Artful LearningFor Teachers
For Teachers
You already know what your students need to learn. Artful Learning helps them understand it.
You became a teacher to help students think deeply and succeed, not simply to cover material. Artful Learning gives you a practical structure for doing that within the subjects and standards you already teach.
How It Works in Your Classroom
You design a Unit of Study around a larger Concept, often anchored to a Masterwork—a painting, a symphony, a scientific breakthrough, a story, a building. Students engage with a Significant Question; investigate content through a carefully calibrated process of inquiry, build an Original Creation; that shows what they understand, and use Deepening Questions; to reflect on what they learned and how.
You do not teach “Artful Learning” as another subject. You use Artful Learning to teach everything else: math, reading, science, history, language arts, geography, and social studies. The method gives visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile learners multiple ways into the material, and social and emotional skills are built along the way.
“It’s a method of presenting the curriculum, it’s not a separate thing that you do.”
— Teacher, Lansing, MI
Rigorous inquiry goes up, not down. Students analyze, synthesize, make judgments, solve problems, revise their thinking, and communicate what they know—through performances, presentations, journals, artistic responses, and self-assessment. These give you a new lens through which to both teach and assess your students.
The Support You’ll Receive
Artful Learning is a three-year wraparound commitment, not a one-day workshop. Each summer you attend an immersive four-day Institute led by Artful Learning Trainers, who are themselves K-12 educators trained in Artful Learning. At the Institute, you learn the model and you design your own units aligned to your curriculum. During the school year, trainers return for two on-site trainings and provide ongoing remote support, along with curriculum resources and a community of fellow practitioners.
Teachers who use Artful Learning report renewed enthusiasm for their work. They see students engage with standards at levels they didn’t expect, grow in confidence as thinkers and communicators, and become part of a school culture where intellectual rigor is the norm.
“I’ve been in public education for over thirty years — this is the best professional learning our school has ever had.”
— Principal, West Des Moines, IA
You give your students a reason to care about what they’re learning.