Fact Sheet

Arts Excel - A School Partnership Program
The goal of Arts Excel is to use music and the arts as critical tools to bring about fundamental, sustainable and replicable changes in the learning environment for Kindergarten through twelfth grade students. Not a music education program, Arts Excel uses music and the arts to teach core curricular subjects including language arts, math, science and social studies.

• Arts Excel is a partnership between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and 10 schools. The original schools were selected in Spring 1995 through a competitive application process: 4 public city, 2 public county, and 1 private Catholic school; since the end of the pilot program, additional schools have joined the roster.
• The BSO created Arts Excel under the guidance of Mitchell Korn, President of Artsvision, the top arts education consulting firm in the country. Of the many arts education programs Mr. Korn has designed, Arts Excel is the most comprehensive and ambitious in scope.
• The pilot period of this project began in 1995/96. Arts Excel began implementation in the Kindergarten, First, Sixth, and Ninth Grades during the 1996-97 school year. By adding one grade to the elementary, middle, and high school levels each year, a full K-12 curriculum sequence was in place in 2000/2001.
• Arts Excel's most unique feature is its co-developed curriculum. Through an extensive curriculum planning process, teachers worked side by side with Artsvision consultants, Arts Excel artists and BSO staff to produce an arts-integrated curriculum that directly responds to the classroom needs of the participating schools.
• As part of the curriculum, Arts Excel musicians interact regularly with students and teachers to deepen the connections between the arts and other subject areas.
• Discovery Boxes, hands-on classroom resource boxes, are designed for each grade. Contents directly relate to lessons and typically include music recordings, videos, world musical instruments, percussion kits, games, teaching aids, and books.
• As culminating events to their classwork, Arts Excel students attend BSO Education Concerts regularly throughout the school year. These age-appropriate concerts bring to life core curricular concepts.
• Extensive staff development and training of teachers and artists is a critical component of Arts Excel. Summer 2001 marked the beginning of a new partnership with the Towson University Arts Integration Institute. Instructors from the Institute conducted weeklong workshops at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall for Arts Excel classroom teachers to provide them with new techniques for integrating the arts into their classrooms.
• Arts Excel was created to be a replicable model for arts partnerships and will be carefully documented at each developmental phase. Vigorous program assessment of the pilot period was conducted by the renowned Center for Arts Education Research, Teachers College, Columbia University. The post-pilot program is being assessed by independent assessors.
  

Questions? Please contact Sarah Angerer, Arts Excel Manager at (410) 783-8169 or at sangerer@baltimoresymphony.org.

- back to top -