A Daring Adventure: Artists and teachers partner for school reform

"Life is either a daring adventure or nothing." Helen Keller's words are unavoidable at O'Maley Middle School in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They confront you every day as you exit Beth Delforge's art classroom on the second floor.

Challenging words and adventurous artwork are everywhere on the walls at O'Maley. It's an inspiring place to be. That's surprising, given the bad press American public schools are getting. To hear the politicians tell it, going to public school is like going to jail—unproductive and dangerous.

While there's no doubt that some of our schools breed despair and failure, there are public schools in America where the teachers, administrators and students are taking responsibility for the health of their academic community, expecting a lot and offering respect and partnership in return. Teachers are turned on and growing, feeling proud of what they're doing for a living. Kids are emerging with accomplishment behind them, armed for the future with confidence and initiative, asking hard questions of authority figures and listening closely for answers.

There's a school reform movement rolling across the country through all kinds of communities and economic strata, employing philosophies of teaching that are brilliant and challenging, creating school systems that are unique, flexible and above all valuable. Because much of the impetus for reform was government initiated, critics and skeptics abound. (See Educational Reform—A Quick Glance) While these reformers' ideas are controversial, their results variable and their funding in danger, some really intriguing work is going on.

"It's a raw time," says teacher Beth Delforge, "because all our weaknesses are exposed. But at the same time, it's exciting to be part of the solution."

This fertile environment can be ideal for artists who want to make a difference in their communities. There are myriad opportunities in every state for artists to get involved in an educational revolution, act in partnership with teachers, learn remarkable life lessons, recharge their muses and take away at least as much value as they contribute.

Likewise artists can be an invaluable resource for teachers committed to school reform—not just as "arts educators," i.e. teachers of visual art, music, dance, theater, writing and media, but as explorers of the uses of the arts in education. Innovators, boundary-crossers, interdisciplinary thinkers, systems experts. Colleagues.

Great opportunities already exist for artists to work in school programs being operated by arts councils and artist-run organizations—the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, for instance—and I hope to explore those programs in detail in future articles.

But in this story I would like to approach arts-in-education from the angle of educational reform. I hope to inspire artists and reform-minded teachers to investigate their possibilities for collaboration. There are treasures there, way beyond what we traditionally expect from arts residencies, beyond time off for teachers and jobs for artists. There is work to do together that can build social change.

However, even in a progressive atmosphere, creating this chemistry is not easy. Any artist in the field will tell you that even talent and years of experience can't ensure the success of a school residency if the faculty and staff aren't willing to cooperate. Many a visiting artist-in-residence has been thwarted and embarrassed by the confusion caused when administrators won't make time for the activity, teachers don't understand it or fear it, or—worse—are threatened by the presence of the artist and deliberately set out to make the project fail. Sometimes this distrust of artists is justified. Teachers spend their professional lives learning the skills involved in structuring the environment of the classroom. The more rigid the teacher, the less s/he is willing to turn the room over to anyone from the outside. If an artist's lack of teaching skills unleashes chaos, it could take the teacher a long time to restore order. (In an age when some students are armed, chaos can be dangerous.) Only a faculty and staff willing to take risks and stay flexible will even undertake a residency opportunity. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a whole school to make an arts residency work to its greatest effect.

One way to illustrate what I mean is to follow an individual artist residency in a school dedicated to education reform—a residency planned, funded and welcomed by a whole community.

This story is about a residency at O'Maley Middle School conducted by musician Philip Aaberg in November 1995. The residency was part of a year-long program called "Take a Flying Leap," designed by teachers at O'Maley along with Celeste Miller & Co. (a local dance organization) and the Gloucester Stage Company (a community theater) in an effort to make art, in all its facets, part of education and life experience for the children of Gloucester. I was privileged to spend a whole week in Gloucester with these collaborators, interviewing them and monitoring their work in the residency. Equally as educational was my trip back to Seventh Grade—a week at O'Maley.

One element that makes O'Maley such an exciting place to work is its wholehearted dedication to school reform. Its philosophy, structure and energy proceed in large part from its membership in the Coalition of Essential Schools (see below), a network of schools across the country held together by a set of commonly held principles. The Coalition concepts of simplicity, flexibility, incentives and personalization of schooling are, to some, extreme and radical. In response Coalition founder Ted Sizer says in his book Horace's Compromise:

The Coalition philosophy offers enormous challenges and rewards to teachers and staff as well as students.

