The Fry Foundation's Arts Education Program concentrates on supporting high-quality instruction for children who would not otherwise have that opportunity. For twenty years, the Marwen Foundation has provided visual arts instruction by top local arts professionals for low-income Chicago students. Now Marwen wants to spread its method of creative engagement to arts teachers around Chicago and improve its own faculty's skills in the process.

Spend a few minutes at the Marwen Foundation on Chicago's Near North Side and it is immediately clear that you are in a special place. The spaces are large, open, functional, and beautiful. The young people are as diverse as the city they come from, but with a shared distinctiveness of hair, dress, body art, and belongings that marks a visual sensibility. And they are engaged: with each other, with the adults around them, with the making of art.

Marwen has been offering high-quality visual arts education, paired with college and career counseling, to some 2,000 low-income Chicago students for the last two decades. At the center of the program are "teaching artists," who bring to the classroom the skills and seriousness of people who have made the arts their life's work. Marwen's approach stresses creativity, individual expression, and personal growth.

This is a strong model and a nationally recognized success. Now Marwen is exploring how to spread the benefits beyond students they can serve directly, while at the same time continually improve its own programs. The key to both, they decided, is professional development.

With Fry Foundation funding, Marwen has embarked on two separate but parallel courses. The first offers its own instructors workshops on adolescent development and classroom management, along with structured discussions in which faculty share their collective ideas on what constitutes a first-class arts education.

"Our teachers may not come with classroom experience or training as teachers, but many have marvelous instincts," says director of education Scott Lundius. Through the workshops they benefit from research on adolescent brain development and explore best practices on working with students with different styles of learning. Such knowledge can help them tailor their instruction to make the most of their students' experiences. At the same time, Lundius says, the discussions build on what Marwen teachers already know from their work. "We are creating our own professional vocabulary, codifying what it is that sets Marwen teaching apart. We believe that what we learn from engaging teaching artists will be applicable in other settings."

The second Marwen program aims to share those insights with Chicago public school teachers. Over two years, Marwen will offer 300 teachers their choice of professional development courses in the visual arts, ranging from art history to computer graphics and digital photography. Follow-up workshops will explore classroom learning through visual arts and offer a select group of teachers the opportunity to participate in a Studio Art practicum, for both themselves and their own students, at Marwen.

"At least some of the Chicago teachers who show up for Marwen classes are unable at first to see how the visual arts might inform their teaching practices," says Lundius. "We provide new points of access to their own creative potential and inspire them to put that creativity into play with their students." Marwen also provides tools and curriculum for applying what they learn in their own classrooms. And it emphasizes applying visual arts practice (what arts education theorists call "Studio Habits of Mind") to enhance learning in other areas.

With so much pressure on test scores and other narrowly defined measures of achievement, arts education, in Chicago and elsewhere, often suffers. "Public school teachers are up against so many obstacles and contradictions—I have tremendous respect for them," says Lundius. "Here we offer them a completely different environment, a wonderful laboratory for thinking about the place of creativity in their lives and in students' lives, and how to foster it."

By offering that opportunity, Marwen hopes to expand the creative potential of Chicago students well beyond those enrolled in its programs. All the insights Marwen has learned by engaging teaching artists have proved so valuable, says Lundius, that "we don't want to just keep all that to ourselves."