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Artist Teacher Institutes (ATI)

The Artist Teacher Institutes provide strategies and tools for teaching with and about the arts. The Institutes, presented by a team of teaching artist from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, link learning experiences that are authentic to the disciplines of theater and dance with classroom curriculum, teaching practice and the Arizona Arts Standards. The Institutes are experiential and provide an introduction to the arts disciplines with a primary focus on theater and dance and a lesser, secondary focus on music and visual arts. They provide educators with specific arts learning tools to use in their classroom programs, addressing arts literacy and arts integration in the full curriculum.

Overview

The Institutes provide creative experiences and opportunities for reflection, and discussion related to integrating arts based learning into the full curriculum. The format addresses creative problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork, synthesis, and analysis.

Participants in the Artist Teacher Institutes first learn theater, dance (using text and music), and visual arts improvisational structures and games that are authentically related to creating and understanding elements of each of those disciplines. Next they practice adapting those improvisational tools and games to build student understanding about specific content in arts and academic areas. By providing educators with first-hand experience in creating art and the tools to teach students artistic processes, the Institutes ensure that teachers will have enhanced skills, knowledge, and confidence to integrate the Arizona Arts Standards into the daily curriculum.

An underlying belief that informs the design and presentation on the Institutes is that when teachers tap into their own creativity and are given valuable curriculum tools, they then elevate the quality of the work of their students. This Institute intends to help participants engage in active inquiry and to discover possibilities of meaning within the disciplines and processes studied.

Arts Integration

In a balanced curriculum, students should have the opportunity to use what is learned in one discipline to clarify or enhance an idea, concept, or skill in another. As a resource, offering unique perceptual, cognitive, social, and personal development opportunities, the arts can be used to assist in learning other content areas. The integration and balancing of different discipline areas in the curriculum with arts tools offers a larger repertoire of multi-modal teaching/learning opportunities in these disciplines, and builds skill in problem solving, communicating, and working with others. By providing educators with tools and methods for integrating the arts in academic content areas such as language arts, math, science, and social science, students will have greater opportunity to achieve and demonstrate proficiency levels of achievement relative to the Arizona Academic Standards for these disciplines.

The teaching process is rich in opportunities for perception, production, and reflection in the arts for both teacher and student. Much of teaching is a blend of various arts talents. The Artist Teacher Institute helps to find, finesse, and celebrate those talents and provide strategies to apply those talents (via the arts) to the full curriculum in a practical, participatory, and supportive environment.

The Teaching for Understanding framework (Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education) is a research-based, classroom-tested approach for making understanding a more achievable goal in classrooms. As a tool for designing, conducting, and reflecting on classroom practices that nourish student understanding the Teaching for Understanding framework informs and is central to the work of the Artist Teacher Institute.

The Institutes also explore methods of ongoing assessment. When understanding is the purpose of instruction, the process of assessment is more than just one of evaluation, it is a substantive contribution to learning. Assessment needs to inform students, teachers, and teaching artists about what students currently understand and about how to proceed with subsequent teaching and learning.

In order to have arts teaching and learning play a central role in establishing a significant impact on comprehensive school reform it is important to have a critical mass of stakeholders from a school participate in the technical assistance program. Previous Institutes have been effective in building community among school faculty, administrators, and community teaching artists and in providing specific, applicable, professional development in teaching with, about, and through the arts. The work of the Artist Teacher Institute, taught by a team of teaching artists with varied, specific artistic expertise, relies on the energy a group provides and can be adjusted to serve from 15 to 38 participants.

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