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Hartford Performs is a robust system of delivering quality arts education experiences to Hartford Public School students. To do that, we provide programs for both the students themselves and the adults who teach them.

Programs for Educators

Teachers want to be able to use arts-education techniques in their classrooms, even when there’s not a teaching artist present.

Since most teachers don’t consider themselves artists – or dancers, or musicians, or actors – Hartford Performs helps them gain the skills they need to build arts into their lessons. We show them simple techniques they can confidently blend into their lesson plans.  Click here for a quick peek at a recent workshop.

As a member of the Partners in Education Program at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, we have access to some of the most experienced and respected professional teaching artists in the country. Several times each year, we bring these nationally renowned teaching artists here to lead practical, hands-on workshops for Hartford Public School teachers. We follow these workshops with a day of classroom demonstrations, so that the teachers can observe how their own students respond to the techniques presented in the workshops.

Hartford Performs also contracts with several highly skilled local and regional teaching artists to present workshops to teachers.

Some of our recent workshop topics include:

  • “Drama: The Missing Link in Teaching Literacy”
  • “Building Reading Comprehension through Sound & Rhythm”
  • “Teaching Math through the Art of Sol LeWitt”
  • “Physical Problem Solving: Math + Dance”

What teachers say about our programs:

  • As I embraced the excitement of student learning and creativity in my classroom, my students became much more enthusiastic about learning.
  • I have used literacy and tied it to drama. The students love learning in different ways and drama added a whole new element for them.
  • The programs are hands on, interactive, creative, artistic, original and extremely innovative.
  • It gave visual representations to content material that can sometimes be abstract or not tangible.
  • It has provided me with ideas to make my lessons more creative.
  • It has given me a set of skills and strategies that I would never have used otherwise in my classroom.
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