student artistry.

What are media arts and how do they differ from just the use of technology in music or another art form? To help me understand what is encompassed by the term media arts, I fall back on the definition Amy Jensen, Professor at Brigham Young University, used with NCCAS to define media arts:

• Film and animation (historical roots of media arts); and
• Interactive artmaking (think: gaming); and
• Computational artmaking (writing code to create an aesthetic experience)

As I ponder this definition, I realize that my own practice in music doesn't "own" the aesthetic of any of these artistic endeavors, even as I realize that music contributes to the aesthetics of all of them. NCCAS has published a Paper and FAQ on Media Arts —further defining the work so far and the work ahead. Stay tuned! And please remember that technology used to create music will remain within the music standards... and just possibly some of the media arts standards will be shared (?) with music? Stay tuned, and explore the possible connections and divergences between music and the emerging world of media arts education.

Embedded Curriculum Design and Assessment - our Standards Framework
Unlike the 1994 national standards, this set of arts education standards will include a strong Framework which will organize the standards for each art form. The Frame is more unifying than the mere headings structure used in our current Arizona standards (Create, Relate, Evaluate), and helps us dive into the similarities across the arts forms, as well as helps administrators and educators organize their work utilizing the standards. Teacher led teams of standards writers are using the frame to help them write the next set of standards. There are four main points to point out in this frame:

1. The new arts standards will be organized primarily around the artistic processes outlined originally for the 1997 National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) Arts Assessment. For those of you who have studied at all with NAfME's Past President Scott Shuler, you will have a grounding in the NAEP Processes: Create, Perform, Respond. Work is ongoing with our arts disciplines partners in better defining these processes to fit all art forms. You will see these processes embedded in the current framework.
2. The new arts standards will embrace elements of UbD - Understanding by Design, a curricular design tool utilized by many districts and schools across the country to help us teach with a greater end in mind. Jay and Daisy McTighe are providing pro bono leadership, helping writing teams create Enduring Understandings and Essential Questions. The idea is to provide guidance on choices as you design your own curriculum, and create a less hefty bunch of standards - fewer, higher, with rigor.
3. The new standards will also include Model Cornerstone Assessments. As far as I know, we are the ONLY content areas embedding assessments within a set of standards, instead of writing assessments after the fact. We are undertaking this bold approach in part as a response to the teacher evaluation frameworks being developed across the country requiring student assessment data as part of teacher evaluation. As arts educators, we need more models on what quality assessment looks like - and what better place to do that than within our new set of national standards? Also, please note the important word here is MODEL. These are not required assessments, but models of what assessments can/should look like that are deeply connected to the national standards. You will not be required to use them - but you are welcome to do so.
4. Standards will also be grade level specific—but searchable in a variety of ways. This is a slight change for us in Arizona regarding music standards - which are grade level specific for general music. Our colleagues in dance, theatre and visual arts, however, have been using skill level articulations for ALL of their standards - more like our performing ensembles standards. When the national standards are finished, we in Arizona will need to determine how to best organize the standards to meet our needs - keep the grade level specifications? Or try a skill articulation approach? I don't know what the answer will be, but I look forward to seeing what the national writing teams develop for all the content areas. Finally, keep in mind that it is virtually impossible to write grade by grade standards for high school - it just doesn't make sense. Secondary level standards will need to be organized in a way that meets the needs of state policy makers as well as you high school teachers. One way we are looking at the work is to used nationally normed NCES Secondary Course Codes + state level high school graduation expectations. Again, stay tuned!

A Web-based set of standards
The next set of National Voluntary Arts Standards will be web-based. Instead of attempting to put words on paper to describe an art form, we can use the multi- media tools of the web to allow the art form to help define the standard. Imagine that a Kindergarten music standard might be a video of a Kindergartener singing, or a group of Kinders playing Orff instruments (or both!). While we in music understand the words we put to paper to describe music making, these words do not always help our students, our parents, our community or our administrators understand the value of what we are doing in our music classes every day. A video of students performing or an audio sample of a student composition - these are more powerful ways to capture what students know and are able to do in music. And the web will allow us to do just that.

In addition, a web-based set of standards allows us to ground the next set of national arts standards in student practice - what can students do given access to a high quality music education? We can take the model cornerstone assessments, ask teachers to pilot them in their schools, and then upload evidence of student accomplishment against those assessments - which tie right back to the standards. This will be a powerful advocacy tool as well as a learning tool for student and practitioner alike.

NCCAS has a partner for this web design - the national non-profit organization, Young Audiences. Young Audiences just launched a very similar, student-center web-site, and have offered to let us "piggy back" on their work to create a web- based set of national arts education standards. The YA model is also very useful to the states as individual states will be able to go in and adopt/adapt the national standards for their own use, using the national web-site as the beginning platform for their work. This will save states a LOT of money, as well as allow states access to high-powered web-based search and design tools.

How can YOU be involved in the revision of the national music education standards?
A new set of standards only works if they are usable by you—the music educator in the field—and understandable by your administrators and your community. I encourage you to become involved in the revision process. Here are just a few of the ways to learn more and to be engaged:

1. Visit the website for the revision process and read up on the areas that interest you. You can find all of our materials at http://nccas.wikispaces.com
2. Participate in the review process for the standards. During March, 2013, Music in our Schools Month, you will be invited to review work in progress for the standards. Sign up and participate! The sign up and information will be available in late February at the wikispace listed above - http://nccas.wikispaces.com
3. Stay alert for information from NAfME. As one of the Coalition members, NAfME is working hard to get out the word and take in feedback from you, its members. Stay in tune to the NAfME professional development offerings around the standards, and be ready to give feedback when requested.
4. Finally, I am honored to be representing Arizona in this process, as is Dr. Evan Tobias at ASU - a member of the Media Arts Writing Team. Feel free to ask us questions - and attend our national standards update session at the February AMEA In-Service Conference!