Challenges Of Partnership: How to Avoid Common Traps

Successful partnerships between arts education organizations and public schools face common partnership challenges. Arts education organizations need to be realistic in recognizing the extraordinary challenges public schools face. Schools and classroom teachers are under increasing pressures to meet new state and federal educational mandates. Moreover, competing demands on learning time in the school day can result in inadequate allocation of time to arts learning and can create difficulty in simply scheduling programs. Scheduling during the school day is difficult and district mandates can force changes in priorities and budgets. Schools and teachers have numerous requirements to be met regarding minutes of instruction and teacher release time.

Challenges common to any partnership effort include developing shared goals and assessments and maintaining regular communications between partners. A mutually agreed upon structure that facilitates clear communication and opportunities to continually learn, assess, and revise implementation strategies is critical for success. The work is hard. Often the daily logistics of scheduling within K–12 classrooms can alone feel insurmountable. These are challenges we all face, and challenges that we all must find ways to overcome, when doing this important work.

Models of Effective Collaborations: Components Necessary for Success

The quality of the relationship between the classroom teacher and the teaching artist or organization working together in a classroom can make a profound difference in student learning. The most important ingredients for successful arts education partnerships are a jointly-developed curriculum and ongoing, varied professional development for teaching artists and public school educators. Through collaborative work together, public school teachers and teaching artists come to understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses and trust each other to provide support and focus attention on goals. And by working together, teaching artists and classroom teachers can ensure that the curriculum, lesson plans, and assessment tools are designed for students to meet local, state, and/or national arts learning standards.

Partners in arts integration must also understand what resources and expertise each partner brings in order to determine what methods best achieve mutual investment in outcomes. Effective partnerships provide opportunities and help to ensure that all partners’ needs are being met. Amongst numerous educational reform efforts, public school partnerships need creative ways to make the necessary time available for the critical process of partnership planning and ongoing assessment. Building productive partnerships requires learning, practice, and reflection throughout the process, all of which is well worth the work in order to create spaces of new learning for students and teachers.

* Excerpts from “The Practice of Partnership: High Impact Art Education Partnership with k12 schools” National Guild for Community Arts education. 2005-2014 report.