COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE Spring 2008

Program Description

The Community of Practice program provides ongoing professional development opportunities for teaching artists and teachers who work with students with disabilities. VSA arts has developed this professional learning community by drawing from the fields of teacher professional development, evaluation-research, and business management.

The core purpose is to cultivate meaningful professional discussion about learning, differentiated instruction, and assessment of students with disabilities in inclusive settings. This discussion is grounded in reviews of student learning evidence in relation to learning outcomes. Participants generate, evaluate, and share valuable curriculum knowledge with peers from around the country. Expert instructional coaches and participants exchange feedback on the shared curriculum, assessment tools, and student work samples using a range of online and tele-conferencing tools. This opportunity is meant to be an enhancement of existing professional development for teaching artists in the VSA arts U.S. domestic affiliate network.

Outcomes

The aim of the program is to support teaching artists in our U.S. domestic affiliate residency programs to design high quality arts learning opportunities for students with disabilities. The program will support participants to:

Design meaningful and coherent standards-based, arts-integrated lessons
Design pre-assessment tools to inform the differentiation of instruction
Collect and document evidence of student learning using pilot documentation tools (I.e., curriculum map, curriculum template, student work annotation)
Review student work to assess learning, as well as generate and validate assessment criteria and descriptors
Share insights into student learning and useful strategies for instruction and assessment

Participants

VSA arts is re-positioning our Community of Practice program to be a professional development opportunity for Teaching Artists in our U.S. domestic affiliate network. VSA arts is inviting affiliates, who have residency programs in K-12 public schools that meet the VSA arts minimum standards and who offer professional development workshops for their teaching artists, to apply for the Spring 2008 Community of Practice.

Affiliates meeting these criteria are encouraged to organize a team of up to six participants. The residency program manager should be a participant, main contact, and organizer for the Community of Practice team. An affiliate team should meet the following criteria:

The affiliate residency program manager is the team leader and key contact
Teaching artists are actively engaged in a VSA arts domestic affiliate residency program at a K-12 public school during Spring 2008
All team members are familiar with the use of tele-conferencing and web applications (i.e. bulletin boards, internet telephone and related tools, weblogs, file transfer, etc.)
All team members have a familiarity with giving and receiving critical and constructive feedback with peers

Participant teams are expected to be actively engaged in documenting, sharing work from their residencies using the documentation tools, and providing feedback to peers through out Spring 2008. Participants will be asked to provide consent forms for VSA arts to use the documentation of their curriculum, student work samples, and discussions to produce professional development products.

Support and Activities

VSA arts has the capacity to support four teams of six participants, or a total of twenty-four participants. VSA arts will provide:

An expert instructional coach to facilitate online and monthly tele-conferencing discussions
Training in the use of curriculum documentation tools and discussion protocols
Access and orientation to an electronic submission system for curriculum documents and student learning evidence (i.e., text, image, and media files)
Access and orientation to an online message board/blog to exchange feedback from peers and expert coaches
Access to a tele-conferencing system for monthly discussions and review of curriculum and student learning evidence with an expert coach

Timeline

November 30, 2007	RFP out to VSA arts U.S. domestic affiliate network
December 19, 2007	Deadline for submission of applications, 5:00 pm ET
January 4, 2008	Announcement of participants
January	Program Orientation and Training Sessions
Feb-May	Community of Practice core activities