Photo courtesy of Whit McGhee
Faith Lenhart
Faith Lenhart, VHHS dance teacher and chair of the performing arts department.
Faith Lenhart’s classroom at Vestavia Hills High School will soon give arts teachers across America a glimpse into the future.
Lenhart, a dance teacher and chair of the school's performing arts department, is one of 15 dance teachers nationwide selected for the Model Cornerstone Assessment Pilot Project.
The project gives Lenhart the opportunity to teach her students through new instructional standards and showcase their work to a national audience of teachers and education policymakers.
It's a well-timed project, according to Lenhart, as work to update Alabama's own curriculum standards for the arts begins in January.
"Our state standards for arts education have not been updated since 2006," Lenhart said. "These new standards will show Alabama and other states what true dance education should look like."
State standards act as a guide for teachers in each subject by setting expectations for what students should know and be able to do, said Jane-Marie Marlin, Vestavia Hills City Schools Director of Curriculum and Instruction.
"Our students will fine tune their craft while helping to define what students should learn when studying the arts and how educators can teach and assess their learning," Marlin said.
Lenhart said the standards put into practice in her classroom will give educators a firsthand look at future possibilities in K-12 dance arts classes.
"The focus now will be on student-created work rather than teacher-created work," Lenhart said. "The goal is not necessarily to prepare students to be professional dancers but to foster their creativity, prepare them to work with other people in the real world, and to be quick problem solvers.
"My job as their dance teacher is to give them the tools to do just that," she said.
-Submitted by Whit McGhee
