Students are provided opportunities for choice in their learning, outlets for expression and are encouraged to present their learning through multiple modalities.

Parents become actively involved with authentic projects and are engaged in working collaboratively to advance the school toward its HOT School and school improvement goals.

Committed leadership is the hallmark of a school participating in the HOT Schools Program. Every HOT school has its own unique climate and culture. Each lives in a district with its own mission and mandates. Principal leaders must work collaboratively with their staff, parents and district to ensure that the community is comfortable with an arts-integrated approach to teaching and learning. They must be willing to participate in professional development, build their school’s foundation by embracing the HOT APPROACH and modeling their understanding and commitment to arts learning.

Teaching Artists are critical partners in HOT Schools. They bring extraordinary skills in a particular discipline: dance, theater, visual arts, music, media or creative writing. They partner with arts and non-arts classroom teachers whose extraordinary skill resides in their content knowledge and understanding of certain strategies for transmitting that knowledge to students.  Together, the team forges a collaborative partnership to design authentic arts-integrated learning opportunities for students through which students apply higher order thinking processes -imagining, decision-making, creating, performing and responding in their learning.

Teacher leaders emerge in HOT Schools in a variety of ways. They are teacher who show initiative, advocate for the learning needs of their students and accept the challenge to be innovative and reflective. They adapt HOT Strategies and design new ones that best meet their school’s unique needs.  Site Coordinators are the front line of leadership in a HOT School.

They are the liaisons between the school community and the HOT Schools Program, responsible for spearheading the efforts to create an interdisciplinary leadership team, sharing information, encouraging and gathering teams for professional development opportunities, managing Teacher Artist Collaborations (TACs) to ensure they are logistically successful, and typically modeling leadership for their colleagues. Teacher Leaders may also be teachers who have played a central role in incorporating one or more of the HOT School Core Components in an intentional and creative way to enrich their teaching, expand their “HOT Schools Tool Kit”, and share their knowledge and enthusiasm with their school community and beyond.