High Meadow Arts and High Meadow School are devoting this planning year to changing the way the arts are used in classrooms to provide multifaceted, interdisciplinary learning experiences for children with varied learning styles and differences.

Updating the Arts Across the Grades will serve the entire school: 123 students and 20 teachers in grades Pre-K - 8, providing 20 teaching-artist contact sessions with 2-3 art forms. Units in each classroom employ visual arts, theatre, music, video and dance that will explode curricular themes and content and deepen comprehension and mastery.

Teaching artists will meet weekly with teachers to plan, implement, and evaluate this program, and use this momentum to find new ways of making integrated arts programs happen in the future. Since the school culture operates according to consensus, the Steering Committee is comprised of every participating teaching artist and faculty member at the school. Teaching artists and school teachers attend planning retreats each year and hold weekly planning meetings to build their curriculum.

To assess these meetings/retreats, there are:

• Feedback sessions after retreats to evaluate the effectiveness of planning,
• An interim reflection meeting to discuss what's working and what isn't, and
• A year-end reflection meeting and survey to evaluate the overall project.