Professional Development Opportunities for K-12 Teachers

We are so pleased to be in our fifth year of partnership with Springfield Public Schools and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on our Partners in Education program, a professional development program for K-12 teachers.

Each year, Partners in Education has offered 2-4 activities for which teachers can earn credit hours toward their re-certification.  These professional development activities focus on integrating the arts (music, visual art, dance, and drama) with other curriculum areas.  The Kennedy Center describes arts integration in the following way:

Arts Integration is an approach to teaching

in which students construct and demonstrate understanding

through an art form.

Students engage in a creative process

which connects an art form and another subject area

and meets evolving objectives in both.  

Though we work directly with Springfield Public Schools to plan these professional development events, teachers from other districts are welcome and encouraged to attend.

This spring, we are working to make effective use of the school district’s new early dismissal policy by offering a series of one-hour sessions that can be attended by teachers remotely.  Teachers from Springfield Public Schools will gather in one location to participate.  Teachers from other schools are invited to attend with them if possible, although additional remote sites will most likely be acceptable as well.  To participate, teachers must connect to the workshop online IN REAL TIME.  After registering, you will be sent detailed instructions for how to join the sessions.

To receive the full content, you must attend all four sessions, 2:45-3:45 PM each day.
• March 4
• March 11
• March 18
• April 15

Cost: $15 per person, or $10 per person if two or more teachers from the same school register
4 credit hours

READING PORTRAITS AS BIOGRAPHIES: OBSERVE. INFER. INQUIRE.
There’s more to a portrait than you might think. Portraits are often viewed as a mere depiction of a person when in actuality they can be read as biographies that communicate significant information about a person’s life. Join Melanie Rick, arts integration consultant and certified reading specialist, for this workshop that examines ways to teach students to view portraits as a visual text filled with meaningful symbolism in order to make the study of people and biographies more engaging. Reading portraits helps students activate and build background knowledge of, construct understanding of, and reflect on historical and literary figures across the curriculum.

For teachers of grades 1-5; teams of teachers are encouraged, especially visual art specialists combined with classroom teachers from their building.

Workshop Leader: Melanie Rick, a National Board Certified Teacher, certified Reading Specialist and arts integration consultant, designs and leads workshops, in-depth courses, and summer institutes focused on arts integration, specifically how to integrate visual art and poetry throughout the K-8 curriculum. She works in museums, schools, and arts centers across the country and is a course leader and coach for the Kennedy Center’s Changing Education Through the Arts (CETA) program in Washington, D.C. Melanie served as the CETA program as consultant, working with teaching artists to develop and evaluate workshops presented at the Kennedy Center, and was an elementary classroom teacher, middle school special ed teacher, and arts integration resource teacher before becoming a national consultant with Focus 5, Inc.

To register for this session, please call the Ticket Office at 217.206.6160 or email Carly Shank at carmi1@uis.edu.  We are happy to answer your questions about this opportunity!