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Find our full episode on creativity here.
Almost 20 years ago, psychologist Ellie Brown was looking to do research on a Head Start preschool program, to examine how it affected kids from low-income families.
Brown, a professor of psychology at West Chester University, now directs the Early Childhood Cognition and Emotions Lab and co-directs the Research on Education and the Arts in Childhood Lab.
She made a bunch of calls, and found a program that put a lot of emphasis on music and arts classes, and the staff there were excited about the opportunity.
“They said, ‘please conduct research on our program. We think it has a really positive impact for children,’” recalled Brown.
But many of her colleagues at the time cautioned her to find a more traditional preschool program, and told her that research on the impact of music and arts would never get published.
Brown says that at the time, music and arts research was passé.
“Music and the arts have suffered from a lack of rigorous research and overblown claims about arts impact,” she explained.
It was the era of Baby Mozart and other programs that made big promises about the effects of exposure to the arts.
“If you listen to a single piece of classical music while your child is in utero, it’s not going to make them a genius. And a single early childhood music class is not going to give your preschooler the visual spatial skills that’s going to make them a leading aeronautical engineer,” she joked.
But Brown was intrigued by this program she had found: the Kaleidoscope Program at Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, which mostly serves children from low-income families, but is open to other families, too.
Every day, the kids have the usual preschool type classes, where they play and learn, but also music, dance and visual arts classes taught by different, credentialed instructors.
In one of the classrooms, which looked like an art studio for little kids, the 3-year-olds, the youngest kids at the preschool, were painting with stamps.
“I’m going to paint a lizard!” said one little boy as he energetically spread green paint onto a fresh sheet of paper. Others were mixing colors and painting rainbows. In another classroom, slightly older kids were decorating picture frames with their art teacher. A few doors down, kids are singing and playing a song with instruments.
Tarrell Davis, Executive Director of Early Childhood Programming at Settlement, says all of the classes and the different areas of instruction are connected. “The music teacher, the dance teacher, and the visual arts teacher are all talking about the same thing at the same time, because we’re all different learners,” she explained. “So if a child doesn’t grasp the concept of what a pattern is in music, they may grasp that in creative movement when they’re using their whole body to hop, skip, and jump.”
When Brown started to study the Kaleidoscope program almost two decades ago, she quickly learned some interesting things about its effectiveness. For example, she compared the students in this program to kids at a different high-quality Head Start preschool that doesn’t have the immersive arts enrichment.
“We found that children at Kaleidoscope showed three times the growth in their vocabulary over the course of the year. That’s a lot. It’s huge. It’s the type of impact that makes you curious to learn more,” she said.
Next she started to investigate social emotional growth – which is important for learning. She found that the preschoolers exhibited much more positive emotions, like interest, happiness and pride, than their peers at a comparison school. They were also able to regulate their emotions better – both positive and negative.
Clearly, the arts program was making a difference.
These findings backed things Davis had observed in the classroom, she was a teacher at the program before she became the executive director.
“I knew something was happening to have a class of 20 and 10 of them having an individual education plan, an IEP, and then seeing over the course of the year the growth that they made,” she said. “I feel like I was a good teacher, and was helping them, but just having that collaboration with the art and the opportunities for them to also build on skill sets outside of me, of course, it’s a no brainer. Something’s happening.”
She says Brown’s research studies were more than just validation that this approach was working. They also gave them insights into how to tweak and improve the program continuously.
Having found evidence that this approach was truly having an impact, Brown wanted to dig deeper. She wanted to know: What exactly was going on in the kids’ bodies to facilitate this growth?
“We launched an investigation titled, ‘Can the Arts Get Under the Skin?’ The answer was a resounding ‘yes.’”
Brown and her team took frequent saliva samples from the kids in the program to measure levels of the stress hormone cortisol. They measured levels at baseline in the morning, and then took new measurements after music, dance, visual arts and early learning classes on different days of the week.
“We found evidence that children showed lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol after music, dance, and visual arts classes compared with their regular early learning or homeroom classes.”
Preschool can be stressful all in itself, kids are in a new situation, away from their parents, they have to navigate classrooms and peer relationships, but many of the kids in this program also experience chronic stress because of poverty or difficult family situations.
To Brown, the findings around cortisol levels offered an interesting insight into understanding the impact of the arts classes. Brown explained that at normal levels, cortisol supports functions like the immune system or metabolism, but too much of it can interfere with the function and development of brain areas involved in learning and cognition, like the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and also areas involved in emotion like the amygdala.
“You’ve probably heard that 90% of brain growth and development happens before children enter kindergarten. So early childhood is a really important period for us to help children regulate stress so that they can focus on learning and so that their brains can grow and develop in healthy ways.”
Brown says all of the studies she’s been able to do over the years have really painted a comprehensive picture of how and why creativity and the arts support learning.
“We know that humans learn best when our entire bodies are engaged and events are registered by several senses. And that’s the case in these music and arts classes,” she said. “But it’s also the case that children learn best when they are not overly stressed, when they can really focus their attention on learning. And we do think that the music and arts programming here helps children to be in an optimal state to learn.”
Helen Eaton, CEO of Settlement Music School, says the research-based approach helps the school improve its programming. It also helps us tell the story of how critical arts enrichment is, that arts integration in preschool is a game changer in the field, that it can really build the skill set of our students getting them ready for kindergarten in ways that other preschool programs without arts integration just can’t do,” she said.
She added that the frequency of arts classes is also key. “So Settlement has made an enormous investment in having our artist teachers work on a daily basis with students, ” she explained. “This is how children learn. They need repetition. They need consistency on a daily basis to reinforce the concepts that are being taught in Kaleidoscope.”
Now, staff at the school and Brown are using the research findings to make some of their lessons available to kids and teachers at other preschools, through an expansion and outreach initiative called KWEST Arts; Kaleidoscope Wants Everyone Succeeding Together through the Arts.
“So even if you don’t have a fully credentialed music teacher or visual arts teacher, there are strategies that a regular early learning teacher can use in their classes to bring in music, movement, visual arts, to support children’s emotion regulation and learning,” said Brown.
Even small things and tweaks that can reduce stress and help kids learn, like singing through transitions. “A cleanup song, singing a get in line song, helping children with those moments that can cause stress for young ones,” said Brown.
They’ve done a soft launch at five schools – four in Philadelphia and one in Denver. They collected feedback from teachers and are now planning to bring their approach and lesson plans to more schools.
Editor’s Note: The Kaleidoscope Preschool Program at Settlement Music School receives some financial support from the Marrazzo Family Foundation, which also supports WHYY News.
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