Project+Overview

=Project Overview=

Arts Educator 2.0 is a professional development project currently running in Intermediate Unit One, which serves Washington, Greene and Fayette counties in southwestern Pennsylvania. AE 2.0 is funded by a federal Professional Development for Arts Educators grant and a grant from the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation. The project is directed by Dr. Mara Linaberger, curriculum coordinator at [|Intermediate Unit One], and Jamie Kasper, Associate Director of the [|Arts Education Collaborative].

AE 2.0 began in 2008-2009 and will run through 2010-2011. To read more about each year's activities, see:
 * Year 1, 2008-2009
 * Year 2, 2009-2010
 * Year 3, 2010-2011

Our final day together for year 2 was May 14. You can watch the stream of the day here:
media type="custom" key="6125501"

Live Blog
= = media type="custom" key="6047983"

WallWisher
media type="custom" key="6089167"

The rationale and references document shared by Jamie at the AEP session on April 10, 2010: media type="custom" key="5872391" align="center"

What do teachers do as part of the project?
The teachers involved in Arts Educator 2.0 teach music, theatre and visual arts. Each participant was responsible for completing 90 hours of work during the school year, beginning in September and ending in May. To help the teachers complete some of their hours, we brought them together for six days at Intermediate Unit One. We provided substitutes for their classrooms and brought them to spend the entire day with us, starting at 8:00 AM and ending at 3:00 PM. These days took place on Fridays in September, November, December, January, March and May.

We began each day at the Intermediate Unit with a work of art. This year's works of art have been: Each art experience was followed by a line of inquiry. The purpose of the line of inquiry was to get the teachers used to thinking and answering open-ended questions, guide them through the process of inquiry, and model the use of open-ended questioning in response to a work of art. Our hope is that the participants will be able to incorporate open-ended questioning in their own classrooms as a result of this process.
 * 60x60
 * Common Ground quilt
 * Attack Theatre
 * Cello Fury
 * Rock and Roll Hall of Fame videoconference
 * Fission of Form

There are six collaborative inquiry groups (CIGs), each with 6 or 7 members and a faculty facilitator. The CIGs each crafted an inquiry question directly related to classroom practice. You can see the inquiry questions for year 2 here. Each member was responsible for researching his/her group's inquiry question, gathering evidence of the research, and sharing the results with the group. The CIGs compiled their evidence on these pages:
 * Red CIG
 * Orange CIG
 * Yellow CIG
 * Green CIG
 * [|Blue CIG]
 * Purple CIG

A hallmark of our inquiry model is that the participants guide, document and evaluate their own work. We put some basic time structures in place for accountability purposes, but the facilitators were responsible for guiding the participants through the process and making sure that they documented all of their work.

You can see live blogs, video and other evidence of each of the six Intermediate Unit days in year 2 here. Documentation from the CIG meetings outside of the IU days can be found on the CIG pages above.

How do we structure our time?
We have begun disseminating information about the inquiry model that will drive years 2 and 3 of the project. If you are interested in learning more about how we have structured the inquiry model with the collaborative inquiry groups, you can see the time structure here:



How are we assessing learning?
In addition to examining the documentation above at the end of the project, we have also collected both quantitative and qualitative data throughout the year.
 * Participants took at pre-test at the beginning of Day 1 and will take a post-test at the end of Day 6 to measure growth in knowledge.
 * Participants will share out the evidence from their inquiry process to the entire group on Day 6.
 * Participants answered 3 questions at the end of each day at the Intermediate Unit and each CIG meeting outside of those days. You can see the 3 questions here (scroll to the bottom of the page to "CIG Progress Tracking").
 * Participants will be interviewed on Day 6 by the evaluator.

Our evaluator, Dr. Rosemary Omniewski from Edinboro University, will be compiling all of this data into an evaluation report. We will post the evaluation report here when it is complete.

Our participants are also assessing student learning in their classrooms through action research. We will post more information about this after Day 6.