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Improving Teacher Quality

The Teaching Artist Project

Grant Number: 10-710

Grant Award: $1,000,000

Duration of Project: Thursday, September 30, 2010 - Monday, September 01, 2014

Project Subject Areas: English, Science and Arts

Grade Band: 3rd-5th

Institutes of Higher Education:

  • University of California, Irvine

Local Education Agencies:

  • San Diego Unified, San Diego

Number of teachers/principals/highly qualified paraprofessionals participating in the project:

180

Goals:

This project will provide teachers with the professional development needed to teach weekly standards-based arts lessons to their students. The three main goals of this project are to increase teacher effectiveness in:
  1. Imparting to students knowledge about and skill in the target art forms
  2. Integrating the arts and language arts curricula, so as to amplify student English language development and thus their learning in the language arts
  3. Using arts instruction to improve students’ teamwork skills and sense of personal efficacy

The project will enable teachers to provide support for ELLs through images, interpersonal interactions, rhymes, and memorable patterns.

Activities:

In their first year in the program, teachers will actively co-teach 27 lessons (9 visual art, 9 theatre, 9 dance) with a professional teaching artist. In these weekly 50-minute sessions, teachers will learn to effectively teach the arts by co-teaching arts lessons to their own students with one-on-one coaching from an expert mentor. In the program’s second year, teachers will teach the same arts lessons alone, with the support of experienced district resource teachers and of the veteran teacher-coaches who will be appointed at each grade level (3-5) at each school site. Teachers will also learn to integrate arts-based strategies into their regular teaching through an on-going series of workshops given by SDUSD resource teachers.

Anticipated Outcomes:

Teachers will teach weekly arts lessons and integrate arts-based strategies into their regular teaching in ways that enhance both the immediate understanding and the long-term English language development of English learners.
The success of this project will be demonstrated by:
  1. Teacher ability to teach and integrate the arts at their grade level
  2. A significant difference between the CST-ELA and CELDT test scores of students in the experimental and control groups

Contacts:

Project: Doug Grove, Research Director, doug@ciassociates.net
Institute of Higher Education: Liane Brouillette, Project Director, lbrouill@uci.edu
Institute of Higher Education: Bradley Hughes, Co-Director, bhughes@uci.edu
Local Education Agency: Karen Childress-Evans, LEA Co-Director, kchildress-evans@sandi.net

Questions, Comments, Corrections?

Send an e-mail to Teacher_Quality@cpec.ca.gov .