"A good school," says Sizer, "is the special creation of its own faculty—its teachers, counselors and administrators. These are its 'permanent' folk. Students and their parents come and go, but a good school's core of veteran teachers and administrators make the difference. A school has character if its key faculty—its senators—feel collective responsibility for it, take its standards seriously and its style seriously, and protect its reputation. Such as commitment arises only when a faculty feels a sense of authority and control over its own school."

Placing the responsibility for the school's culture in the hands of the teachers seems to pay off. They respond to this trust with vigor. From my observation at O'Maley, which has been in the Coalition for about six years, this is hard work requiring maximum dedication, concentration, attention and, above all, flexibility. In a model of site-based management, the faculty and staff, not the Coalition or the School District, are sculpting the O'Maley environment. The teachers I interviewed seemed excited, inspired...and exhausted, but tired from fighting the good fight. (One teacher told me that, as a result of a cross-disciplinary team-taught project on The American Dream, she had become so focused on the cultural implications of migration that her family was begging her to shut up about it at the dinner table.)

O'Maley is a middle school educating 900 ten- to 14-year olds. The three grade levels (6,7 and 8) are kept completely separated on different floors, using different schedules and even coming and going by different doors, in an attempt, says Seventh Grade Team Leader James Hunt, to avoid the peer pressure that is so intense among children of different ages at the middle school level. The grades are called "schools within a school," and the teachers often refer to the whole as "the building" instead of "the school." Each grade is divided in "Houses" (Discovery, Schooner, etc.) and each house is divided into groups of 50 students team-taught by two core-subject teachers in classrooms of 25. The students also learn with "specialists" in art, music, physical education, technology and home economics. Classes are held in long and short "blocks" instead of traditional 55-minute classes. The curriculum is what teachers call "inquiry based, project oriented and real-world related."

One of the most intriguing strategies I found at O'Maley is the concept of an Essential Question of the Year for each grade. Content areas, such as language arts and social studies, are not taught as separate subjects, but integrated and focused on essential questions like "How do civilizations survive?" This focuses the students and teachers on the "why" of learning, rather than a short focus on the subject matter. Everything they undertake together is framed by The Question. This year the Eighth Grade is asking, "What is the American Dream?" The Seventh Grade is asking, "How is conflict resolved?" An Essential Question is the best tool for an artist residency because it gives the teachers, students and artists an immediate introduction to each other, a place to stand together. The residency can flow from and to the question, saving time and energy during the planning phase and providing a common language in which to speak. "The Essential Question," O'Maley's principal Sue Gee told me, "is a linking tool. It helps the artist focus on a point where he can get the most done. It's a link to the real world."

Students work in collaborative small groups and have ownership of their classrooms. Doug Zierk, who with Mike Horne teaches in the Schooner house of the Seventh Grade, feels so strongly about his class taking responsibility for their own education that he does not even have a desk in the classroom where he works. "It is their classroom, not mine," he says firmly.

While the school still gives out traditional grades, student progress is also tracked by what reformers call "alternative outcome assessments," that is, students demonstrate their mastery of a subject through project portfolios, presentations and other kinds of "exhibitions." (This is a political sore point. If elected, Republican Presidential candidate Pat Buchanan swears to outlaw "outcome-based" evaluations. In interviewing at O'Maley I found that teachers regret still being tied to an A-B-C grading system, but students who got As boasted about the fact.)

Parents are partners with O'Maley, serving on the School Council and on committees to select new administrators and teachers. Student projects extend the curricula into the community on a regular basis. Guidance counselors discuss the learning process during community meetings in the classrooms and run small groups to allow students to express their needs and learn how to improve their organizational and interpersonal skills.

The school overtly promotes a "tone of decency," a Coalition concept discussed continuously. Respect for each other is viewed as a basic building block in a safe and orderly school environment, and is the first step in disciplinary action. I watched teachers wrestle with this strategy many times during my visit, often barely avoiding shame-based discipline, and with varying degrees of "outcome."

Emphasis is placed on students accepting responsibility for their behavior and on mediation to resolve conflict. "With all staff modeling this principle," says a school profile, "students soon realize that school is for learning, and that learning is serious work and sometimes difficult." Overall the atmosphere was orderly and safe, but more importantly its primary tone was high energy and engagement at every level.

It is this rich atmosphere for growing and learning that is waiting for artists at schools like O'Maley. That's part of why Celeste Miller decided to establish a permanent collaborative relationship with the school, designing a series of arts residencies this year called "Take a Flying Leap."

