Arts Is Education Professional Development Program
The Alameda County Alliance for Arts Learning is proud to announce the Arts Is Education Professional Development Program for 2009/2010. Professional development opportunities offered under this initiative includes:
Large Scale Professional Development Initiatives
The Teacher Action Research Institute (TARI) ~ The Teacher Action Research Institute creates a broad platform for teachers to develop and share their work with their peers, within and across schools and school districts. Action research is a collaborative inquiry, focused on teachers’ explicit questions about practice that engages teachers, teaching artists, administrators and their communities together in serious reflective practice. Using research based frameworks as a common language, arts and non-arts educators design instruction and engage in on-going assessment to support the success of every student, including those students performing at below basic according to standardized measures: English Language Learners, special needs and special education students and other targeted student subsets. With a new on-line action research tool, educators learn to document, interrogate and improve on how they learn and share their practice publicly. The Classroom Action Research Tool is an interactive publishing piece that allows teachers and teaching artists to document and investigate their classroom learning using text, pictures and video. This tool supports and reveals the learning process of teacher teams as they describe, think through, and improve arts related teaching and learning in reflective, collaborative explorations. Professional learning communities of teachers and administrators to share and reflect on student learning and outcomes can also use it.
Action research validates professionalism for teachers and teaching artists and motivates serious attention to improved teaching, communicating the quality of effort toward developing equitable teaching to a broader audience who can learn from it. The Teacher Action Research Institute builds the capacity of arts teachers and teaching artists to articulate how the arts develop student thinking that is necessary in all content areas and enable non-arts teachers to aim teaching in the arts intentionally towards understanding goals across the curriculum.
Laboratory Schools ~ Laboratory schools provide models for other schools and administrators to see how Teaching for Understanding and Studio Habits of Mind support conversations about quality teaching and learning in arts and arts integrated classrooms. Visits to these sites can be arranged through the ACOE as a school or district professional development approach by combining observations with focusing questions and dialogue facilitated by trained coaches.
Laboratory schools provide unique opportunities for teachers and administrators to see arts integration in action and enable observers the opportunity to talk with and ask questions of laboratory school practitioners. These model schools can provide insight into the process of setting up similar programs and save hours of implementation work.
The Arts Learning Anchor School Initiative ~ An arts integration initiative creating arts focused professional development networks developing instructional leadership at the district, school, and classroom levels to recognize and address the needs of teachers, administrators and coaches seeking arts learning development. At the heart of the initiative are school-based arts integrative collaborations between instructional leaders, classroom teachers, teaching artists, students, parents and the community at large. These collaborations spark new approaches and model true success in contemporary public school education.
Arts Learning Anchor Schools utilize frameworks and tools in the arts to expand the scope of quality teaching, learning and assessment in order to improve student success. School sites are identified at the district level through a rigorous selection process as leadership models for arts learning, where new and established arts partnerships are leveraged to create a model for a school-based, arts-focused professional teaching and learning community. All thirty-eight of the Arts Learning Anchor Schools are working with community arts providers and arts coaches to implement new ideas for arts integration and transform their schools through the power of arts learning.
Workshop Series Available For Schools And Districts
Teaching for Understanding Framework
A workshop that introduces The Teaching for Understanding Framework (TFU). A Project Zero initiative, TFU supports teachers as they aim lessons and assessment directly at students’ developing understanding – with understanding defined as the capacity for students to use what they know flexibly in new situations.
Teaching for Understanding asks teachers to focus on three recurrent questions:
• What do students need to understand about this topic?
• What can students do to develop that understanding?
• What can stand as evidence of students’ growing understanding?
Studio Thinking Framework
Also an initiative of Project Zero, The Studio Thinking Framework (SHOM) helps teachers answer the question: Why are the arts essential to a high quality education for every child, in every school, every day? Studying the arts means more than learning techniques with materials and tools – the arts require many skills and attitudes critical to success in all content areas and in life. The Studio Thinking Framework describes both what is taught in high quality visual arts classes (eight studio habits of mind) and how teachers organize classes to nurture high quality arts learning (three studio structures).
Making Learning Visible
Making Learning Visible (MLV) is a way of documenting student work that makes the learning transparent not only to the student and teacher, but to parents and the community. It provides a way for everyone to learn more about what students are actually thinking, what and how they are learning. As such, it provides a vehicle for discussion that helps students build a meta-cognitive vocabulary and begin to understand their own learning processes Simultaneously, Making Learning Visible helps teachers understand what is being learned by students and chart the course for future teaching—for that very day and for the next time the same material is taught. It also gives parents and the school community a window into learning that captures the work and thinking that goes into creating works of art and finished projects.
Dance and Literacy ~ This hands-on workshop will guide participants through a teaching methodology that utilizes words as inspiration for original movement and choreography and demonstrates how to meet dance and literacy content standards without adding instructional time. A great way to strength vocabulary and enhance reading comprehension.
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