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Paul Thompson shares insights on the importance of arts in student development
1:38:12
ยท
93 sec
Paul Thompson, drawing from his 18 years of experience as a principal, emphasizes the crucial role of arts education in student development and academic success, particularly for struggling students.
- Thompson explains how arts education helped create a safe space for students to express themselves and admit academic difficulties.
- He highlights the connection between arts education, social-emotional learning (SEL), and improved graduation rates.
- Thompson stresses the need for a mindset shift in implementing arts education, focusing on its role in fostering student engagement and academic growth.
Paul Thompson
1:38:12
So I'm gonna be frank with you.
1:38:13
As a principal for eighteen years in an unscreened, no audition school, the priority was not to make sure we had arts and culture.
1:38:23
The priority was to graduate our students and meet the state graduation requirements.
1:38:28
I'm here to tell you that with the students that we served, we would not have been successful if we had not used the arts as a core space for students to exercise their voice.
1:38:39
Many of the students that we got as ninth graders were functionally illiterate.
1:38:46
And for a 15 or 14 or 16 year old to admit at that late stage that they have difficulty reading is is in many ways an impossibility.
1:38:59
So for us, I can tell you, we proved this because we had graduation rates that were in the eighty percentile.
1:39:06
The arts were the thing that enabled students to feel safe because they were able to exercise their voice and create community.
1:39:15
And so one of the things that we're doing is making sure that we are doing a a wholesale mindset shift.
1:39:22
Right?
1:39:23
This is this is not just let's throw some money at this and all of a sudden like arts are gonna solve this.
1:39:28
This is really about how the arts are implemented to push SEL work so that students feel safe to admit.
1:39:36
I don't know how to do this thing.
1:39:39
And we then can get into the work of the productive struggle that all students must enter to learn how to do something like