Overview

Arts Impact provides comprehensive professional development in the arts to elementary classroom teachers in Pierce and King Counties. The program began in Pierce County in 1999 where it has served more than 200 teachers through a two-year training and mentoring program, reaching over 5,000 students.

Arts Impact is currently a U. S. Department of Education Model Arts grant project investigating best practices for teacher training in the arts. This grant enabled Arts Impact to expand the program model types and the numbers of teachers served. Arts Impact compares three models of professional development for K-5 classroom teachers in districts written into the grant. This includes a student learning component and advanced teacher training component in the form of an arts-infused summer school program in partnership with the Tacoma School District.

Common features of all the program models includes four common components centered around a thirty hour summer institute, ten hours of teacher mentoring by trained artist mentors throughout the year, cultural study trips for students to the art museum, live dance, or theater performance, and a minimum of two supplemental workshops. In addition to the common components, Arts Impact is able to investigate the distinct features of three different models and their impact on teacher knowledge, skill, and readiness to teach the arts.

The evaluation of this program helps educators and policy makers to better understand the levels of support necessary to improve teacher conceptual knowledge, and practice in planning, teaching, and assessing a new content area. In addition the evaluation of the arts-infused summer school will help policy makers understand the impact of conceptual integration on student achievement in reading, writing, and mathematics.