The First Leadership Lab for the Field of Teaching Artistry, 2016-2019
Part of the Teaching Artist Development Labs at Lincoln Center Education
By Eric Booth, September 2021
The Leadership Lab, developed within Lincoln Center Education (LCE), was the culminating stage of LCE’s Teaching Artist Development Labs. As a result of changing circumstances, the Labs have been closed. This essay attends to its legacy. The Leadership Lab was first of its kind in the field of teaching artistry and was remarkably successful according to its participants. So, this essay hopes to report what it was and what was learned along the way—in hopes this success can inform and support a next incarnation. For me personally, it was the culmination of a career in “training” teaching artists, containing what I had learned in four-plus decades, and allowing for bold experimentation that broke new ground. We hope there may be future leadership labs for the global field of artists who work in schools and communities, and that this first experiment proves useful to the design of those.
The Teaching Artist Development Labs were launched at Lincoln Center Education in 2013. I brought the vision to LCE leadership and was soon joined by Jean Taylor in founding and leading their development. We engaged a strong core faculty of lead teaching artists (Richard Mannoia, Barbara Ellman, Judith Bose, and later adding Salla Saarikangas and LaTonya Borsay) who took charge of the different Labs. The Labs evolved every year to become a four-stage developmental sequence of two-week intensives at Lincoln Center in July. New and beginning TAs took Fundamentals, those with 2-5 years of experience took Developing Your Practice, which led to Developing Your Practice II, and then career-committed TAs with many years of experience were eligible for the Leadership Lab. I designed and led the Leadership Lab (LL), first offered in 2016 with help and co-teaching and co-leadership from Jean Taylor. The LL (and all the Labs) included visiting teachers doing targeted workshops, so that LL participants weren’t faced with two weeks of long days just working with me. Jean Taylor came to be the leader of the overall LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs, managing the growth and implementation of the two week summer intensive at Lincoln Center. She faced and overcame many challenges in a demonstration of leadership that inspired not only me but all who participated.
In this essay, I will describe the theoretical basis upon which the LL was designed; then I’ll detail its particular features and offer some of the lessons learned and implications for future leadership development programs. The essay includes some appendixes to provide details that may be useful to any who are particularly interested.
The reader may note an undertone of enthusiasm rather than objectivity; this is unavoidable. The LL was the single most positive, high impact professional development offering I have experienced. I am proud of its ambition (and grateful to Lincoln Center Education for inviting it), and of the many distinctive features and overall cumulative effect those two weeks of long intensive days had on the roughly one hundred teaching artists who joined the LL. It wasn’t “life-changing” for every participant, but our informal surveying of response had about 75% describe it that way.
The Labs were closed by Lincoln Center before their July 2020 season, as part of a restructuring led by Lincoln Center, Inc. The decision was made before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, but the pandemic would have forced changes anyway. I am sad to report that there has been no other collection and sharing of documentation that survives the brief life of the Labs, and apart from the experiences of those involved carry inside them, they have disappeared without a trace. This essay is my effort to retain some part of the Leadership Lab for posterity, since it was, in my experience, the single most advanced training intensive in the history of teaching artistry.\
FOUNDATIONS
The form of the Leadership Lab had to embody its content—this was a founding commitment. I have heard other programs claim a similar commitment, but find the aspiration adhered to inconsistently or casually. (In my view, this is a persistent weakness in teaching artist training—training that does not rigorously walk its talk.) Fierce adherence to this commitment led to the unusual forms of the Leadership Lab that you will read about below.
Leadership in teaching artistry is not the same as leadership in other fields, and so the tried-and-true approaches of leadership development had to be re-considered from the ground up. There had been no leadership development program in the field of teaching artistry before. Leadership development in arts administration and other fields are informed by different priorities—perfectly good priorities for those fields, but not for this field. The entire two weeks of activities in the LL were experiments in professional development design and facilitation to discover ways:
- to rigorously embody optimum teaching artist practice in LL instruction;
- to carefully target what teaching artists need to learn to be more powerful within the peculiarly configured professional field that teaching artistry is;
- to connect with a disparate group of LL participants who brought a wide range of experience, with different art forms and artistic practice (some were not even practicing teaching artists at the time they took the Lab, and about 20% of participants came from other countries, where the field is configured differently);
- to teach to the leading edge of the field, so that these leaders might become field-changers.
We assessed the effectiveness of each experiment with the participants throughout the Lab, modeling the Leadership practice of transparent self-assessment.
