Goals and Objectives
The goal was to focus on specific strategies to create continuity between classes and students throughout the whole school. My work with FAIR built upon a previous collaboration with a Seattle elementary school building a whole school collaboration built on communication, consistent vision, and commonalities with methods.

Challenges
As a public arts middle school there were a wide range of disciplines within the arts, math, language arts, science, social science, and physical education to support student learning and cultural understanding.

Action
Pedagogical Strategies
The sessions worked with specific strategies that could be used across disciplines and grade levels. Strategies included Thinking Maps, Idea Books, and Structured Inquiry. In between whole group sessions, the regular school site visits included workshops with smaller groups focused on the specific strategies, demonstration lessons in the classrooms, sharing resources of implementing strategies, and clarifying concepts. The whole FAIR staff was involved with the initial workshops and other sessions during the three years consulting.

Techniques
The staff regularly did community building exercises at staff meetings. We collaborated on bringing this same focus into the classrooms. I led many demonstration lessons and various staff members also adopted the role. At the briefing prior to the demonstration lessons we visually mapped our lesson agenda including techniques to involve the whole class. These techniques – briefing and follow through - were then discussed at the debriefings.

Outcomes
Results
The strength of the school is the wide range of interesting backgrounds of the staff, and harnessing their excellent perspectives and implementations of strategies that connected with the students between different classes and disciplines.

Continuing Results
A staff member became a Trainer of Trainers to continue and expand Thinking Maps use in the school.

New Ideas
The wide range of art and core disciplines working together to improve their pedagogy created many new ideas to explore and implement. The staff collaboration at the sessions supported a deeper understanding between the various disciplines and how to support each other.

Client Information
Fair Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School (FAIR)
www.wmep.k12.mn.us/fair/

West Metro Education Program (WMEP)
www.wmep.k12.mn.us

Download Case Study
Download the Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School (FAIR) Case Study as an Acrobat PDF file.

More Case Studies
Case Studies available online, and as a downloadable Acrobat PDF files include:

• Youth Development Collaborative for staff from over 15 community-based, youth-serving organizations in the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia
• National Urban Alliance leadership visioning session with the key management team
• Fine Arts Interdisciplinary Resource School whole school change and common understandings of curriculum in a public arts school serving a large metropolitan area
• Designs for Thinking Tools exploration DVD to assist understanding and implementation of Thinking Maps
• Bryant Elementary School, Seattle Public Schools whole school change focused on creating collaboration with a staff built on communication, consistent vision, and commonalities with methods
• Cal Arts to improve overall in-class experience for teachers and students during presentations and critiques.
  
• Development of Case Studies with Thinking Foundation to provide examples of funded participatory research that shares exemplary examples of innovative and successful schools. Go to the Thinking Foundation website Case Studies section.
• Description of Case Studies format

website details
updated 17 February 2007