Celeste Miller is a nationally touring performance artist and choreographer who has been teaching performance in various settings since 1972. She maintains a nonprofit organization called Celeste Miller & Co. to help fund and administer her work, including community projects. Several years ago she and her husband Ian McColl moved from New York to Gloucester when McColl took the position of managing director of the Gloucester Stage Company. The theater, founded by playwright Israel Horovitz, annually presents two seasons of theater and dance performances, including Celeste Miller. As soon as she arrived, Miller, who has always been interested in creating strong links with her audience wherever she performs, set about making family with Gloucester.

Gloucester is an old fishing port on Cape Ann, about 35 miles northeast of Boston. According to the community profile issued by the Massachusetts Department of Education, Gloucester is considered an urban center with a population of 30,000 who have a per capita annual income of $16,000; some 6.8% percent of the families live below the poverty line (both figures are close to the state average). The majority (98%) of the population is white, many of whom are bilingual and strongly identify with their family's European national origin (primarily Italian and Portuguese).

Gloucester has five elementary schools, one middle school and one high school. O'Maley Eighth Graders' average scoring in most core subjects is around the state average (Massachusetts Educational Assessment Program scores); these scores have not changed appreciably since 1988. About half of Gloucester's (and the state's) high school grads are college bound (figures are on the rise over the past ten years). About 4.5% drop out of school.

Besides the Coalition of Essential Schools, other innovative programs being tried in Gloucester schools include Multiple Intelligences (learning through areas of strength) and Project Spectrum (identifying key abilities through creative expression by kindergartners).

Gloucester Stage Company contributes a great deal to the community, providing a summer school for children (where Miller teaches) and some opportunities for student employment. While I was there Ian McColl was up to his neck in his annual community-art ritual, directing a huge cast of citizens in "Scrooge and Marley," a Horovitz version of "A Christmas Carol" (Miller as choreographer).

Miller began crafting her relationship with the Gloucester Public Schools by inviting all the teachers from the school system to one of her performances at Gloucester Stage. She made connections with O'Maley teachers Annie Ziergebiel and Beth Delforge. They found money to bring Miller in to work with the Seventh Grade in 1994-95, and began planning an ongoing artist-in-residence program that would bring artists to O'Maley year after year. The planning group grew to seven teachers and staffers from the two arts companies, developing the program with the support of school administration.

"Take a Flying Leap" was designed as a "Celebration of Arts and Education," a yearlong artist-in-residence program for O'Maley, integrated with the performance season at Gloucester Stage. Its goals were to incorporate performance into the students' integrated curriculum studies; to allow the entire school to experience the artistic mastery and educational programs of a notable visiting artist, and to permit grade-level staff to participate in a reflective process that would highlight assessment.

Five residencies were planned for a five-week period of time, staggered throughout the school year. The projects included a week with selected Eighth Grade classes by Elise Witt, Atlanta-based singer/songwriter; a week with the whole Seventh Grade by Philip Aaberg, California-based solo pianist and recording artist, and a week with Sixth Graders by Kimberli Boyd, premiere dancer with Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Washington, DC.

Each week includes an opening performance at school by the artist, workshops with individual classes, a closing school performance by the students and public performances by the artist at Gloucester Stage. Celeste Miller will conduct two residencies: a week-long multigrade "incentive program" with selected students and a culminating, whole-school exhibition based on reflections, skills and responses built from the entire project. An evaluation plan was also drawn up that includes the student performances and reflective meetings between the artists and school staff, as well as written reflection by the students.

The inclusion of Gloucester Stage Company in the partnership is key, says Celeste Miller. "It provides a bridge between the school and the artist's working world. When a child has worked with an artist and then experiences him or her on stage as a professional, it lends a real-world importance to the work they did together. And it gives the child some ownership of an important component of the community—its theater."

On a practical level, says Miller, the tripartite partnership is vital. Funding for both arts and education is increasingly difficult to come by. By pooling their resources, the school residency, the dance company and the theater program help support each other, each contibuting something to the financial picture.

Miller and Delforge put together a $10,000 budget that spanned all the activities and included administrative expenses, performance and residency fees for the artists, travel and per diem. Funds were raised by all three partners, drawing on earned income (theater tickets to the artists' performances), the Massachusetts Cultural Council (from a grant to Miller), Gloucester Cultural Council, the O'Maley Parent-Teachers' Organization, local businesses and the School Connection, a group of private citizens interested in funding school enrichment activities.

The planners talked intensively twice a month through the summer of 1995, adding J.P. Ware, a language arts teacher at O'Maley who would be the key contact for the first residency, with Elise Witt. As Witt's residency approached, she and Ware traded questions and answers with each other, embracing Witt's experience as a songwriter and folksinger in four languages and focusing on the Essential Question for the Eighth Grade this year: What is the American Dream?