Teaching artists are sometimes accused of being “fluffy.” Sometimes they are—relying on the liveliness of their arts activities and the excitement of creative engagement, rather than rigorously experimenting with the most effective way to target specific results. This applies in professional development too. Teaching artists’ belief that the power of creative engagement is so strong it can obscure objective thinking about the most effective ways to achieve learning goals—as in, “just do something creative aimed in the general direction.” That is good enough for most teaching artist work, but it is not good enough for leaders.
For example, in professional development the question must be asked, “Isn’t it more effective to just teach ten tools for guiding reflection than to take so much time creatively exploring, for example, what reflection is and how it can be shaped to accomplish through creative activities?” In the LL, we took on such challenges, choosing to delve rather than tell for all key topics. Modeling a “teaching artist’s approach” to all learning, we inquired into all our focal areas, and we evaluated the impact with the group, asking if there might have been another more effective way to teach that particular content.
No other leadership development program I have ever seen has taken on this challenge. Nor have I seen any kind of intensive leadership development training use the tools of teaching artistry with such commitment. Our discovery was that these tools can be powerful ways to teach a wide variety of content, and that fully walking our talk catalyzed leadership capacity. When you rub off the fluff, teaching artistry is more powerful than we let ourselves imagine.
In its last two years, a letter like this was the welcome letter sent to LL participants after they registered but before they arrived:
LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs believe that teaching artistry is an expansion of one's artistry, not a separate set of skills. The Leadership Lab believes that leadership is a further expansion of ones artistry: Leadership in teaching artistry is motivating and maximizing the actions of others, informed by their artistry, to achieve a common goal. That means you don’t just activate and deploy your own artistry (what artist’s do), nor that you activate the artistry of others and guide it to accomplish a range of goals (what teaching artists do), but that you activate the artistry of others and guide it toward the benefit and growth of the field of teaching artistry and other professional fields (what leaders in teaching artistry do).
This includes developing useful new knowledge for the field, launching new work into the field, building an ambitious and intentional plan for one’s own ongoing professional development in practice and leadership, stimulating the advancement of every partnership project one participates in, and radiating ones authenticity through practice that embodies your values.
Many teaching artists demonstrate leadership in their work. The Leadership Lab focuses on those leadership capacities, seeking to clarify, strengthen and expand them in the areas of participants’ practice and beyond, especially in advancing the field of teaching artistry. Leadership in teaching artistry relies on the Fundamentals of Teaching Artistry and can appear in any of the Purpose Threads for which TAs are hired or beyond them. (You have received a preparatory assignment that introduces both these documents that are part of the foundations of all the LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs.) Because a two-week experience, however intense it may be, cannot adequately address the range of issues that leaders encounter, we will prioritize ways to think and function as a leader, the habits of mind, that can be brought to the many challenges and opportunities leaders encounter.
The Leadership Lab makes every attempt to embody its beliefs, to walk its talk. The Lab’s design applies several theories. Leadership is developed:
- by deepening the understanding of the Fundamentals of the field and developing a habit of mind to continually delve deeper into them. Most teaching artist’s careers are freelance and respond to opportunity, finding their ways across different endeavors and partnerships. We develop our careers better horizontally, if we are inquiring into new understandings vertically at the same time;
- through careful assessment of ones own teaching and leadership practices, and in devising and implementing plans for continual improvement;
- with awareness of and re-commitment to ones personal philosophy of art, artistry and ethics to intensify ones authenticity;
- in devising and delivering projects that bring new things you care about into the world.
We invest in each of these endeavors every day of the Lab, building momentum, using multiple modalities (as strong teaching artist practice always does), and inviting each participant to design a focal leadership project that pulls discoveries and plans together. Please note, as we have reminded you before, that the LL will not focus on developing your teaching artist practice—that is the purpose of the other LCE TA Development Labs. However, we find that leadership work does enrich your practice as a reliable side benefit.
The instructional modalities will include a self-directed small group inquiry process, designed to practice co-creating and sharing new knowledge for the field of teaching artistry. This work will culminate in sharing this learning with Lab colleagues, and in teaching it to another Lab. (Teaching something is one of the best ways to clarify and strengthen ones learning.) The Lab will also include direct investigation of several essential areas of extended practice teaching artistry in stand-alone workshops.
Each day, Leadership Lab participants will engage in artmaking, deep individual reflection, group reflection on process, small group exploratory work, collegial discussion, project planning, and connection-making alignment between Fundamentals, personal philosophy, professional practice and leadership.
The overall goal of the Leadership Lab is to reconnect you with under-examined essentials and inchoate knowledge, to foster new understandings and habits of mind that activate them intentionally toward ongoing improvement as a practitioner and courageous leader. Each participant will leave with a plans for their own development and for a new project they are passionate to bring into the world.
