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Professional Development Events SmART Schools West Dates: June 14, 16, 2010 Facilitator: Lynn Robb, Master Teaching Artist Visual Art Local history is the final social studies chapter for third graders in California. Lynn Robb and a team of teachers at Will Rogers Learning Community designed and presented an experience built on poems that express various locations and characteristics of California. We investigated the poetry by tagging texts: the students explored several texts and chose lines that had meaning for them. They took their lines and illuminated the letterforms and adorned them with illustrations. Their texts were shared with classmates and prompted rich classroom discussions. They were shared with the larger community, as well, at Third Grade Poetry night where they were read and displayed.
Dates: January, 2010 Facilitator: Lynn Robb, Master Teaching Artist Visual Art Fourth grade teachers at McKinley Elementary School collaborated with visual artist Lynn Robb to design science lessons integrating visual art with the food web. First, students created a “Gallery of Decomposers”. Presented with electron microscope images of fungi, mites, isopods and others the students rendered them in pencil and oil pastels on toned paper. Careful observation, scaling images to a larger size, as well as pastel shading and blending techniques combined with an exploration of the role decomposers play in the transfer of energy. The second goal was to use visual thinking to organize and represent the flow of energy in the food web along with description of each of the participants. Students focused on a specific biome and created two-sided diagrams containging text, symbols and images that illustrated the movement of energy throughout the web.
Dates: October 12 & 13, 2009 Facilitator: Wendy Cohen Teams from two sites, Will Rogers Learning Community and John Muir Elementary, came together for an intensive two-day session of Collaborative Team Leadership Training. Teams were made up of site administrators. The two participating teams explored their school culture through a powerful two-day workshop led by Wendy Cohen. They began the process of analyzing the culture of their own schools, defining and building leadership traits and skills and explored practices and ideas that form the basis of creating a professional learning community. Essential Questions
Workshop Outcomes:
Each site has continued to move forward with this work in advancing their specific goals.
Dates: September 3, 2009 Facilitator: Ana Maria Alvarez, Master Teaching Artist Dance The chosen focus for McKinley Elementary School this year is strengthening students experience and knowledge in science. SmART Schools West partnered with McKinley in a pre-service day focused on providing science resources for their entire staff. Throughout the day Dance Master Teaching Artist Ana Maria Alvarez conducted sessions with each grade level. She began by introducing teachers to call and response games to enliven and focus the classroom. Then she guided each set of teachers in creative ways to use our bodies to illuminate grade-level specific science content (such as choreographed movement sequences and ‘human machines’). At the end of the day the entire staff reflected on ways in which they would integrate this new work into their classrooms.
Dates: September, 2009 Facilitator: Vanessa Mizzone, Master Teaching Artist Theater Giving teachers and students a means to bring stone to life was the goal for Vanessa Mizzone at Will Rogers Elementary. Together with Pam Dresher, Rogers’ science teacher, Vanessa designed an experience for students to explore and communicate the processes that form rocks and minerals. Students created small groups and designed tableaus to illustrate igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks. Classmates were challenged to read each tableau and identify the formation it depicted. Sharing their scientific knowledge with creativity gave students a deeper understanding of how change occurs in an element of nature that appears to be static.