Miller, who tours as an artist and has pressing childcare responsibilities, brought in arts administrator Jill Burnham to continue the discussion and closely monitor the planning. Miller would continue to provide oversight and occasional guidance, but the trench work would be done by Burnham, the artists and the teachers. They went through months of meticulous communication.

"It was my job to be the liaison between the artists and the teachers, " said Burnham, "making sure they heard each other's questions and priorities. It was so important to keep them talking. We wanted each residency to be a true collaboration where the artists and the school came together to create something new. Each project proceeded out of the students' curriculum and the teachers' methods as well as the artist's work. That way the students are on familiar ground, and feel the artist is coming to meet them, rather than finding themselves in a totally alien, unfamiliar world."

Witt arrived in October, performed at Gloucester Stage and conducted an International Music Residency at O'Maley with selected classes in the Eighth Grade, working in Language Arts, Spanish and Music classes. Burnham worked with Witt in the classroom, coordinating the elements of the residency and constantly assessing the process. At the end of the week the classes performed for the whole grade the songs they had written, then Witt followed up by providing the teachers with a detailed outline of what she had done in the classes and the outcomes she observed among the students and teachers.

Miller at the same time began a series of teacher training sessions at Fuller Elementary School in Gloucester, exploring the possibilities of using dance and movement throughout the curriculum.

The second O'Maley residency, Philip Aaberg's, was scheduled to coincide with the staging of his and Miller's touring collaborative piece "Big Sky Spinning." It was at this point that I joined the activities.

Phil Aaberg describes himself as a "holistic musician," with professional credits that stretch in every possible direction. With impressive track records in rock, classics, blues and movie music, he has five solo piano CDs on the Windham Hill label and currently tours with the new-music/theater group The Paul Dresher Ensemble.

His eclectic talent is perhaps best described by Dresher: "Phil Aaberg is a dangerous musician. Dangerous because when you work with him, you're in danger of never finding another musician who combines virtuosity with real passion, and a unique versatility with profound depth of musical understanding. He bring a personal humility and humor to his artistry, which makes him a rare pleasure to work with or to see."

"Big Sky Spinning" is a live performance that blends music with storytelling about Montana. Aaberg brings to the collaboration a lifelong love affair with Montana that began at birth some 50 years ago in Chester (pop. 950). As a child he took the train across the plains 1200 miles round-trip for piano lessons, and worked on farms and as a park ranger there. His lean and romantic compositions for his CD "High Plains" evoke the unique sweep and majesty of that vast and lonesome country.

"Big Sky Spinning" was on the menu at Gloucester Stage Company while I was there. My favorite Aaberg moment in the performance is his story about the arrogant John Philip Sousa storming across Montana on his own private train, which tossed a spark and burned a whole town to the ground. "The train kept right on going west," said Aaberg, straightfaced, then turned to the piano and tore into a muscular piece that shrugged its shoulders at the tragedy, as the Father of American March Music might have done.

Aaberg needed all the humility and humor he could muster when he took on 300 twelve-year-olds at O'Maley Middle School and vowed to have them producing their own compositions at the end of a week's residency.

In the auditorium at O'Maley Aaberg received the best of introductions. Teacher Beth Delforge asked the students to recognize "how special this week is. Consider it a gift," she said, "an opportunity to be with a great artist who is here to work with you, your talents, your ideas." She described the schedule: A performance today by Aaberg and Miller selected from "Big Sky Spinning"; workshops on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday giving each student two chances to work with Aaberg; meetings and rehearsals Wednesday and Thursday for those who wanted to perform on Friday for the whole Seventh Grade, and a Friday reception and time for reflection. The students were urged to attend the full performance of "Big Sky Spinning" at Gloucester Stage on the weekend.

Then, hesitant and soft-spoken in his greeting to the 300 restless preteens, Aaberg entered into the tug-of-war for attention that ensues between all teachers and their students, between all performers and their audiences. He told them they were going to compose music together. He called them all composers. "The main job of a composer," he said, "is to compose himself. We're all works in progress." Acknowledging their Essential Question—How is conflict resolved?—he referred to composition as "making choices. Composition is composure. What's a good way to be composed? Almost every time when I'm having an argument I say, 'You're not listening!' Listening is very hard. It's a way to compose yourself." Then he asked them to listen for a whole minute. The seconds crawled by while the kids found ways to show off—laughing, coughing, then orchestrated mass coughing. At the end of the minute Aaberg held up his hand until silence occurred. "If you don't listen," he told them in the smallest of voices, "how are you going to hear anything? How are you going to resolve anything?"

