Ideas about leadership and trust. (Teacher Talk).

Barry Shauck Instructional Facilitator for the Visual Arts The Howard County Public School System National Art Educator of the Year 2002 in the Division of Supervision and Administration

SchoolArts: What do you think is the key to successful staff development?

Barry Shauck: The key to successful staff development may lie in our ability as leaders to honor our audience of artist-teachers; to treat them as artists. Countywide staff development should be more than solely a response to administrative needs, state mandates, and generic pedagogical issues. Researchers often look at circumstances that affect instruction, yet overlook the teacher as the most important factor. The focus is on the learner, the content, the setting, and the instruction. But simply put, staff development should be fun for teachers. Doesn't it translate that if the best learning occurs for kids when teachers make the learning enjoyable, eventful, and significant, so too that program leaders would be well advised to honor those same feelings as desirable outcomes when working with teachers?

SA: How do you go about planning for staff development?

BS: When planning and offering staff development, lead teachers can show that they value the work of artists, and celebrate the qualities that are unique to who we are as artist-teachers, and the ways that we think when we create, produce, and respond. The staff development which results opens the dialog with a common vocabulary--based upon shared behaviors, modes of investigation, and thinking systems--habits of mind, or maybe better put, habits of artistic practice.

Art teachers are always looking for new ideas to develop as strategies for their students. Arts leaders are wise to use a feet-forward approach for staff development. When carefully planned with respect for programmatic needs and a look towards an event in the future to share results, such as an exhibit, teachers have a goal to work towards with their students.

Program leaders carefully consider the content and topics for the few and precious days they have to meet with their teachers. They carefully consider sources artists use to identify ideas for their own artwork. Artists inquire about ways people relate, the environment around them; they investigate who they are themselves in relation to the world around them. Traditional themes such as the landscape, figure, and portrait help art teachers "get at" the development of students' basic skills. These subjects and content are basic in the visual arts and so provide a common lexicon and starting point for leadership about practice. They give us a forum for understanding ways changes in government, technology, and society may inform the work of, and opportunities for, artists.

Staff development days structured for teachers to include seminars, keynote speeches, workshops, and breakout sessions offer opportunities to seek out experiences that serve individual professional motivation and needs. Leaders who structure these days with an end result in mind, understand that the learning and hard work that go into staff development becomes memorable when celebrated by a culminating event; an exhibition opening in which teachers, students, and consultants share their expertise.

SA: Many art programs are threatened because of the lack of administrative and community support. How can teachers be more proactive in gaining the support necessary to maintain a quality art program?

BS: There's a lot of good information out there related to what makes and sustains successful art programs. The most important document that comes to mind was published by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities and the ArtsEd Partnership, Gaining the Arts Advantage: Lessons from School Districts That Value Arts Education. That document identifies ten important qualities, among them community support and strong leadership.

What I gained from leading the NAEA Division of Supervision and Administration was a sense of the diverse nature of leaders represented in our association. It seems that a basic tenet for local school systems is to find ways to identify, hire, and support leaders with specific expertise in their area of content. As the case is made for district-wide arts education, a solid philosophical visual arts education curricular premise needs to be in place to frame art teachers' discussions within and beyond the school. National standards, state frameworks, essential learner outcomes, and local curriculum guides do teachers a service when they challenge them to construct and invent their own lessons based upon elegant problems, rather than providing a myriad of studio activities to occupy time. Teachers who are challenged by forward-thinking premises during staff development are naturally inclined to design and present similarly artful challenges for their students, to foster and further their own interests in pushing practice forward. And remembering that our center as educators remains on the child.

Art teachers can be more proactive in gaining the support necessary to maintain a quality art program by continuously examining their own pedagogical and philosophical premises for instruction. They're obligated to children to continuously ask themselves:

* Who am I teaching?

* What am I about as an art teacher?

* What can the community expect to see when they visit?

SA: Earlier you talked about the concept that learning should be memorable--fun. Does that also apply to teaching?

BS: You know, happy employees don't necessarily work harder than the unhappy ones. A little positive anxiety seems to be better for employees and programs alike, because it conveys the charge for people to do things differently. What results is vibrancy--exciting places and programs to share in and learn from. Employee happiness does weigh heavy in one area: a significant percentage of teachers who move on do so because they are unhappy with supervisors--principals or program leaders. There's an old addage, "Employees don't quit their companies, they quit their bosses." Translated for art educators, it might go something like this, "Art teachers don't quit their students, systems, or programs, they quit their principals and supervisors." Program leaders need to hold their responsibilities to their teachers as a trust. We trust them to do their best with their students; so too, we need to offer them the tools to continue to shape and understand who they are as philosophically as artists, teachers, and arts educators.