Foundations of leadership in teaching artistry.
The Teaching Artist Development Labs were committed to the six Fundamentals of Teaching Artistry as a solid foundation of the entire field. (See Appendix 1. This is a document I wrote prior to the birth of the Labs, which was refined a little by input during the years of the Labs.) We believed that developing ones practice as a teaching artist and as a leader in the field requires consistent reinvestigating and deepening of ones understandings of these six fundamentals. We also believed that Leadership in teaching artistry is a natural extension of mature practice, and so we view Leadership through the six-faceted prism of the Fundamentals. Here they are, revised from the foundation document in Appendix 1 to focus them through the lens of being a teaching artist Leader:
Activating artistry.
The number one goal of a teaching artist to activate the artistry of others, and to guide that universal force into engagements that produce positive outcomes. The TA Leader is a servant leader whose success is determined by the creative accomplishment of others. The good TA practitioner embraces this truth with learners in various settings, and the TA Leader embraces this truth for colleagues in the arts and beyond. Thus, a TA Leader is an advanced practitioner in professional settings. A TA Leader has expanded her artist-catalyst skills to succeed in a wider range of settings.
Adeptness with creative processes.
Teaching artists expand their artistry to become adept at illuminating and guiding others in creative processes. A TA Leader stays grounded in the power of process and is skilled at extending and guiding it (even with product-minded participants) toward more powerful final accomplishments in learning and in creating things. The TA Leader can engage and guide groups through formative journeys without predetermined outcomes, supporting their engagement during ambiguous stages. The TA Leader seeks pleasure and joy throughout the process.
Creating safe-and-charged environments for engagement.
Teaching artists skillfully, and often quickly, create conducive learning environments for and with a wide variety of learners and settings. The TA Leader creates a context for change. She can dislodge established preconceptions, expectations and norms to awaken fresh perception, new thinking, respectful personal exchange, and meaningful innovation. She always prioritizes inclusive practices that respect and encourage all present and that create inherently-interesting and relevant invitations for engagement. She instills habits of observation before opinion and interpretation, and constructive practices for feedback and evaluation.
Deftness with inquiry processes.
Teaching artists use creative engagement as an inquiry process. The TA Leader is an exemplary learner, inherently a co-learner, in the kinds of experimentation and discovery he offers to others. He is skilled at questioning, considering multiple perspectives, wondering, trying out, evaluating and revising, self-assessing and reflecting. While employing deductive and inductive reasoning where appropriate, the TA Leader champions and uses the effectiveness of “the aesthetic method” as a way of discovery significant truth and useful impact. Inquiry is the opposite of aggression; and that informs the quality of the work environment.
Authenticity.
A core truth of teaching artistry is that it is an expansion of artistry and that embodying her artist-self in all her choices and actions is her most powerful tool. (Sometimes called by my term: The Law of 80%—80% of what you teach is who you are.) Thus, a TA Leader must embody artistry in all her actions.
As an artist:
The TA Leader must be an active artist, making things she cares about as a consistent part of her life, and must think like, pay attention like, and function like an artist as she works with participants, including times when those participants are other teaching artists. She must trust the Law of 80% as she seeks an artist-to-artist relationship with those she leads and rely upon spontaneous experimentation and improvisation.
As a learner:
A TA Leader prioritizes a particular kind of exploratory learning, which is akin to many schools of pedagogy such as expeditionary learning, project-based learning, discovery learning, artful learning, aesthetic education, etc. The TA Leader is an exemplary learner, inherently a co-learner, in all he does, including in his regular self-assessment and transparent sharing of the discovery process.
Imagining meaningful new worlds.
Teaching artistry always inclines toward “the more,” with a relentless urge to reach beyond the literal, beyond the “good enough,” beyond right answers, standard solutions, existing opinions and judgments, to seeing the world as if it could be otherwise, and to bringing that new world into being. A TA Leader models intrinsic motivation toward the most rewarding, most successful, highest quality outcomes possible for participants. He hungers to fulfill high standards and makes those standards understandable. The Leader abides in the joy of creating and making the world a better place.
