Catherine Achenbach

Article Reflection

I found this article to be extremely interesting, because it wasn’t just another study done

on how learning an instrument can make you “smarter in other subjects”. Firstly, I don’t believe

that participating in music makes you “smarter”, I think it exercises a part of your brain that you

might not use as frequently in other subjects, that can consequently help when you do need to

utilize that part of your brain in other courses. So many aspects of history, science, and English

can be related to music and the arts, and the fact that there are non-arts teachers including the arts

in their lessons is new but exciting to me. I hadn’t previously thought that it would be very

practical to teach science lessons by drawing, creating skits, or performing in any other area of

the arts, but after reading about how these concepts were integrated into the classroom, like the

students who drew shapes of the galaxies on posters and created dance moves to represent the

galaxies, I saw how effective this can be.

Something that I thought was really important (as a teacher) to take away from the article

was that the reason all of these AI lessons seemed to work so well was because they were

essentially just creating differentiation in instruction. Students that performed at a basic level saw

the most growth with the integration of AI lessons. This shows that those students who might not

be as proficient with formal ways of learning, like reading and writing and taking notes, were

able to retain information better because they were being taught in a way that made sense to

them. This doesn’t have to just apply to AI lessons, differentiation in instruction can be made in

a multitude of ways, and this was one excellent example of how teachers of all subject areas can

use the learning benefits of the arts to their advantage in the classroom.