SMARTS Professional Development Videos
These professional developments are provided to SMARTS teachers for training and coaching. Click a topic to view the recording of a professional development provided by SMARTS Staff.
Zoom Teaching 101
Learn the Virtual SMARTS guidelines for Zoom instruction, discover online teaching strategies, explore technology resources, and get tips and tricks for creating a successful online classroom.
Intro to Arts Integration
Learn what the arts integration is, why it is a beneficial teaching approach for underachieving learners, and see what arts and content area education could become in schools today.
Intro to Trauma Informed Care and Resiliency
Learn the medical research behind traumatic experiences in childhood impacting health and our role working with students as artists who may have experienced trauma. Learn how artists help students develop resiliency skills.
Skill-Based Teaching
Learn how to interpret skills inherent in state standards, target different types of skills, scaffold skills in your lessons, and assess skills. Also, get an overview of the entire teaching process from lesson planning to reflecting.
Arts Integration Step 2
View an example of a visual art and geometry arts integrated lesson and learn the planning process for an arts integrated lesson plan and how it is different from a traditional lesson plan.
SMARTS Beats and Empowers SPED
Learn communication strategies for students with special needs, how to collaborate with special education (SPED) partner teachers, and expectations/ideas for supporting them to teach the arts when we are not there.
Cooperative Learning and State Standards, Part 1
Learn cooperative learning strategies to put groups of students in charge of their learning in a student-centered approach while analyzing and interpreting state standards.
Assessment and Classroom Management
Introduction to new SMARTS Teacher Handbook 2022, best practices for assessment in arts education, and a revisit on classroom managment strategies and approaches.
Classroom Management
Learn how to create classroom expectations, student accountability, classroom routines, and use approaches to address or redirect misbehavior in ways that build and honor teacher-student relationships
Arts Integration Step 3
View practical examples of ways to incorporate arts integration into your classroom at SMARTS through these fun, adaptable, and interactive learning activities. Generate ideas for your discipline.
SMARTS Education Philosophy
View our first teacher discussion of the SMARTS Education Philosophy and consider how to embody the SMARTS approach to arts education in your classroom and how to teach your students to become artists.
Cooperative Learning and State Standards, Part 2
Learn cooperative learning strategies to put groups of students in charge of their learning in a student-centered approach while analyzing and interpreting state standards.
Intro to Whole Brain Teaching
Learn the Whole Brain Approach definition and philosophy, watch practical examples, and discover how WBT improves classroom management and increases student engagement.
SMARTS Premier Program Training
These professional developments are provided to SMARTS teachers for training purposes for our four premier programs - Arts Integration, Beats and Empowers, Early SMARTS, and Arts in Non-Arts Spaces. Click a topic to view the recording of a SMARTS teacher teaching in one of these programs provided by SMARTS Staff.
Arts Integration
Arts Integration is the process of teaching a project-based lesson through a creative process where state standards and learning objectives in both the arts discipline and a core subject are met simultaneously. This in an approach to teaching that is heralded by the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington D.C. Arts Integration teaches the ‘whole child’ by helping students combat learning loss, increase long-term retention of knowledge, and give alternative and underachieving learners core content instruction through a creative process in ways that match their learning styles.
Beats
SMARTS Beats is a percussion-based learning program for PK-12 (and up to the age of 21) students with developmental and behavioral challenges. SMARTS Beats uses hand drums and other percussion instruments to engage students in lessons that emphasize social emotional learning, fine motor development, and arts integration approaches. Originally developed as a pilot project in 2011, SMARTS Beats centers on four goals:
1. Promote academic learning through unconventional/alternative techniques.
2. Increase musical knowledge, understanding, and appreciation.
3. Foster a sense of teamwork and community.
4. Develop students’ sense of pride, confidence and satisfaction.
Empowers
SMARTS Empowers extends the learning of SMARTS Beats to additional arts disciplines - visual art, dance, and theater - and was piloted in 2019. SMARTS Empowers integrates arts education into students’ daily classroom activities, emphasizing social emotional learning, fine motor development, and arts integration approaches. Students in this program improve with foundational SEL skills such as left and right coordination, following directions, mirroring and imitating patterns, decision-making, and communication. The goal of this program is to empower students through art forms and connect their classroom learning to these positive experiences. SMARTS Empowers:
- Promotes academic learning through unconventional/alternative techniques.
- Increases knowledge, understanding, and appreciation in visual arts, music, dance, theater, and creative writing.
- Fosters a sense of teamwork and community.
Early SMARTS
The SMARTS teachers will teach daily during the designated ‘SMARTS lesson time,’ following prepared SMARTS curriculum designed specifically for PK students. SMARTS has developed its own 7 early arts skills to help children gain skills necessary to be creative thinkers and problem-solvers by age 5 and to pursue any arts discipline. These skills are: 1) color knowledge; 2) fine motor practice; 3) rhythm sense; 4) curiosity, exploration, and patience; 5) courage and confidence; 6) creative play; and 7) arts experiences. Early SMARTS incorporates research and best practices from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University and Reggio Emilia educational philosophy to offer an experience in the arts that allows early childhood students to create art by playing with art.
Arts in Non-Arts Spaces
Discover an artist at work in a place you wouldn’t expect! In this program, SMARTS Teachers will come to your school or organization as an artist and will demonstrate their art live in a place students wouldn’t expect. The purpose of this program is to expose students to careers in the arts, see an artist at work live, have an opportunity to ask them questions about their art, and to apply for SMARTS free public classes by visiting www.smartsartschool.org/classes. During the demonstration, the teacher may be visited by classrooms of students and teachers, administrators, students passing by in the hallway, or eating lunch. This is a demonstration of art making, this is not a performance.