When parents, teachers, or arts organizations think about how to strengthen arts education at a given school they almost always recognize the value and importance of the principal’s commitment. The fate of many promising arts programs has been determined by the support (or lack of support) from the principal.

While the importance of principal leadership is widely accepted, little has been written about how to cultivate and foster principal leadership for arts education. Beyond just the luck of the draw, what can advocates do to help principals assume a larger leadership role in support of arts education?

The Music Center: Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County is exploring a variety of professional development strategies to cultivate principal leadership. This paper describes some of these efforts and shares some of the preliminary lessons we are learning.

When we speak of principal leadership, we see two dimensions: operational leadership and transformational leadership.

Operational leadership involves facilitating the specific funding and logistical arrangements needed for an arts program to be implemented. When a principal provides needed funding, schedules the use of key facilities, or releases teachers for professional development sessions about arts education, they signal that arts education is important and utilize their authority to facilitate program implementation. While this may seem basic or obvious, it is not. In fact, many arts programs never get off the ground because the principal was not willing to support even the basic elements for implementation.

Transformational leadership occurs when a principal sees the arts as central to their overall vision for teaching and learning. This happens when the principal has a strong understanding of quality arts education and is able to connect this understanding to their broader vision for the school’s instructional program. Such principals serve as the key advocate for school-wide change and show interest in the nuts and bolts of classroom practice in teaching in and thru the arts.

With these distinctions in mind, it is important to think through how you want to go about developing principal leadership for arts education? How large or small is your vision about what is expected from the principal? Is it simply awareness of some logistics for program implementation or do you expect principals will grow into a more active leadership role?

Our work at the Music Center preparing and presenting professional development in arts education for school principals has forced us to think through our goals and achieve greater clarity:

• Clarity in defining the overall purpose of the project – the real Why are we doing this?
• Clarity in identifying the ever-evolving short-term goals – What is our best thinking at this juncture to guide our next step?
• And clarity in acknowledging the existing expertise of the participants – What are they already doing well (both within and – more importantly – outside of arts education) that we might authentically connect with and build upon?

Following are a few of the important distinctions we have begun to recognize in our early work:

Motivation and personal investment

Does the principal demonstrate a genuine personal interest or is their involvement the result of a district or other external mandate or requirement? This level of personal interest or commitment (as well as the district context) is important to consider before designing a professional development program. Information may need to be framed differently for principals who did not volunteer to participate.

(side issue: in delivering programs at a given school site it is important for the Music Center to know if the principal is interested in transforming instruction and building teacher capacity OR do they see the program as a resource required to meet external demands or requirements.)

Leadership Roles at the School Site: Principal and Teachers

While principal leadership is essential, no principal can “go it alone.” In fact, one of the key purposes of principal leadership is to set a tone and provide a culture that will encourage teacher leadership for arts education.

In helping principals get smarter about the elements of quality arts education, it is important to know they will not have the same level of direct engagement and participation as a teacher or teacher leader. Each have their own, distinct set of responsibilities an each requires a different skill set. Professional development for principals and for teachers calls for professional learning that emphasizes/ supports different aspects of arts leadership. Work with principals might focus on the rationale for arts education in the curriculum and the specifics supports and structures needed to achieve school-level change. Programs with teachers would focus more on the content of the subject matter and specific strategies to support student learning.

Remember what we know about adult learning

Because there is so much we want principals to know and understand, it is tempting to spend an entire session talking at them. We need to resist this temptation and structure the sessions to provide a range of activities including: direct experience, scholarship (professional reading), demonstrations, modeling, and peer dialogue. By using multiple formats we can allow individuals opportunities to learn within their area of greatest strength.

Make the end game clear: Define a vision for the Delivery of Instruction

Principals appreciate knowing the bottom line. When we talk about a quality arts education program, what do we mean? What does this look like in real life? What staffing and resources will be needed to make this happen? Who will teach the arts? -- a classroom teacher alone, an arts specialist, or a combination of teacher/specialist/visiting artist? This vision needs to be clarified from the start, in order to enable the most effective use of professional development resources (for both teachers and leaders). Principals will better understand the task at hand if they have a sense of the scope of the final result.

The Music Center’s work to support principal leadership has come through two main projects: our work with the Norwalk-La Mirada School District and are work with school teams participating in the Music Center’s Institute for Educators. The details of these efforts are provided below.

The Music Center has a long-standing partnership with the Norwalk-La Mirada Unified School District, an urban district in the Southeastern section of Los Angeles County. The district has 28 K-12 campuses and several pre-school sites. It was one of the first districts to participate in Arts for All: the Los Angeles County Regional Blueprint for Arts Education. The district has approved an ambitious strategic plan for arts education and has begun a series of professional development days for their principals. Because “you can’t lead what you don’t know,” the district believes sweeping instructional change begins with an investment in principals.

The district has contracted with the Music Center to help plan and facilitate an arts education “leadership academy” for all principals.

Here are some of the emerging lessons we are learning in this process.