Dates: August 11-14, 2009 Come join us in August for a 4-day SmART Schools summer institute facilitated by SmART Schools’ staff and notable international, national, and local professional/master teaching artists with expertise in all four arts disciplines (dance/movement; instrumental & vocal music; theatre; and visual arts). Participants will engage in hands-on studio workshops to develop new skills, techniques, and methodologies to:
Participants will have opportunities to design their own curriculum units utilizing the Wiggins/McTighe Understanding By Design backwards-planning approach. Daily common planning time sessions will be facilitated by SmART Schools professional teaching artists and SmART Schools staff (including curriculum design and assessment experts). Participants will learn how to recognize and improve their individual and group working styles and use this information to create a productive culture of collegiality. Participants will also begin to establish close ties with New England based arts and cultural organizations, institutions of higher education, and the SmART Schools network. SmART Schools West Dates: May, 2009 Facilitator: Ana Maria Alvarez and members of CONTRATIEMPO
SmART Schools: Creating Arts-Centered Dates: April 23-24, 2009 Facilitator: Eileen Mackin (SmART Schools Founder & Director) In this seminar, participants will learn how professional learning communities contribute to increased student achievement. In addition, participants will work together, creating a SmART Schools WEST network, and engage collaboratively in learning the concepts, habits, tools, and skills that lead to more reflective practice. Together they will prepare to adapt, and translate, their own seminar experiences in order to create and lead groups back in their own schools. The goals of this training are to:
SmART Schools West Date: February 28, 2009 Facilitator: Co-presented by Lynn Robb and John Zeretzke Elias Simé, an up and coming artist from Addis Ababa, uses yarn, plastics, tattered fabric, buttons, used plastic, and bottle tops, to create work that reflects the current state of his surroundings. Simé’s three-dimensional sculptures are made with traditional organic Ethiopian building materials such as mud and straw, as well as wood, metal, and other found objects, gathered in part by neighborhood children. February’s Mini-Institute will begin with a tour of the exhibition and then proceed with hands-on explorations inspired by his work. Participants will practice autobiographical art-making, reflective prose and personal musical interpretations of their lives and surroundings. Initial expressions will focus on the individual’s ideas, then culminate in collaborative performances that meld the unique visual, oral and musical voices into communal works. SmART Schools FALL Mini-Institute November 2008 Kurt Wootton, co-founder and co-director of HABLA: Center for Culture and Language, and faculty member of Brown University, will facilitate a new studio-based SmART Schools training as part of a series of ongoing, yet separate and distinct, professional development workshops designed to help participants cultivate Culturally Relevant Arts Integration Practices. In this hands-on studio mini-institute participants will study the arts and culture of Mexico and South America and explore the ways in which students from all cultural backgrounds bring a vast set of cultural and artistic resources to the classroom. This culturally embedded professional development experience will challenge educators cultural assumptions and help them to reflect on their own cultures as well as the cultures they are experiencing. Arts-integration in a Cultural Context participants will:
SmART Schools WEST Summer Institute 2008: August 2008 Research shows that music, art, dance and drama not only increases student creativity and critical thinking skills, but also increases student achievement in language arts, math, and science. SmART Schools WEST intensive four-day studio-based professional development institute. Participants experience professional development by engaging in workshops centered around innovative SmART Schools prototype curriculum facilitated by international and local professional and master teaching artists in visual arts, music, theatre, and dance. Participants also collaborate in the design of their own arts-integration curriculum units. SmART Schools master teaching artists help participants to cultivate arts-based methods, techniques, and skills to:
SmART Schools WEST Master Teaching Artists: Ana Maria Alvarez – Dance Vanessa Mizzone – Theatre Lynn Robb – Visual Arts John Zeretzke - Music In addition, SmART Schools Featured International Visiting Artist & Partner: Kurt Wootton, Co-Founder and Co-Director of Habla: Center for Language and Language will conduct the following workshops for SmART Schools Summer Institute 2008: Imagining Mexico: Integrating the Arts in Cross-Cultural Classrooms: Literacy is more than just a set of reading and writing strategies, it is a way of describing ourselves and the world we live in. This series of workshops will explore how the literature and photography of Mexican artists serves as inspiration for students to create their own, original work through various artistic mediums. Participants will learn a variety of innovative tools & techniques for integrating the arts into classrooms environments. This toolkit has been assembled by the team of artists and teachers based at Habla: The Center for Language and Culture in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. The workshops utilize and model the best arts-integration practices from around the world including: The Cordel from Brazil, Images and Words from Mexico, and approaches for developing student literacy created by the Arts/Lit Project in the Education Department at Brown University. SmART Schools Winter 2007 Mini-Institute December 2007 Facilitators: Master Teaching Artists Lynn Robb and Jennifer Zakkai Collaborate in cross-district grade level teams and engage in hands-on studio workshop to:
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