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This article describes a study in which 53 teachers participating in arts-based professional development courses and workshops gained a profound understanding of the role of the arts in education and an appreciation for the powerful role the arts can play in pedagogy and social justice. The findings of study demonstrate how arts-based instructional approaches contributed to the teachers' perceptions about the importance of students' active engagement in the learning process (i.e., the importance of student voice) and the role of higher-order thinking in providing all children the possibility of success in learning. We discuss how the described study was based on action research and how the participants' perspectives were discerned from their writings using document analysis.

In this article, the authors describe the outcomes of a Continuing Professional Development (CPD) course that offered a pedagogical innovation called "Imagination Quest." This CPD course was a part of a 2-year project entitled Teaching to Reach Potential. Participants were all from Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Schools' (MCPS') Program of Assessment, Diagnosis, and Instruction (PADI) schools, an Early Recognition of Potential program whose goal is to identify and nurture potential abilities among those elementary school students most frequently overlooked because of socio-economic, cultural, and/or linguistic differences so that some of them might move on into programs of giftedness and talent. Teachers of PADI students must be willing to acquire and utilize a variety of innovative instructional strategies that recognize learning differences in order to nurture and challenge each and every one of these young people. The CPD course methodology, "Imagination Quest" (IQ), offered this pedagogical innovation. "Imagination Quest" is a performing and visual arts-based teaching and learning model whose purpose is to provide host school teachers with innovative arts-based instructional tools and strategies that can be applied to their existing curriculum and personal pedagogy, that link to learner outcomes in content areas and in the arts, and that foster gains in their students' academic achievement. (Contains 2 tables and 4 endnotes.)

Professors from American University and artists and educators from Imagination Stage, a children's theater and arts-education organization in nearby Bethesda, Maryland, have combined their intellectual and artistic strengths over the past 12 years to create an arts-integrated educational program for elementary and secondary schools throughout the region. "Imagination Quest" teaches schoolteachers how to use the visual arts, dance, drama, and music to help underachieving students, those most at risk for academic failure, become successful learners. The program has recently expanded to include students in the theater-education program at the University of New Hampshire, who are creating arts-integrated curricula in schools in that state. The program builds on the cognitive-learning theories and writings of Howard Gardner, Jerome Bruner, Lev Vygotsky, and Stanley Greenspan, among others, and is supported by research that posits that the brain is social and collaborative. While the learning process takes place in each student's mind, learning is enhanced when the teaching environment gives them opportunities to think out loud, exchange ideas with their peers, and produce collaborative work. Imagination Quest is an example of how colleges, arts organizations, donors, schools, and parents can work together to improve education.