                                                              
| Improving the Arts |
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| Written by Robert A. Southworth Jr. |
| Wednesday, 26 April 2006 09:12 |
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CABLe is the result of a collaboration between Amy Duggins Pender, Director of Arts in Education at the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), Rob Southworth, President of the SchoolWorks Lab (SWL), and Geri Hayes, Regional Arts Supervisor of New York City’s Region 1 in the Bronx. After several conversations about the field’s need for a transportable model for district-wide School Improvement through the arts, Pender, Southworth, and Hayes decided to donate their time and expertise to establishing an organization that would support the development of Quality Arts in Education model. Having created the Center for Arts-Based Learning, this team of professionals will now plan, initiate, implement, sustain, document, and evaluate an approach to arts-based school change that will eventually be taken to Scale to create district-wide, whole-school improvement. The approach will involve the creation of, and/or support for already existing Partnerships between schools and cultural organizations. This year, the work of the Center will focus on Region 1 in the Bronx, and six schools that are working with Bronx-based cultural organizations will be invited to participate in the pilot program. These partnerships will be nurtured through strategic planning assistance from the Center, targeted consulting services, and small grants to supplement existing financial resources. The partnerships will also be supported by a rigorous, Inquiry-based Professional Development program that will focus on opportunities for artists and teachers to learn from and with one another. The pilot will result in the formation of a network of six learning partnerships that will serve as the hub of an ever-expanding circle of school/cultural organization partners from across the Region, with the eventual goal of creating whole-school improvement, in and through the arts, in all schools in the district. The projected 2005-2006 programmatic budget for the Center is approximately $150,000. However, the organization is striving to raise an additional $150,000 in order to fill several permanent staff positions. The SchoolWorks Lab, Inc. (SWL) is the fiscal sponsor for the Center. Founded in 2002 by Dr. Robert A. Southworth of Teachers College, Columbia University, its goal is to study, research, and disseminate information about teaching, learning, and school reform. In addition to housing the CABLe, and providing fiscal oversight, Dr. Southworth and the SchoolWorks staff will serve as the evaluation and research partner for the Center and its work in the Bronx. Methodology The pilot for our professional development program will have two components: one that will focus specifically on teaching artists and one that will target both teaching artists and teachers (arts and non-arts). Current research tells us that the way teachers learn best is from other teachers (Fullan, 2001, p. 119; McLaughlin and Talbert, 2001, p. 22). Our program will provide several opportunities for both teachers and artists to do just that—learn from and with one another through a tested approach that is designed to maximize peer-to-peer learning. The professional development component for teaching artists (at least three from each of the six pilot organizations) will involve four facilitated meetings during which participants will collectively identify best practices in artist/teacher collaborations and benchmarks for what teaching artists should know, understand, and be able to do in order to work effectively in the classroom. This work will result in the formation of a self- assessment tool that the artists will then have the opportunity to complete. At the end of the pilot, each artist will have had the chance to develop an understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses and to begin the development of a personalized professional development plan for the upcoming year. These meetings will take place during April, May, and June 2006. During the same time period, teams of artists and teachers (both arts and non-arts) from each of the six partnerships will engage in three Peer-to-Peer Sharing sessions. Peer-to-Peer Sharing is a technique that was developed four years ago at the Empire State Partnerships Summer Seminar. Adopted from the practice of performing and visual arts studios in higher education, Peer-to-Peer Sharing allows teams of collaborating artists and teachers to present an essential question about their practice to a group of peers and receive constructive feedback in a safe and nurturing environment. Since its first use at the ESP Summer Seminar in 2002, the Peer-to-Peer approach has been evaluated and improved, and we are anxious to disseminate this highly successful practice through our work in Region 1. The pilot will culminate in a half-day roundtable where lessons learned and next steps will be discussed. This meeting will take place at the conclusion of Region 1’s annual arts festival. In total, this pilot will involve approximately 18 teaching artists and 12 teachers. Artists will receive 18 hours of professional development time, and teachers will receive ten. Planning for the pilot, including the recruiting and training of peer-to-peer facilitators and documenters, will begin in late September 2005, and will involve Amy Duggins Pender (volunteer director for the Center), Geri Hayes, Rob Southworth, and an advisory committee of stakeholders from the cultural, parent, and education communities in the Bronx. All of the professional development meetings will begin in April 2006. The pilot will be evaluated by Dr. Southworth and the staff at Schoolworks Lab, Inc., and a final report will help guide the expansion of the program in subsequent years. In support of this work, we respectfully request a grant of $40,000. The founding partners of the Center share several core beliefs: that improving schools is complex work; that integrating arts-based work into the fabric of teaching and learning can be an essential element of school reform; and that lasting change requires long-term commitment and perseverance. The Center is prepared to make that commitment–first in the Bronx, and eventually in districts across the nation. A grant from the Dana Foundation will help us begin our journey toward systemic and lasting change. |