Key Features of the Leadership Lab
The Leadership Lab was committed to rigorously walking its talk. Participants were encouraged to question every aspect, and to raise questions and challenges when they were uncertain. The Lab evolved every year; this ongoing experimentation was in keeping with its commitment to the discovery nature of teaching artistry. Although the curriculum varied in any given year, these elements were consistent and invested in every year:
Personal philosophy. Most TAs have a general sense of what they believe; TA Leaders must have a clear, articulable philosophical foundation to ground their work. The Leadership Lab surfaced and distilled the participants’ inchoate philosophy to clarify and strengthen recommitment to its core tenets, and the Lab connected personal philosophy to the moves teaching artists make in their teaching moments and larger-scale ongoing professional actions. This provided guidance for the individual to make stronger choices and serve as a more resonant example to others. (See Appendix 4 for specific activities in the Personal Philosophy sequence. Jean Taylor devised the initial design of this sequence, and I continued its development when Jean’s other Lab commitments made it hard for her to dedicate enough time to the LL. She continued her development of the Clown Leadership work.)
Learning groups. In small groups, Leadership Lab participants spent over ten hours delving into a specific fundamental question or a relevant challenge in our field. The goal was to surface what they know, and then apply it to creating new knowledge that is shared with colleagues in workshops at the end of the second week. To support this inquiry, each small group had a “coach” with whom they Skyped for an hour, two times. The coaches were prominent people in our field, such as Liz Lerman, Steve Seidel, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Ashley Hare, Tina LaPadula, Roberto Bedoya, Lara Davis and Judith Bose. The small group challenges changed every year. Several years we had each group investigate one of the Fundamentals to develop new understandings about it that could be taught to less-experienced TAs in another Lab. In its last year, the LL had small groups design the Lewis Prize Institute—giving them all the specific realities and goals of this new and unprecedented real-world social-change-through-music program, having them design a teaching artists’ answer to how the institute should run. We had Dan Lewis (Founder of the Lewis Prize) and Dalouge Smith (CEO of The Lewis Prize) attend the final small group presentations.
Self-assessment. Teaching Artist Leaders know their strengths and weaknesses as practitioners and as leaders, and they plan specific ways they can improve in each. The Lab provided tools and processes for the deepest self-assessment participants had ever undertaken. The Development Guide for Excellence in Teaching Artist Practice (see Appendix 3), one of the three foundation documents of the LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs, was used as a springboard for their professional practice assessment. While we recognized the limitations of this document, and continued to evolve it, it proved useful as a stable, objective, widely-vetted articulation of quality in many areas of practice. We had well-intentioned plans to take this document to the next level, but never got to do it. (Would others like to take on this project?)
Personal Learning Plan. TA Leaders must be exemplary professional learners. The Lab provided the opportunity and guidance for each participant to lay out a Personal Learning Plan, aligned with their personal philosophy and clear self-assessment. The Plan included short- and longer-term growth plans, including a very short-term next steps plan, to take the day after the Lab ended.
Changing the Field. Entrepreneurialism is a natural expansion of the artist’s innate drive to make things she cares about. Leaders want to make things they care about in the fields of arts and teaching artistry. TA Leaders in the LL were challenged to envision and sketch out something new they were passionate to bring into the field of teaching artistry, sparked or intensified by something they experienced during the Lab. To strengthen the intent, we provided a “pitch session” on the last day when each Leader delivered a prepared three-minute introduction to this new “something” she intended to create, delivered to an audience gathered to hear the ideas. The proposals ranged widely, as did the styles of presentation, but they were carefully shaped and rehearsed after we studied what makes for a strong “pitch” and presentation style. Many participants claim the “pitch” process was the most powerful part of their learning in the Lab (for most it was also the most uncomfortable and resisted), with a lasting impact on their work as an advocate. We note that about 70% of those proposed change-the-field-projects actually came into being in one form or another.
Learning by teaching. Recognizing that a powerful way to learn is by teaching new material, all participants co-designed and co-lead a workshop that explored ideas they had encountered in the Lab learning. To model exemplary reflective practice, we dedicated time to the “how” of the workshop, to make sure it authentically embodied its message, and we dedicated time to assessment of the impact of the workshop. The small group study groups culminated their work by teaching their discoveries to another Lab, and then taking time for feedback from the participants about the way the learning actually landed.
Learning through arts activities. Determined to “walk its talk,” the Lab invested in arts activities in various media to expand the cognitive learning. The Lab took time to reflect on the ways in which the use of artistic engagement can be more than just creative exploration, but actually effectively target and deliver learning that would not have happened without the artistic exploration. LCE teaching artists led “aesthetic education classic” workshops, of the kind they might do with teachers or students to prepare us to see performances of works of art. Reflecting afterwards, we carefully unpacked and assessed the impact of the design and leadership choices the teaching artist had made—the ability to analyze and evaluate teaching artist practice is a leadership skill. A volunteer group of participants also designed and led their own “aesthetic education classic” workshop to prepare the Lab participants to see a performance we attended together, and we carefully analyzed their choices and the effectiveness of those choices.
