COMMUNITY-WORD PROJECT INC

Community-Word Project aims to ensure that young people in New York City can envision, invest in, and build a community different from the one failing to meet their needs. The key goals of CWP's residency programs are to:

-Make the classroom a safe, creative space where each student feels challenged and supported to put ideas forward with confidence and discover the power of working together.

-Offer multiple ways to engage different kinds of learners, and provide a creative learning environment not often available in our culture of high-stakes testing.

-Engage highly-trained multidisciplinary teaching artists in New York City school classrooms

-Provide a sustained experience for students through a 10 to 25 week classroom presence during each school year and a continuing to “bridge" programs from their elementary to middle school years.

-Help NYC's public school students meet the New York State Common Core Standards in English Language Arts for Writing and Literacy.

-Focus on literacy by bringing a writer alongside another artist into every classroom to ensure that each student practices articulating and expressing their ideas, concerns and aspirations.

-Promote equal access for students of all learning levels, especially English as a New Language learners and students with Special Needs.

- Help youth to individually and collectively articulate and express social justice issues of importance to them.

-Providing professional development workshops for classroom teachers, after-school leaders, and youth workers to integrate creativity into the classroom and after-school programs.

By working collaboratively in a safe and positive classroom environment, CWP students learn to think creatively and analytically, embrace differences, solve problems, and confidently share ideas so that they are better prepared to make positive change in their communities and their lives.

The heart of CWP’s activities is the empowerment through the arts of students annually in schools, libraries and homeless shelters. We operate in NYC neighborhoods where 70% of residents live in poverty and students struggle with the effects of underperforming schools; unstable households; and the linguistic challenges of recent immigration.

Our actions to achieve the empowerment we seek are threefold:

In our Collaborative Arts Residency Program (CAR), Teaching Artists (TAs) integrate creative writing and visual arts, music, dance, or theater into the curriculum to help students improve their literacy and develop creative, critical thinking, and socio-emotional skills.

The Teaching Artist Project (TAP) provides an opportunity for artists and educators to engage in a self reflective process while in a supportive, artist empowered and creative-inquiry-based community. In the program, participants have the freedom to unpack their own pedagogy, in service of their justice oriented and student centered teaching practice. Our hope is to leverage our arts education models’ collective impact and scale, through continued collaboration with our cohort of 15 peer arts organizations such as Brooklyn Arts Council, DreamYard Project, and National Dance Institute.

CWP’s professional development sessions prepare classroom teachers, after-school leaders, and youth professionals with the expertise to integrate creative writing and collaborative arts into their curricula.

Guided by these outcomes, CWP measures a number of indicators of student skills development, using formal observations twice over the course of each residency to ensure that benchmarks towards our student outcomes are being achieved (for example, students are taking leadership roles in collaborative projects, students are listening respectfully to each other's ideas, students understand the importance of revising their work), to assess teaching artists' classroom management and teaching skills, and to give the teaching artists feedback...

Along with the surveys, Community-Word Project uses several other methods to assess the success of our residency program. Before the residency begins, our evaluation manager administers an initial assessment tool that includes a short written description of an image. The tool is then administered at the end of the residency in order to see how much CWP students have improved in CWP's five essential outcomes (Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Literacy, Emotional Intelligence) as well as their overall writing techniques. In addition, three times each year, we collect writing samples and evaluate them based on CWP-developed rubrics in order to assess the quality of the work in connection with lesson plan that generated the work.

CWP focuses on measurable impact and continuous program improvement by using multiple methods of evaluation. We take a deep, individualized look at arts residency and training effectiveness in order to maintain program strengths and identify areas in need of improvement. Each tool and the corresponding outcomes and indicators continue to be revised based on program outcomes and previous evaluations. This data-driven approach ensures that our programs strengthen Teaching Artist (TA) practices and student aptitude.

CWP's 20-21 Evaluation Report:

Our outcomes from the past year continue to encourage our work and demonstrate the dire need for arts education in the communities we serve. The power of the arts continues to grow skills in Literacy, Critical Thinking, Creative Thinking, Emotional Intelligence, and Engagement Citizenship. For example, last year at the beginning of their residency students reported that only 11% of them could create new and meaningful ideas by using a range of idea creation techniques such as brainstorming, adopting, adapting and researching, yet at the end of the residency the same students reported that 47% of them now felt confident in that skill. Also, at the beginning of the residency students reported that only 11% felt that they could behave empathetically toward their classroom community, and at the end of the residency those same students jumped to 60%. Overall, 88% of students grew in more than one social emotional learning capacity, which is particularly meaningful during the second school year impacted by COVID-19. As one fourth grade student said about their experience in CAR, “I learned that I should speak up more because at the end of our lessons we say we have a voice… which you can use to share opinions and make ideas to make the world a better place.”