• Advancing innovative arts integration practice and policy in both education and the arts 
• Actively participating in professional dialogue with practitioners, researchers, and leaders.

• Develop innovative approaches to instruction and curriculum through direct classroom collaboration
• Identify their questions about their shared practice 
• Create and share data collection instruments with others in the network to answer questions 
• Collect data around site specific and cross-site questions 
• Arrange the collected evidence into multi-media and hard copy documentation; share with public (see Useful Tools). 
• Network helps critique documentation in cross-site meetings and researcher document examination and interviews 
• Researchers analyze across partnerships, develop assessment tools grounded in the action research questions to examine practices cross-site

• Constructivist learning (in which learners construct their own meanings and discover their own understandings of learned concepts and content) 
• Parent involvement 
• Teacher-Led Professional development 
• Teacher collaboration and leadership 
• Reflective practice (in which teachers and students collectively examine and analyze their learning and teaching processes and products) 
• Multiple modes of assessment 
• Authentic audiences for student work
• Share promising practices widely. Grounded with evidence, the network delves into the nuts and bolts of what works why. Then, when students, parents, and education and arts administrators join the discussion, they can tie the approach to concrete examples of learning. Professional development becomes “two-way and multidimensional” Moving away from the arts-service provider model, everyone learns and benefits. (Aprill and Burnaford) p.5.

• Novice teachers. Help them understand they are leaders. Help them learn to plan. Honor their innovation. Design professional development specifically for novice teachers. 
• Veteran teachers give back. Most workshops led by veteran teachers. 
• Veteran CAPE schools open their doors. Parents, new partners, and those interested in observing this learning community in action are welcomed into veteran CAPE schools to see how arts integrated into school life feels and looks.

• Full length, credit courses taught by staff and education and artist partners. These 15 hour courses (3-five hour or 5- three hour meetings at host school) “allow teachers to immerse themselves in the process of making art, as well as to develop an understanding of how to connect art making to core curriculum content areas.” (CAPE). Topics include: arts integration methodologies, collaboration, and documentation strategies.
  
• State certified professional development helps teachers with recertification

• Bureau of Cultural Arts of Chicago Public Schools and CAPE work together on research-based initiative: Improving Academic Achievement Through the Arts in. 
• Developing Early Literacies Through the Arts (DELTA): Intensive professional development relationships with schools on literacy development in grades 1 - 3.
• Middle School and High School International Baccalaureate programs in Chicago Public Schools.
  

• Engage external researchers to study all CAPE professional development programs
• Engage full time research associate to coordinate data collection
• Provide a feedback loop between researchers and teachers and artists to inform the on-going development of CAPE's professional development

• Teacher change- most developed arts-integrated units (74%). 
• School approach change - over 90% report integration of CAPE into school. 
• 91% educators reporting collaborations with teaching artists. More success in co planning than co-teaching. 
• Positive student attitude towards arts integrated teaching approach
• Evidence for strong, significant achievement effects in elementary grades. For example, before CAPE school averaged around 40% of 6th graders performing at or above grade level in math; seven years of CAPE showed overall an overall rise to 60%. The average for all Chicago schools changed from 28% of 6th graders performing at or above grade level in math to around 40%. (Catterall and Waldorf) p.54-55. 
• Arts-integrated teaching contributes to workplace and life skills; more than non-integrated classes. 
• Helpful qualities for those who teach in CAPE schools: 
  • Teachers: openness, willingness to risk, arts interest/ background, also willingness to seek arts training, to collaborate. 
  • Artists: communication, planning, classroom management skills, love of art.

Form a professional community across schools. Connect the resources of communities to the resources of schools. Provide occasions for teachers, artists, community members, and students to reflect on effective learning as a shared community. Leadership and full community involvement mature the program. 

Involve people from different perspectives. Varied perspectives in the partnerships help everyone see more clearly “The actual collaboration and co-planning between people of different expertise is a significant piece of the professional development.” (Aprill)  

Flexibility and adaptability are key.

No cookie cutter. Help them develop their own answers, CAPE facilitates rather than imposes. CAPE serves as a resource, finding answers and support, and a convener, helping others learn from successes and challenges across the city. The network needs to develop the criteria for excellence.

Lift them up to be seen. By involving practitioners in national and international learning communities, they gain new insight into the work’s importance and fresh ideas for improving it. 

Increase capacity. CAPE workshops helped teachers and artists learn how to develop integrated arts units.

Students and peers can be unexpected allies. They are part of the collaboration and bring interesting, innovative connections to the work. (Burnaford, et al.) p.34

Support the inquiry process. Support teachers and artists so they can ask questions about their practice and find ways to seek the answers. Veterans rediscover curiosity. Novices join the professional community.

Share research. Practitioners need to present their research to each other and analyze what about other’s research is meaningful to their own work: What it would look like in the classroom.  

Documentation is important. It provides concrete evidence of learning and helps clarify the learning, assist in educational planning and tells the learning story.

Principals are key players. Researchers describe how principals can be a key player in making collaborative opportunities possible. 

Encourage teacher leadership. Develop positive leadership opportunities so that teachers see themselves as leaders.

Support the destabilization of entrenched, ineffective teaching practices. Develop, test and refine effective new teaching practices. Meaningfully challenge both novice and veteran teachers and artists   

Teacher planning time is necessary. Teachers’ schedules are overloaded and Arts specialists are often scheduled out of collaboration.

Example: Some Chicago schools “bank time”, where they start school a little earlier every day, then every other Friday have a school planning period.   

Strategically use existing planning time. There’ s not enough to waste. Do “administrivia” remotely, use face to face time intentionally. Provide planning tools and link to grade level meetings.

Budget money to pay teachers for planning, documentation, and reflection time. The planning is more important than the extra funding for program delivery. 

Turn after school programs into laboratories for in school planning. It can be a safe space for teachers to try new teaching strategies and critique their work. For instance, without time constraints, teachers can spend several weeks on watercolor before deciding which areas to concentrate on during the school day.

Elicit positive leadership from students. Connect the lives of students in-school with their lives out-of-school and provide opportunities for them to actively contribute.