Learning a new art form. We included a series of workshops on theatrical clown practice—an artform that was new to (almost all) participants, so that they could have a vivid reminder of the learning experiences of being a beginner. This series, designed and led by Jean Taylor, the co-founder of the LCE Labs, proved to be surprisingly eloquent in illuminating key issues of leadership. Partly because of the nature of the art form, which requires vulnerability, resilience and rigor, partly because it required courage for participants to engage fully, and largely because of Jean Taylor’s incomparable teaching, this six-hour sequence, with culminating performances, was particularly memorable and powerful for participants. We provided reflective opportunities to identify key aspects in the experience of learning a new art form and considered implications for teaching artist practice. I think the study of theatrical clown, the way it is taught by Jean Taylor, could be expanded to become a valuable stand-alone Lab in leadership.
Special Leadership Topics. The Lab included stand-alone 75-90 minute workshops on key topics in the field by outstanding leaders in the field, three or four of these each year. These included: Advocacy, Diversity/Equity/Inclusion in Practice, Partnering, Reflection, Professional Development of others, Group Dialogue Facilitation, and Entrepreneurialism. The assignment for these workshop leaders was: distill your many years of expertise on this topic into a workshop that contains the core elements of what a leader in this field needs to know. Given that assignment, and the breadth of the topics, some “telling” was allowed along with the experiential activities of these workshops, even though that sometimes compromised the “walk the talk” mandate of the LL. We felt and admitted to participants that the brevity of touching on such big subjects had a discomfiting inadequacy built into it, especially regarding issues of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion. We chose to include these touch points anyway, inviting a discussion with participants about the hard choices, and why we made them. If we were leading the LL after the George Floyd racial reckoning in the U.S., we would have changed the LL to build issues of racial equity and social justice into the fabric and flow of the whole Lab journey.
Culminating Art Project. Given the wealth of material generated during the Lab, it was essential to reflectively bring the parts together to find alignment and distill key messages to take away. Adhering to our principles, we did this through an art-making project rather than in discussion or other language-based reflection. I devised a visual arts challenge, with 5-6 hours of Lab time (and additional open studio time outside our working hours), that was led by a different LCE visual arts teaching artist each year. It relied on a layering challenge, with four layers to design and align. The base layer was a visual representation of the key elements of ones personal philosophy of teaching artistry. Layered over this, on a transparent acetate sheet was a representation of ones personal practice of teaching artistry, both current and intended-future; layering this over the personal philosophy base forced considerations of alignment and interrelationship. The next layer captured something of ones current and future leadership practice, forcing consideration of alignment and relationship with personal philosophy and teaching practice. The top layer captured ones entrepreneurial project, the new something they intended to bring into the world, and also forced consideration of alignment with the other layers. The Lab project culminated in a gallery walk in which teaching artists shared their work and discussed it with colleagues. Let me transparently admit that we never got this project quite right. It may be that it was just too complex an endeavor—I noticed that participants tended to simplify the challenge as they found their way into it. We knew there was something very right about the aspiration of this project, but we always missed by just a little in execution.
Teaching Artist Tools. The Lab was not focused on improving participants’ teaching artist practice, although certainly much of the work had direct and indirect application to strong practice. (The rigorous self-assessment and resulting personal learning plan about their practice invited direct consideration of strengthening their practice.) However, the field of teaching artistry does not have consistent language for its work. So I felt it was responsible to introduce the key teaching artist terms I use, many of which had been adopted by LCE, as they arose in the context of our activities. This list grew long, often to twenty key terms that we would tease out and refer back to in reflection on how they had appeared during our hands-on activities. [One year’s list is included in Appendix 5 as an example.] We dealt with these items only briefly. We would add them to the list when we had experienced them in the flow of Lab activities; in reflection on an activity, we would name the tool, briefly describe and discuss it, and then add it to the list on the wall. We would regularly make reference back to items on the tool list, to strengthen our awareness of them.
Stimulating environment. The Lab modeled the safe-and-charged environment created by all good teaching artistry. This included a variety of stimulating inputs in addition to the curriculum elements listed above, such as attending performances and reflecting on them, attending keynote speeches, spontaneous experiments, and participant-led experimental warmups and workshops, dinners and evening outings together.