Celeste Miller mounted the stage sporting a trademark look that immediately attracted their attention. Miller is a beauty, with a star quality any twelve-year-old girl can envy. Her long blond curls and black leather and lace left the first row breathless. While Aaberg played piano and synthesizer, Miller began dancing a story about a woman searching for herself in a motel room in Montana. Her movement style catches words the way Aaberg's music catches feelings: on the sly, on the rise, gestures chosen with care, phrases captured like birds in flight. The kids sized her up. They dissolved into laughter when Aaberg's electronic sampler, playing the bleating of a flock of sheep, collided with the narrative and made comedy.

The assembly broke up and Aaberg began the introductory workshop I was to observe six times over the following days. He invited his first workshop group, Schooner 1, to come up to the stage. One student announced grandly, "We are now Entering the Stage." "Oh, cool," said a long-haired girl as she ascended the stairs, "I've never been up here before."

For the next few days I watched Aaberg encounter six groups of 50 kids, one after another, and try essentially the same scheme: to get them to listen, and consider music. It was an interesting exercise because not only did I get to watch him refine his message, using what worked and discarding what didn't, I also saw the differences in each group of kids. I couldn't help identifying them: the bright scientific group, the rowdy but gifted creative group, the defiant and rebellious group, the tired and bored group. As the week passed I became more and more strongly impressed with the quality of a teacher's acquiescence in the project and the difference it made in the quality of the students' experience. The classes with the least "control" were led by the most apprehensive teachers. The most interested and inspired teachers led the classes who got the most out of the encounter.

"We're going to compose ourselves," Aaberg said to the 50 on the stage at his feet. "That's the biggest job we have." He told them they were going to sit very still and listen to music for 15 minutes. "Music has a frame around it, like art. It begins and ends with silence," he noted, and they were suddenly still. Because they were currently engaged in a study unit about Europe, he had chosen European music from all the ages. "Some cultures," he told them, "think that sound is the only thing that holds the world together, makes the world exist." While they listened, he asked them to consider the question "What is music?" and write down their responses.

For 15 minutes the music flowed: Gregorian chant, ethnic choruses, opera, minuets, Irish fiddles, flamenco, the Beatles, French rap. As I listened, I responded to each fragment with memories from my own past—my exploration of my Irish roots, the first time I ever heard Spanish gypsies, the Catholic Mass in Latin that I learned to sing in high school, the Beatles concert at the Hollywood Bowl, my summer in France. In all six sessions I saw the teachers' heads come up and emotion visibly register in their faces when they heard the childlike yet mournful tones of the Bulgarian Women's Chorus: they were hearing the voice of the tragic Balkans. It was then that I realized the chasm between myself and these children. For me and for their teachers, a lifetime of connected moments of joy and sorrow and learning surrounded us, manifest in these bits of music. These kids had yet to fill their lives. What on earth did these musics mean to them?

Next Aaberg explained amplitude—pianissimo (soft) through fortissimo (loud). He asked the students each to choose a phrase from their thoughts about music and loop (repeat) it over and over as a group, graduating from soft to loud. The jumble of phrases rose from a whisper to a chatter to a melange of screams; this exercise was very popular with each class, and it warmed the atmosphere.

During this period, in one group a tall young man with a mustache and a cadre of acolytes could be seen speaking in a low but dignified voice to his companions. There was a flurry of objections among them and then he said softly but authoritatively, "That's an example of how Americans are destroying the Italian language." After the session he approached Aaberg and told him he had it all wrong about music. Piano in Italian means "slow," not "soft," and forte means "strong," not "loud." "I know," he said, with the demeanor of a mature adult, "because I'm Italian." Aaberg thanked him graciously for the information, and told him the translations he was using, however mistaken they were, were in universal use among world musicians. Later Aaberg shared the correction with the next group of students.

"Did you like all of the music?" Aaberg then asked the group, approaching the Essential Question. (No!) "Did any of it make you mad?" (Yes.) "What if there was one group here and another here, and one said, 'I hate your music!'?" He set loose a bit of Stockhausen from his sampler. "This is my music," he pretended dramatically. "This is the only music that's good. It was given to me by Jim (a gesture heavenward)."

At this point Aaberg introduced the large electronic sampler he had brought with him, showing the students how any sound can be recorded, stored on the computer's hard disk, and then "sampled," or called up at will, and manipulated in a series or with other sounds to make music. He assigned them to return to their classrooms and collect ten minutes of sound on tape; tomorrow from these sounds they would, through editing on the sampler, collaboration, negotiation and compromise, create pieces of music by the Seventh Grade that would be played at the performance on Friday. They were visibly excited. This introduction of technology and the promise of hands-on access immediately raised everything up a notch, from just a school exercise to a cool project.

