MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

I. ORIENTATION FRAMEWORK

what is music learning leadership?

• Create and manage school change through music: Music Learning Leadership is a dynamic view of how to create and manage sustainable, cost effective music-in-education practices that contribute to positive change and transformation of whole-school culture and performance for the benefit of optimizing every child’s learning capacity.
• Music Learning Leadership emerged out of the principles and practices of the Music-in-Education National Consortium (MIENC) supported by the Federal Department of Education: The frameworks for school change emerging out of the MIENC’s Learning Laboratory School Network are now regarded as a valid and cost effective strategic priority for creating and sustaining comprehensive arts programs in schools, starting with the establishment of ‘music plus music integration’ laboratory schools in partnerships among representatives from arts learning organizations, higher education schools of music, and primarily urban public schools.
  
• A music-focused model of arts learning leadership in schools: Music Learning Leadership seeks to provide authentic, comprehensive, and interdisciplinary arts learning with a primary focus on music that is guided by MIENC frameworks and best practices, local and national standards and policies, and the standards of leadership based on the practices and principles of successful learning organizations in or outside of arts learning organizations.
• Collaborative Leadership sustained across many parallel perspectives: Music Learning Leadership depends on building a cross-institutional, collaborative-based team leadership layered across a non-hierarchical landscape of administrators, arts specialists, teaching artists, classroom teachers, parents, researchers, policy setters, lawmakers, foundations, or any other constituency interested in the essential role of music-in-education.
• A central focus on the Music Plus Music Integration practices in schools: Music Learning Leadership focuses on understanding better how Music Plus Music Integrated teaching and learning can serve as a medium, model and strategic priority for virtually all facets of school improvement and re-formation in all areas of academic, arts, and social-personal learning. By the medium of music we mean the essential value of music learning in all children’s personal and social lives and how high quality instruction in music intrinsically engages a wide range of integrative learning processes and the understanding of multiple representations of fundamental concepts and symbolic literacy systems shared across disciplines. Music’s validity and cost effectiveness as a model for learning integration rests in the predominant presence music now has in public schools and how the optimally trained music specialist or teaching artist can disseminate curriculum innovation and facilitate professional development of an entire school faculty more than any other single teacher in the school community. Many education leaders have found that music functions well as a strategic priority for building comprehensive arts and arts-integrated teaching and learning throughout the school culture because of its established presence in schools, its engagement of community and cultural support, its affinity for integration with other art forms and academic learning, and the amount and quality of research suggesting its positive general program (and learning intervention) impact on learning and teaching in other subject areas and social-emotional development in schools (see Postlude JMIE IV; New Ventures study)
• Leadership that moves beyond the perimeters of prefabricated curriculum, rigid compliance to one set of standards, or the reliance on a single person paradigm of music education in the past: Music Learning Leadership does not assume the presence of a ready-made program, pedagogy, or standards of instruction and assessment to be imported into a school or district. Rather it serves as an ‘action research approach’ to program development that takes place first in ‘laboratory school cultures’ that engage multiple forms of leadership from musicians and non-musicians. The action research perspective ensures that the creative input and collaboration among all layers of leadership will lead to buy-in into the curriculum design, range of implementation, documentation methods, evaluation tools, and determination of evidence of positive teacher professional development, student, and whole-school outcomes before scaling out program development within schools and across school districts.
• Looking beyond the borders of the school community: Music Learning Leadership is a primary strategy for effective scale-out dissemination of research-based MIENC Learning Laboratory School Network practices. As a certificate program, Music Learning Leadership provides a model of LLSN site development through three institutes over two years in the following sequence:
  • Orientation and First Year Planning Institute.
  • First Academic Year MLL action research process-based program development with support from MIENC Guided Practice Consultants free of charge in the areas of principal and district leadership; Music Plus Music Integration curriculum development; documentation and digital portfolio support; research design and statistical analysis services; and publication support.
  • Peer Presentation and Second Year Planning Institute.
  • Second Academic Year MLL follow-up program implementation with support from MIENC Guided Practice Consultants free of charge in the areas of principal and district leadership, Music Plus Music Integration curriculum development, documentation and digital portfolio support, research design and statistical analysis services, and publication support.
  • Nexus School Scale-out Dissemination Planning Institute

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