One on one. Every participant had a private conversation with me that provided an opportunity to share personal and professional goals and particulars about that individual’s learning journey. This enabled increased differentiation of instruction, opportunities to side coach about specific aspects of bigger topics, to better support each learner. For example, a participant who wanted to get better at managing teams would be encouraged to take a lead role in the small learning group project planning and get feedback from me and the group.
Group working agreements. On the first morning, I led an abbreviated process of establishing the group’s working agreements. (See appendix 6.) This formal process was introduced for two reasons: 1. To establish clear commitments for the function of this two week “community,” and 2. to model a process that teaching artist leaders must know how to lead in community-based work. There was never enough time allocated to fully explore the development of group agreements, so this part of good leadership practice was stinted—this insufficiency was acknowledged and was discussed. This would not be the case if the LL were active now; time dedicated to careful examination of community agreements would be an important priority now.
Outside activities. The LL participants attended two performances during Lab days; these were works in the LCE school repertoire, both of which had a preparatory workshop in the Lab, using LCE’s aesthetic education approach. In addition, Lincoln Center Education provided tickets to LL participants to attend (not required) two evening performances together. Almost all took advantage of these tickets, and usually an informal dinner together near the venue was organized by the participants. Also, over the weekend in the middle, groups of participants tended to get together informally, frequently arranged around the idea of local TAs sharing parts of the city with out-of-towners. These occasions built comradery and a cohort feeling.
Hospitality. I wouldn’t call this a critical feature, but it was genuinely appreciated, that Lincoln Center Education provided a welcome reception with snacks, daily breakfast snacks, and a closing reception for each Lab. Participants felt appreciated, and welcomed the time to talk informally, deepening connections.
Lessons learned
Overall. While the Leadership Lab adjusted and evolved every year, the changes were tweaks more than overhauls, and the initial theory and design priorities proved to be effective and were sustained largely intact. Certainly, the Lab features listed above were refined, and shifted in priority balance, but the only feature added along the way was the listing of teaching artist tools in the last two years.
Scope. There was a too much material introduced over the two weeks, forcing us to scrunch the additional time that most features would have benefitted from. The content would have lived just right in a three week intensive. Simply, I could not figure out what I could cut out, so I scrunched. I thought the damage of condensing was worth the benefit of including all the key material. Not all participants would agree with that. The days were long (9:00-5:00 with a 75-minute lunchtime and other breaks) and packed (homework was not assigned), and quite exhausting. Our annual after-surveys showed that participants did feel time pressure, and felt tired out by the intensity, but when asked what they could cut to create more time, there were either no answers at all no consensus on recommendations. The hard-work, no-minute-wasted ethic was intended to model leadership rigor, and there was considerable variety included in each day so that there were physical movement activities, a variety of group configurations and modes of engagement every day, to maximize attention.
Alumni. Every year we noticed a strong impulse at the end for the group to stay connected. LCE had the policy that it could not lead ongoing connections but was willing to help if the alumni had developed an activity it could support. The intention to stay connected usually manifested in things like a Facebook group, and ongoing email connections, occasionally in planning for reunions (which did not happen other than for a few individuals). The momentum tended to last about six months for organized efforts, but the last two groups lasted longer. And the final LL group from 2019, had sustained a book club, led by one of the participants that look sustained at least a year.
We recognized a big opportunity, even a responsibility, to create Leadership Lab extensions to sustain the interest and development of graduates, and we had many ideas of things we could, should do. Our funding did not allow us to responsibly undertake such ongoing work, much to our disappointment.
Importance of foundation documents. The TA Development Labs created three foundation documents, each with a different provenance.
- The Fundamentals of Teaching Artistry. I refined some of my previous writings to shape this for the Labs, and they were tweaked a bit by colleagues over the years. This document provided the first stable set of core priorities for the entire field. They provided coherence to the investigations of the four levels of expertise in the Labs.
- Purpose Threads of the Teaching Artist Profession (longer and shorter versions). I wrote this two years before the Labs began and revised it to work as a tool for the Labs. This document provided a user-friendly map for the reasons teaching artists are hired, allowing us to align fundamental priorities with the real-world assignments they are given and might seek out professionally.
- Development Guide for Teaching Artist Practice. I provoked and initiated a laborious process that Jean Taylor and I led to create this ambitious rubric for teaching artist practice. The creation took several rounds of gathering input from many professionals in the field, and repeated rounds of polishing and adjustment. Parts of it were used and adapted in various ways. We wished to transform this useful (but somewhat unappealing) document into a more user-friendly format, and we planned to add sections and reframe others—but budget and circumstances never allowed for us to create the next generation of this good document that we intended. This document proved to be very helpful to teaching artists in their self-assessment, and many continued to use all or part of it back at their home sites.
