Arts Instructional Guide: Theatre v.1
For Classroom Teachers, Arts Teachers and Arts Community Partners
About Theatre Education at LAUSD
Content standards are grade-level expectations that specify what students should know and be able to do.  They indicate knowledge and skills essential to the discipline that should be taught and learned at each level as children advance through their education.  They express shared expectations for schooling, enabling educators to focus on what they value, and providing a common language for assessing programs in meeting their goals.

The Visual and Performing Arts Content Standards for California were adopted in January, 2000.  Before that there were the California Challenge Standards and LAUSD's locally adopted standards for dance, music, theatre and visual arts.  All these were based on the National Standards first developed in the mid nineties.

For at least the past decade, secondary theatre teachers sixth through twelfth grades have aligned their curriculum to these standards. 

The Arts Prototype Schools program, putting dance, theatre and visual arts teachers into elementary classrooms, started in LAUSD with 54 schools in the year 1999.  Since then they have grown to 340 schools, now called Arts Program Schools (APS).  The expectation is that all LAUSD elementary schools will be served by 2010. 

In the absence of elementary texts or well articulated elementary curriculum, the elementary theatre teachers in these schools have developed the benchmarks, the enduring understandings, the assessable performance tasks and the teaching modules to support them.  Our K-6 "Arts Instructional Guidelines for Theatre" is the result of their work. 

These Guidelines are rigorous and challenging, but they are also based  in reality.  The teachers who developed them are piloting them every day in their classes.  They are, we believe, the most thorough and exhaustive standards-based elementary curriculum ever developed.