ArtsNow in Action

EDUCATOR PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

ArtsNow is a community-driven professional development initiative that builds the capacity of all educators to use creativity, authentic arts integration and sequential arts education to help students fulfill and exceed Georgia Performance Standards. Committed to serving the unique needs of students, teachers, and school-communities, ArtsNow professional development and on-going support is developed in collaboration with local arts leaders and school systems in both Metro Atlanta and across Georgia. Arts Specialists, General Classroom Educators, and Administrators are empowered as leaders to build an arts-rich culture in their school-communities. They guide the alignment of ArtsNow strategies into their school improvement plans which now provides the framework for creativity and arts integration.

Participants experience arts activities designed to "ignite" their creativity and are exposed to arts integration as a research-based teaching strategy. As an organization, ArtsNow engages the larger arts community to provide expert training and on-going support to educators and administrators throughout the year.

Four primary collaborators work with ArtsNow to provide professional development and on-going support to educators. Additionally, these groups work collaboratively to continually develop and gather support for the ArtsNow initiative across the city and state!

All schools are eligible to attend ArtsNow Foundational Training for School TEAMS: Adventures in Creativity. Download a list of schools and districts that have attended Foundational Training to see the potential total impact this professional development has on educators and students.

• Foundational Training for school teams (K–12)
• Follow-up Training for school systems and individual schools (K–12)
  
  

EDUCATOR RESOURCES

ArtsNow is working hard to develop a host of teaching resources for educators to access with ease and relevancy in order for them to use when writing their classroom lesson plans. Some are ready for your access, some are in development.

All our resources are intended to be used first by those educators who have attended our “Adventures in Creativity: Foundational Training for School TEAMS” 2 ½ day workshop. (Participants may download Ignite Curriculum Guides free through our website for a year following training). All other educators can also access these Ignite Curriculum Guides for a small fee of $2 to help support our work.

We also intend for these resources to be used for educators in local school-communities as they lead their colleagues in a faculty workshop. This is the best use of the video workshops and arts ignition boxes. They can lead others with these resources – and then hope to see their faculty translate what they have learned in to their own classrooms with children and youth.

Our vision is to build this website with links to a host, globally, of other terrific resources that have passed our “standards of excellence” both in terms of the graphic simplicity in how the information is presented and in terms of the deep, constructive content aligned to state and national standards for teaching and learning.

For now, please enjoy the Ignite Curriculum Guides, Video Workshops and Creating Teaching Tools — though small in number — rich in content as helpful tools to developing your own lessons.

• Ignite Curriculum Guides – creative teaching ideas aligned to state and national standards in an attempt to “jump start” a teacher’s own ideas for developing effective lesson plans
• Video Workshops – 15–30 min sessions of trainer led demonstrations of arts integrated activity, classroom implementation and teacher feedback
• Creative Teaching Tools – art supplies and workshop materials aligned to all Foundational Training “breakout sessions” and corresponding Ignite Curriculum Guides