Each document accomplished its different purpose, and each grew steadily in its own way. Their power was in their consistency, their use across all labs. Having stable, reliable, widely-vetted foundation documents was a first for the field. Jean Taylor and I longed to keep working on them to make them fit together more elegantly, but we had to admit to ways in which they didn’t quite fit and weren’t as seamless a foundation as we sought. I strongly recommend, bordering on “plead” and “insist,” that any future teaching artist development program develop and invest in stable, carefully-considered foundation documents. If our docs serve well, please use them. If not, build your own strong foundations.
Which were the most potent activities? The feedback and survey data were consistent enough to state that the most impactful activities were the clown sequence, the entrepreneurial project sequence, the small project work, and the personal philosophy sequence. The least satisfying to participants was the final visual arts reflective process; I attribute this to my not providing enough time to allow the depth of work required by such a complex assignment.
Challenges with additional faculty. We wanted to bring more teaching artists into the Leadership Lab to lead activities as visitors, to add various kinds of diversity (racial/ethnic, discipline, and style). These were mostly members of the Lincoln Center Education faculty, and the differentness of the challenges we gave them proved to be difficult. Some were asked to use their aesthetic education approaches but not teach to a work of art, rather to teach a teaching artist skill, or provoke a particular kind of learning, or to model specific good practices. All of the TAs were strong and reliable; some produced masterful workshops, but some struggled to adapt their practice to this different purpose. Across the other LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs, the main TAs were superb innovators, delivering powerful results. It is the visiting TAs who sometimes struggled to design for new purposes—a note for professional development in the field. A note to allow more time for preparation of visitors who are expected to contribute in such a specific way.
Difficulty with participants. I observed where participants struggled. Participants often took a bold risk to step up and lead a warmup or design and lead an activity. It must have been something that happened in the Lab because these experiments got steadily better over the years. A few times there was a painful situation when a participant who was masterful in talking about the work would step up to lead an activity and show glaring weaknesses. One time a participant led one of the worst activities I have ever seen. These were vivid reminders that talking about the work and doing it well are very different. This is the main reason we never pushed to offer a certification, although we had hoped to, because we couldn’t assure capability without seeing the work in real-world practice.
I learned the hard way that I could not assume that advanced teaching artists know how to work well in a small group. After one LL in which we struggled with small group process, I added a step before starting the small group projects in which we reminded all participants about strong group practices, refreshed their interest in the mechanics, and fostered their making group agreements. In two cases even this was not sufficient, and I had to intervene. I concluded that one has to dedicate real time to preparing small groups (including advanced professionals) to work well together.
Conclusion.
I hope that other professional developers will have the fortunate set of circumstances that Lincoln Center Education provided me and Jean Taylor in which to create a Leadership Lab for Teaching Artists. May the experimentation described above provide ideas and encouragement. I strongly urge future programs to commit to innovating ways of training that embody the teaching artist best practices; this commitment had the greatest influence on our design. I encourage future professional developers to use the ideas described in this essay (with proper attribution, including recognition of Lincoln Center’s sponsorship of the Labs), with our strong encouragement to build on this experiment to build the field of teaching artistry.
Appendixes:
- Fundamentals of Teaching Artistry
- The Purpose Threads of the Teaching Artist Profession
- Development Guide for Excellence in Teaching Artist Practice
- Personal Philosophy Sequence of Workshops
- Teaching Artist Tools
- Working agreements
Appendix 1
The Fundamentals of Teaching Artistry
http://ericbooth.net/the-fundamentals-of-teaching-artistry/
Appendix 2
The Purpose Threads of the Teaching Artist Profession (A New Framework for Understanding the Field of Artists Who Work in Education and Community Settings)
Appendix 3
Development Guide for Excellence in Teaching Artist Practice
http://ericbooth.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/LCE_TA_Development-Guide2018.pdf
Appendix 4
Personal Philosophy Sequence in Leadership Lab 2019
Essential question: What are the core tenets you want to place in highest priority for the next chapter of your life-and-work?—those that you want driving your artistic work and your teaching artist work? Your teaching artist work includes your practice with learners, your other non-learning-session work, and your career development. We call carry many beliefs around with us, and they inform many of the choices we make, both conscious and unconscious decisions.
Philosophy Session 1
- What quotation did you bring with you? Write and post them. What do we see? What do you notice about your engagement with those quotations? You agree with most of them; what is the task of selecting the small irreducible core set of maybe three that you place in highest priority for the development of the next chapter of your life-and-work? How does one do that? [We took time with the question of prioritization in that selection.]