Aaberg finished with a wild performance of boogie-woogie piano. The upright on the stage had its cover thrown back and the kids crowded around to watch the hammers jump on the strings.

Curious about the previous residency by singer Elise Witt, I ventured into J.P. Ware's Eighth Grade classroom, where she told me her priority during arts residencies: assessment, assessment, assessment. "Assessment is our prime concern as a Coalition Building," she said. "To connect learning to kids' lives we have to assess outcome. We have to be able to measure how we're doing, and to do that well, we want to scrutinize our assessment tools."

This is Ware's second stint of teaching at O'Maley. In between she took time off to write curriculum for the Coalition.

"This building jumped into the work six years ago," she told me. "It's about smaller units of kids, it's about kids driving their own stuff. We're coaches, not deliverers. Now that that work is very authentically underway, we're reflecting on how we're looking at the work. This residency is a good opportunity to think about different ways to evaluate what kids have learned."

Ware teaches 100 students with a team of four teachers, each teaching four classes a day "in our strong suit." Each core subject, for instance science, is broken up into four pieces, "each married with one of our guiding themes or areas of passion; the idea is to integrate science with other bodies of learning over a term of ten weeks."

Ware was excited about a life-science unit (evolution and ecology) married to the history curriculum, and connected, of course, to the Essential Question of the Year: What is the American Dream? "We looked at Gloucester," she said, "which was settled in the 1600s. We examined artwork on Puritan gravestones, connected the art with what they're learning about Puritan life. We did an exercise of burying obstacles to the American Dream, making headstones for them (student choices included hatred, AIDS, cancer, confusion, peer pressure).

"Confident thinkers" she called her students. "Questioning authority is welcomed as an appropriate setting, as the basis of all knowledge," she said. "It's often I'll hear a response like, 'I don't think that's what was meant here' in reference to my interpretation of a text."

You see consistency with the Coalition, she said, in "the bigger messages—working to create a tone of decency, the framework of essential questions, the acceptance of working with others, sharing. We begin to see the fruits of all this trench work between students and teachers by the time they enter the Eighth Grade." The transition to high school is painful, she told me. Gloucester's high school is more traditional in structure, using the standard lecture-driven format of teaching, which, according to Ware, "is successful for a limited number of people for a limited time. But it is changing. The next big change," she said, "will be student-driven" as O'Maley students fill the student body. "You'll hear things like, 'I don't do well on true-false questions because I'm dyslexic. Could we write a play instead?' The goal is creative thinkers, lifelong learners."

Elise Witt's residency involved selected classes of Eighth Graders in one week. In preparation Ware talked to Witt over the phone and they easily focused the residency on the American Dream. "It was so easy to pull together," said Ware. "We shared the underpinnings. In addition, our kids are used to being asked to turn it up a notch. It was okay with them that there was an artist in the classroom and they were being asked to write music and turn it into a performance." The residency benefited from the ease of scheduling, the small number of students in each unit, the ability of teachers to move in and out of each others' classrooms.

But most helpful of all is the commitment of the teachers and their excitement about the job they face. "We're all developing such deep connections to what we're doing," said Ware. "We care so much about having the kids carry away something that has importance to their lives. Because that's the only thing they're going to be holding five years from now. It's a troubled world and high school's way too late to get kids thinking about a tone of decency. You're already at the reactive stage. They need to develop a sense of community early, responsibility for each other, being careful and kind, learning how to care about somebody else's deficiencies. We do this by working in small groups. If your group can't figure out a problem you can't get any work done."

Witt's residency demonstrated respect for the gifts of each student. One Portuguese student who had problems with English sang a solo in Brazilian Portuguese. "She was a star," said Ware. "We took a flying leap. They recognized it. How long it would have taken that child in the classroom setting to demonstrate that she understood a piece of the American Dream! It made a difference in her school year. We are so lucky if kids in their middle-school experience can have some level of performance.

"Artists can look at kids in a different way from any of us," said Ware. "Artists can help us see how ready students are for performance assessment. We were all in the process of saying we need to look at this—and along came this tool."

At midweek I walked at lunchtime with Aaberg and Burnham through the school to the cafeteria. We passed through the immense two-story Common Room, filled with art projects by the students and, above, stretching along the walls, huge WPA murals from 1935, realist paintings depicting the history and soul of Gloucester. Images of the sea and the drama of the fisherman's life, ships, storms, heritage.

As we entered the cafeteria a small boy approached us and addressed Burnham: "Are you the lady with the piano?"

