Arts Integration: Creation of a “whole” curriculum by bringing together several subjects and disciplines.

Arts Specialist: Teachers with licenses in specific areas for specific grades.

Collaboration: Partners share a mission and maximize resources to fulfill common goals and objectives.

Co-Teaching Model: Teacher/artist partnerships integrate concepts from the arts and non-arts disciplines. At times students’ experiences may focus more on the art form or on the non-arts subject, while at other times the arts and non-arts instruction appear seamless. The teacher and artist create lessons that guide the artist during sessions that focus on the arts, and clarify what the teacher will do when the artist is not present.

Discipline: Specific area of curriculum or instruction, such as math, science, music, etc.

Partnership (for Arts-in-Education): Educators, artists, and/or arts and cultural institutions combine talents and resources through planning, to effectively collaborate with shared responsibility for an agreed upon outcome. In a spirit of mutual cooperation and responsibility, the partnership creates programs for students that are relevant, in-depth, and sharing. The programs must be interdisciplinary and/or integrated in the study of non-arts subjects and the arts or environmental sciences.

Professional Development: Workshops that provide constituents with tools to construct successful teacher/artist/student classroom partnerships. Quality offerings can help ensure continued support for arts-in-education programs and encourage school improvement in and through the arts.

Teaching Artist: A professional visual, performing, or literary artist with training and experience in an art form and with knowledge of teaching practice who works in schools and in the community. The teaching artist may perform for the students and teachers, may work in long-term or short-term residencies in classrooms, or in a community setting, or may lead in program development through involvement in curricular planning and residencies with school partners. The teaching artist is an educator who brings the creative process into the classroom and the community.

PLANNING: Arts-in-Education projects involve a project team comprised of all involved (e.g., teachers, artists, school and cultural organization administrators). This team meets to decide the course of the project and the inherent elements for success. Planning occurs prior to residency work and can be ongoing throughout the project.

Goal: Long-term results. Goals describe long-term intentions, based on shared values of the project team.

Objective: Short-term results associated with each long term goal. Anticipated outcomes linked to the shared goals.

Learner Outcome: The actual result (learning) of an activity designed to achieve a specific intended future result (objective) in a student/ teacher/ artist partnership experience.

LCB RESIDENCY: A partnership of schools and cultural organizations or artists, focusing on collaboratively planned and taught, interdisciplinary (arts-in-education curriculum) involving a minimum of three contact sessions between students and artists. A performance component by artists is not mandatory.

Best Practices: Lessons that encourage educators, artists and cultural organizations to learn from each other, to model and emulate successful strategies and methods.

Contact Sessions: Each time an artist and teacher (together) connect with a small group of students it is considered one contact session. Double classroom sessions do not count as multiple contacts. Contact sessions are separated by a minimum of one day.

Core Group: A core group is the same group of students who interact with the same artist for a minimum of three (check local guidelines) class sessions. A core group cannot be a “pull out” group such as only artistically talented students. Nor can it be an after-school group such as a history club.

Curriculum: The collection of lesson and activities that teachers teach. Building or district curriculum specialists and supervisors in specific content areas coordinate the curriculum to stop gaps, eliminate overlaps and improve what teachers are doing.

BUDGET: Project costs, including all expenses broken down into specific categories (as provided on the budget sheet in LCB grant applications). All real and anticipated income sources should be shown, as should all expenses, both those to be paid in cash and those provided through in-kind gifts and services.

Expenses: Costs associated directly with the project, but only those that are not normally expended by the school or district. (Expense lines include substitute teachers, buses, teacher after school time, materials/supplies etc.)

Income – Cash: Cash contributions include money that is spent on materials, busing, payments to substitutes, payments to teachers for work after school, payments to artists, etc.

Income – In-Kind: Contributions include teachers donating time to work after school, materials donated for the project from outside groups, administrative support outside the normal course of work, etc.

Title I Funds - Federal: Enable all children to meet high academic standards and to provide extra resources to improve instruction in high poverty schools to ensure that poor and minority children have the same opportunities as other children to meet challenging academic standards. These funds often surface for special teacher education programs, technology improvements, program-linked materials, research-based curricular changes etc. Title I funds might be a source of cash match income for a school.

ASSESSMENT: The process of using comprehensive evaluation tools to determine the value, significance, and level of skill or achievement reached as a result of an arts-in-education partnership.
Performance Indicator: Evidence of a performance measure, often indirect, that shows in the intended outcome has been achieved.

Reflection Practice: Looking closely at student work. Teachers, teaching artists, administrators take time to develop methods of collective inquiry – the kinds of conversations and processes that create collective responsibility for assessing and improving instructional practice and learning opportunities.

Rubrics: Criteria for scoring student performance.