Leonard Bernstein at 100

For District Leaders

School-wide improvement that lasts

Artful Learning, Inc. is a nonprofit organization with one purpose: to give schools a proven method for improving school-wide teaching and learning. Built on Leonard Bernstein’s conviction that we understand an idea most deeply when we see its connections to other ideas, Artful Learning trains teachers and school leaders, over three years, to teach the curriculum they already have in a way that newly engages students and raises achievement. It is not a curriculum, a software platform, or a subscription. Instead, Artful Learning provides a fresh context for addressing the required standards. When the three years of training end, the expertise continues to be embedded in the school.

If you are looking for one investment that moves the measures you answer for—student achievement, the strength and stability of your teaching force, the identity of your schools, and the return on public dollars—Artful Learning is worth your serious consideration.

• Student achievement. In a UCLA/CRESST evaluation, Artful Learning schools increased the share of students meeting or exceeding reading standards at twice the rate of their districts over three years, and outpaced their districts in mathematics. In Dallas, students in Artful Learning classrooms posted higher passing rates in every subject measured.
• Support, encourage and retain teaching talent. Teachers in Artful Learning schools report renewed satisfaction in their work. They plan together, share a common language for instruction, and build a professional community that gives teachers a strong reason to stay.
• School identity and pride. An Artful Learning school has a distinctive way of teaching that students, families, and staff can see and name. Schools report a stronger culture and sense of community, and the original works students create give the whole school something to be proud of.
• A three-year investment with a decades-long return. Training lasts three years, with no continuing fee. Afterward, the school’s own teachers carry the method forward with every new class of students. The longest-implementing Artful Learning school has taught this way for 29 years.

How Artful Learning Works: Three Years of Teacher Training

The Artful Learning method is taught through three successive years of teacher training. In each of those years, Trainers lead an immersive four-day Summer Institute, where teachers learn the model and design units aligned to their own curriculums. Then, during the school year, the Trainers return to the school for two on-site trainings, with ongoing remote support in between. Every unit follows the same four-phase sequence: Experience, Inquire, Create, Reflect. By the end of the third year, the school truly owns the practice and can continue independently, with no ongoing trainer presence and no subscription.

Artful Learning is used in some of the country’s most selective private schools. It works just as well in large public school classrooms, in classrooms that include students with special needs, and in schools with many English-language learners, because every unit gives students several ways into the material: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and hands-on.

Improving Schools Today Calls for a Systemic Approach

District leaders manage an extraordinary range of priorities: academic achievement, student engagement, curriculum implementation, teacher effectiveness, professional learning, student belonging, assessment and accountability, leadership development, workforce readiness, school culture, and innovation. Each matters. But when every priority becomes its own initiative, even excellent ideas compete for the same limited time, money, and professional energy.

Artful Learning does not add another initiative. Instead, it gives teachers one grand, interconnecting framework for teaching the entire required curriculum, so that existing priorities reinforce one another. Creativity here does not come at the expense of rigor; it is how students reach it.

One Investment, Many Mandates

Districts must meet obligations that compete for the same dollars and the same hours. Artful Learning addresses many of them through a single investment:

• Professional development. Three years of sustained, expert-led training and in-school coaching for up to 40 participants—not a one-day workshop.
• Arts education across the curriculum. The arts enter daily instruction in every core subject, not only the art or music room. A Masterwork—a painting, a symphony, a story, a building, a scientific breakthrough—anchors each unit, and students create original work to show what they have learned.
• Core standards and accountability. Teachers use the curriculum the district has already adopted and required district and state assessments stay in place. Portfolios, presentations, and student work add richer evidence of learning.
• The science of reading. Comprehension depends on background knowledge and vocabulary, not decoding alone. Each unit immerses students in a concept and its vocabulary before they read or write about it.
• Writing to learn. Students often produce a written Original Creation, using writing to clarify their understanding, not only to demonstrate it afterward.
• Social and emotional learning. Collaboration, self-expression, and reflection develop through the academic work itself. Students inquire together, create individually, present to peers, and reflect on their own learning.
• Professional Learning Communities. Once Artful Learning is the school-wide method, PLCs become far more productive. Teachers across grades and subjects plan with the same sequence and speak the same language, so they can share units, examine student work together, and spread what works from one classroom to the next.

Most important, Artful Learning is not confined to one subject, one grade, or one group of students. It reaches every core discipline, every classroom, and every grade level in the school.

Start With One School

Artful Learning does not ask a district to commit every school at once. The strongest beginning is a single school whose needs make the case: a principal who wants the work, a faculty ready to commit to three years, and a challenge worth solving—reading scores that lag, a faculty in need of renewal, or a school looking for a clearer sense of who it is.
That school becomes your evidence. Over three years, you see what Artful Learning produces in your own classrooms, with your own teachers and students, measured by your own assessments. When the results are clear, the work can expand to additional schools and, in time, across the district—supported by teachers from the first school, who can be trained to help prepare their colleagues. System-wide adoption can be where Artful Learning leads; it need not be where it starts.

What Does the Evidence Tell Us?

Among nine Artful Learning schools with sufficient achievement data, a UCLA/CRESST evaluation found three-year growth in the share of students meeting or exceeding standards of 11.5% in reading, 5.4% in English Language Arts, and 9.7% in mathematics—compared with 5.5%, 5.2%, and 5.9% for their districts, and 4.9%, 3.0%, and 5.6% for matched comparison schools.

An earlier independent evaluation in Dallas involving 1,384 students found higher passing rates for Artful Learning students in every subject measured: reading, mathematics, writing, science, and social science.

No single method guarantees a particular gain in test scores. What three decades of implementation show consistently is that sustained professional learning, teacher collaboration, strong leadership, and student engagement drive improvement. Artful Learning brings them together in one framework.

The Opportunity for District Leadership

Imagine a school where creative and critical thinking are not confined to the arts classroom and inquiry is not reserved for special projects; where professional learning changes classroom practice and teachers across disciplines share a language for deeper learning; where students are expected not only to acquire knowledge, but to build upon it to understand other things; and where the investment leaves teachers, leaders, and students more capable than when the work began. Students in such a school test better, speak and write better, and feel more empowered and connected to their school and their community. Then imagine a district that builds on that success, one school at a time.

Begin with one school. Build capacity—not dependency. Create coherence—not another initiative. And develop students who don’t simply know more but know what to do with what they know.