"I mean the lady who goes like this," he said seriously, executing a perfect Celeste Miller sideways leg move, the broken-ankle look any Miller fan would recognize. "Is she coming back?"

My life flashed before my eyes and I remembered the crushing inhibition of my twelfth year, remembered the traditional, static, rote learning I had endured, and it occurred to me that here I had had a demonstration of the potential for change in education and child development. This O'Maley student had just exhibited the confidence to dance in a packed cafeteria in front of his peers and a grownup, female stranger. He had used the language of art. Without a second thought.

At lunch Aaberg was clearly thrilled with things, bearing an astonished look on his face. We discussed the workshop, its weaknesses and strengths, the things he forgot to say, the things he needed to emphasize. Both he and Burnham were worried about the restlessness of the classes, the potential for chaos later in the week. They worried that not all the students had clearly understood what was expected of them, and made a plan to ensure that each class had recording equipment and time to do the work. While a Coalition school is flexible enough to make room for all this, it still takes a lot of organizing. They would go into hours-long bouts of discussion about the details every night for the rest of the week, doing their best to make sure it came off smoothly.

After lunch Aaberg and I were swept along into Doug Zierk's science classroom. It seemed he had something for us to watch. His 25 students from Schooner House filed in and sat at tall tables arranged around the room. They all had notebooks with them and busied themselves. Aaberg and I squashed ourselves into chairs at the front of the room and hunkered down.

"All year long you've been making observations with your eyes," he told them. "This week it's time to observe with your ears.

"Each class has its own music," he went on. "It's full of energy. My task is to use that energy, but teach discipline, teach listening and making choices. It's hard to sit still and listen. It's uncomfortable because you're alone with yourself. This week try to sit still, get calm, listen carefully. We're going to listen and talk."

Then he put on a tape, something symphonic, full of emotion and aural images. I didn't recognize it, but to my surprise the children all seemed to know it well. When Zierk asked, they all cried out "The Lion King." How did they know it so well? "If you like something," said one boy, "you listen to it a lot." "Is it fair to say," asked Zierk, "that you hear this piece of music all over?" (Yes.) "That it's part of our culture?" He had linked listening to something valuable in their lives.

The next day Zierk's class made metronomes and related them to music and rhythm. "Easy," said Zierk. "It broke out of an exercise we were doing in physics. I take every chance to tie in real-world applications. The most effective learning is done when the kids master something meaningful. They go with it: I can do it! You can preach and preach, but if they don't experience it...."

When his class returned for their second session with Aaberg, they were extremely animated. Zierk and his team partner had them sit on the floor in the hall outside the auditorium and asked them to focus. When they entered Aaberg was playing some calm and awesome music on the synthesizer. They quietly filed into the auditorium seats. Aaberg approached them with an exercise to show how sound can move over space; he had them use their hands to make sounds of rain falling in a rain forest. It moved from hand-rubbing to finger-snapping to clapping, following Aaberg's conducting hands across the room and back, softly, then louder, then softly again.

Then he played the class the sounds they had collected, which had been fed into the sampler's computer data base. The tape included, as did most of the other classes', the sound of a toilet flushing, which brought laughter. They discussed the sounds, what was surprising, what sounded different than they expected. Aaberg showed how a microphone picks up sound, how it hears differently than the human ear. He demonstrated through the keyboard how a computer remembers things digitally. He talked to them about repetition, variation and sequence in composition. Then he brought the students up on the stage in groups of four to manipulate the sampler, to make music out of toilets flushing, to demonstrate in the most graphic way how any sound can be music if repeated, varied, sequenced.

As each group went to the stage, the rest of the class stayed in their auditorium seats, conversing with each other like adults at a professional conference. To my amazement the noise level never rose above normal conversation. Anticipating a few minutes at this keyboard, they had no interest in disruption.

I saw clearly how technology is making a difference between my generation and theirs. It will turn out to be the greatest generation gap in history. To me a keyboard was a mechanical instrument. To them a keyboard is the electronic key to the digital world. They have grown up on video games and computers. They have witnessed the transmutation of music and visual art into experimental music video. They were born in 1983! Their world has been multimedia from the very beginning. They have learned to view bodies of knowledge as objects to be moved around electronically. Any adult who can converse with them through technology is already on the other side of the river.

By Friday morning Aaberg and Burnham were in a panic. They were running out of time. The magic trick of changing sound into music was taking longer than everyone thought, and some adjustments and short-cuts had to be added to the process. The residency had worked too well. In addition to the sampling project, Aaberg had invited students to bring forward any music they were working on. They hadn't counted on everybody wanting to participate to this degree. And they certainly hadn't counted on nearly everyone wanting to be in the performance. The auditorium had filled up with kids who had songs, skits, bands, solo instrumental performances they wanted to do. All this had to be quickly crafted into a program.