Less is more

• carefully selecting limited information to allow more depth in thinking/processing
• which pieces of information will leverage/spark the greatest thinking/learning

• Reminder of goals/expectations
• Recap of learning to date
• Celebrating successes
• Participatory Arts Experience (related to overarching session topic)
• Opportunity for independent learning (reading, review, analysis, discovery)
• Reflection
• Dialogue
• Opportunity/incentives for immediate, anonymous feedback (want the design of each subsequent training to respond to the needs of the participants)

• arts education context
• arts content
• arts implementation strategies

• Lay the context and build the rationale from THEIR starting place
• Establish credibility, community, and good will (for the work ahead)
• Offer an ongoing variety of resources (brochures, articles, research, etc.) that may be used to help build the rationale for arts education back at their site (teachers and parents)
• Establish a frame for understanding the organization of the VAPA Standards, and the components of balanced arts instruction
• Engage participants in analyzing the work of colleagues to inform thinking and push forward/ How are others grappling with the big ideas and challenges of implementation? (MIENC, LAUSD, OUSD, TCAP)

Building the Rationale:

• Mike Huckabee: Weapons of Mass Instruction
• Daniel Pink: A Whole New Mind
• Critical Evidence (a follow-up to Critical Links) from Arts Education Partnership
• CCSESA – TCAP brochure

• Guiding Principles of the Music in Education National Consortium
• Richard Burrows: “Reframing-Reforming: Arts Education: Taking Bold Steps Toward Radical Change in the Los Angeles Unified School District”
• Burrows: “No Longer Castles-in-the-Sky”
• Oakland USD: Arts Learning Anchor Initiative Developmental Rubric
• Eric Booth: Look for the Trimtabs

• Component Strands handout (2 sided)
• VAPA Framework
• CCSESA – TCAP brochure

• who ultimately is responsible/accountable for (different aspects of) arts instruction? (classroom teacher alone, teacher/specialist/artist, specialist alone)
• how to address issues of equity (school-wide, selected grade-levels, cross grade-level, etc)
• how to move forward in all four art forms? start with one arts discipline, or all?

Project Overview & Components

The Music Center’s Institute for Educators is our signature initiative to support the professional development of teachers and build their capacity to integrate the arts in their curriculum. In recent years, we have served school teams during the Institute, as opposed to individual teachers from many different schools. Further, we have required that the principal be a member of the school team and be an active participant in the Institute. Two cohorts of schools have participated in this effort. One group has been funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The other schools are part of a project funded by the Rose Hills Foundation.

Our work with these schools in the Institute for Educators has focused on the in-depth study of a single great work of art or “anchor work.” The projects have several different goals:

1. to transform their practice and increase their arts discipline content knowledge and skills,
2. to develop integrated curriculum units based on a Music Center Institute anchor work model,
3. to partner with a Music Center artist in a range of collaborative styles based on teachers’ self-selected readiness and professional development goals,
4. to facilitate student learning in the arts.

For this project the principals were expected to provide support their teachers; engage in reflection and assessment of their own personal learning; and consider the implications for student learning outcomes. Principals attend the summer Institute training with their teacher teams each year which encourages a more intensive bonding and community-building relationship with their teams.

In light of our earlier comments about principal leadership and learning, we realized the principals need to do more than just become aware of the specific instructional practices developed by their teachers. Principals also need help to see the bigger picture, to understand the elements of quality arts education, and to consider strategies for school-wide change.

In the NEA project, our professional development for principals began in the summer of 2005 with 9 hours special leadership training within the 30-hour Institute. These sessions focused on orientation of principals to the project, its goals and commitments, timeline of events and deadlines, and expected support for teachers and Music Center artist partnerships. This is the bread and butter of operational leadership.

In 2006, the Music Center partnered with the UCLA School Management Program (SMP) to develop and lead the Institute Administrators’ Strand. There were 6 break-out sessions with the principals, for a total of 11 hours, over 4 days to address the following goals:

1) Foster a school community where professionals, students and families participate together in standards-based arts experiences that deepen standards-based learning across the curriculum;

2) Create the professional learning community that uses protocols and other processes to link professional learning with curriculum development and assessment of learning results;

3) Establish a cycle of inquiry that frames learning for students, professionals and families; and,

4) Build the school culture where all stakeholders have a role in student learning and achievement.

These sessions were intended to help the principals think more deeply about opportunities for transformational leadership.

In the 2007-08 school year the principals are also hosting their colleagues for quarterly meetings at their schools to discuss progress, problems and update plans throughout the year. Meeting agendas are focused on an “arc” throughout the 4 sessions:

• Focus on the Teacher and Artist Planning Process
• How does this work align with other arts education instruction? With vision for school-wide implementation?
• What are the next steps for highest priority needs and for Music Center partner resources and support?

What we are learning and reflecting on:

• consider repeating an anchor work unit and mining it for more depth in successive Institutes
• provide an opportunity for learning about the educational foundations of the anchor work strategy, arts learning model and lesson planning template
• built on the Harvard’s Teaching for Understanding and Wiggins’ and McTighe’s Understanding by Design work
• clarify goals for principals and teachers within a 3-year continuum related to teacher-artist partnerships, lead teacher development, and grade-level and/or school-wide implementation strategies
• develop stronger ongoing principal leadership strand to include engagement of principals and teachers and others in aligning the anchor work strategy and Music Center partnership with district and school instructional, curriculum and assessment vision and goals
• provide additional artist training related to partnership skills, broadening artists’ capacity to teach or facilitate teachers’ practice of core arts content as differentiated from sharing a specific style or genre of an art form (i.e., African music vs. standards-based music content and skills)
• provide additional training and support for teachers and artists to get smarter about documenting evidence of student learning