- What are other philosophical tenets/core beliefs/principles that spring to mind as biggies for you?
- Let’s expand the set you may consider. Six small groups, each one gets one Fundamental. They explore it looking for philosophical tenets embedded or connected. See if the group can distill some. Write them into succinct philosophical belief statements. We post them and reflect on them.
Philosophy Session 2
Imagine you are observing a good teaching artist you know working with a specific group of learners. It is a typical situation, and the work is positive but imperfect. Jot down some of the areas of weakness you see. Not about the circumstances but about areas of the TA’s work that could be stronger.
Now imagine that same TA in the same situation but doing exemplary work, as good as the situation could possibly allow. Jot some notes about what’s different.
Looking at the disparity between those two, what philosophical principles are under-invested in in that first situation?
Can you apply that same thinking challenge to yourself?—a typical teaching situation, then imagined to be ideal but not because the circumstances change. What philosophical tenets are more fully embodied in the ideal?
Let’s do the same for you in a leadership role. Imagine a situation in which you could see yourself taking a strong leadership role. First jot some notes about how it would probably go if you stepped into public action in this role today. Then imagine and jot some notes about how you could imagine yourself being in that same role after you have been working on your leadership, practicing, studying, for a while. What’s the difference? What philosophical tenets are more fully embodied in that future imagining?
Final step of Session 2.
What are the lineages of your personal philosophy in this work? Where do your main beliefs-in-practice come from? Where do your aspirations come from, both for stronger practice and for leadership?
Who are the true ancestors of your practice, how did you learn how to do your best TA work? And then who are your leadership models, and what do you draw from them that you wish to prioritize in your own development.
Philosophy Session 3
Imagine you are teaching a professional development workshop for early-mid career TAs. The subject is how your personal philosophy informs real choices in your practice. Come up with three examples you might use with them to clarify the key idea of the workshop.
- Find a specific example of a seemingly small-sized moment while teaching a specific group that reasonably could go either of two possible ways based on the TA’s choice, but is tipped one direction by a philosophical tenet, when the opposing choice is informed by a different philosophical tenet.
- Find a specific example of a seemingly small sized moment in some part of teaching artist work, but not while actually teaching, that reasonably could go either of two possible ways based on the TA’s choice, but is tipped one direction by a philosophical tenet, when the opposing choice is informed by a different philosophical tenet.
- Find a specific example of a seemingly small sized moment of leadership in the field that reasonably could go either of two possible ways based on the TA’s choice, but is tipped one direction by a philosophical tenet, when the opposing choice is informed by a different philosophical tenet.
What can we say about the ways that our personal philosophy manifests in our actions?
If time allows, identify: A) More consequential situations of those kinds where the choice really matters and really could go different ways. B) Which philosophical tenets you want in the forefront influencing the choices you make while teaching, while fulfilling the rest of your responsibilities, while being a leader?
Final step of the philosophy sequence (maybe not that day) is distilling down to a small set 2-4 of key philosophical tenets you wish to place in highest priority for the next chapter of your work and life. Try to phrase them in succinct mottos or slogans that help you remember them.
Appendix 5
Teaching Artist Tools
As introduced in LCE Teaching Artist Development Labs, Leadership Lab:
High priority on personal relevance
Tap competence
Equitable participation
Ruthless use of fun
Enabling constraints
Warmup activities
Effective conclusion
Scaffolding
Entry point
Use of questions/quality of questions
Reflection: purposes, modalities, timing
Rituals and routines
Revision
Giving feedback: from TA, group protocols
Guiding group discussion
Engagement before information
Observation before interpretation
Group as resource/learning partners
Focus on choice making [Choice / Basis of Choice / Consequence of choice]
Ongoing development of self-assessment habits
Appendix 6
Community Agreements
Nature of the Lab
Schedule will change.
Experimentation/it’s a lab—hold our feet to the fire; join in that spirit; take risks; make mistakes
Timing—adhering to start/stop times; breaks
Schedule varies day to day
Working groups, and agreements to be made about those
Insufficient morning warmups, take responsibility on your own
Working agreements
Assume value
Active listening
Step up/step back
Speak concisely, so that all get to speak
W.A.I.T. Ask Why Am I Talking, before you speak and know the answer
Observe time commitments
Honor your lineage, respect/cite originators
Debate the point not the person
Yellow Zone (self-manage your level of risk: green is too easy, red is too risky, seek to stay in the yellow learning zone--thanks to Kirya Traber for this)
What is said stays; what is learned leaves
Complain only to those who can do something about the issue