One group of boys, who were widely known as behaviorally challenged, had put together a drum ensemble. Teachers trembled at the thought. Another had assembled a horn sextet. Some girls had written a whole play that needed rehearsal. A group of studious kids who had taken every chance to hang around with Aaberg and use the synthesizer had collaborated on a piece of music that required them all to have their hands on the instrument at the same time. One girl would have her back to the audience. "All they'll see is my butt!" she complained loudly.

Aaberg faced a sea of anxious faces and musical instruments knowing he had turmoil on his hands. The frame of silence was starting to fragment. Everyone was talking at once. He raised his voice one degree: "You'll have to stop talking now or you're going to see what happens when a musician loses his temper." Silence fell.

"Okay," said Aaberg. "All together we're the U.N. and you're the representative nations. It's time to make a decision. Do we have a common goal?"

"Here's the conflict," said Aaberg. "We have more people who want to perform than we have time. In the same way that the Bosnians are trying to divide up Bosnia, we have to divide up time. Any ideas?"

"Maybe we can do both," said Aaberg. There was grumbling, but finally there was negotiated agreement. And he set about placing the groups throughout the auditorium, showing them how he would indicate to each group when they should let loose. The synthesizer and piano were set up on the stage and minutes before show time Aaberg was still arranging tape collages.

The whole Seventh Grade marched in, followed by Celeste Miller and Ian McColl. A very tense silence reigned, since absolutely nobody knew with certainty what was going to happen. Burnham dashed across the room with messages for the scattered performers. Teachers roamed the aisles looking doubtful. A skirmish broke out in the back row and one truculent young man was ejected into the hallway, in a manner ever-so traditional.

Aaberg took the stage and without introduction raised his arms and began conducting the rain forest exercise. The sounds pattered softly south across the room, rose to a clap and a thunder, then pattered back. If nothing else happened all period, I thought, they have made one piece of music. Aaberg approached the microphone humbly and humorously and thanked the school for the opportunity to work with them all. Then he casually gestured to the farthest reaches of the auditorium and the drum ensemble began their piece. Some text, thought to be amusing by those nearby, was read into a megaphonelike highway cone, and a torrent of noise emerged from the drums. Moments later, at Aaberg's gesture the horn group began in the opposite corner. Embarrassed by the spotlight, they sat on the floor, completely out of sight, and played off key for a few minutes. The skit began on stage and had several ribald moments, then Aaberg indicated that all should perform at once. And they did. A dangerous and glorious cacophony filled the auditorium. The teachers were amazed, the students exhilarated.

A short program ensued in which several solos were offered on-stage. The synth group played their competently new-age instrumental. One girl quite ably sang a touching song she had composed about a classmate of hers who, sadly, had become pregnant.

Aaberg played several pieces that had been collaged from the student's sound collections, works with a decidedly industrial edge. But the masterpiece was a no-go: technical difficulties. He promised to play it later at the reception.

All in all it was a fairly confusing and messy affair with all the components necessary to allow pandemonium to break out, but, curiously, the audience was attentive and calm. The teachers seemed astonished at the level of attention paid to the lesson of the week: listen. They went off plotting how to use it for the rest of the year.

Exhausted and radiating, Aaberg waded through a reception in the library, where the students presented him with their reflections on the residency. Then he hustled away to Gloucester Stage where he had several shows to do.

Before I departed Gloucester I was graciously invited to Beth Delforge's house for a Sunday brunch with Aaberg, Burnham, Miller, the principal, some teachers and their spouses. We talked of the residency and the Coalition and how, again and again, flexibility had made room for serendipity. We discussed the future for education. Their dedication to the process. Their appreciation for the opportunities afforded by this residency. Aaberg beamed.

As we parted I detected a mix of elation and dissatisfaction among the collaborators. If only there had been more time, more money. If only the equipment hadn't failed. If only there had been more preparation, more assessment. Did the students make that conceptual "flying" leap? What can we do better next time?

As I left, Burnham stuffed into my bag a handful of copies from the students' assessment of the residency. Reading their "Final Words for Phil" on the plane, I had to smile. They are the perfect souvenir of my trip back to Seventh Grade:

"Live large, enjoy, and treat every minute of your life as if it were the greatest thing on earth, and get lots of sleep and practice."

Linda Frye Burnham was the founding editor of High Performance. She is co-director of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

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A Daring Adventure: Artists and teachers partner for school reform

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