Arts Integration Coach - ASALA; After School Arts Learning Academy

Arts Integration Coach - ASALA (After School Arts for Learning Academy)

Arts for Learning Maryland (formerly Young Audiences of Maryland) is devoted to enriching the lives and education of Maryland’s youth through educational and culturally diverse arts programs. Through Arts for Learning, professional teaching artists from all disciplines partner with educators, schools, and school districts to provide -- on average -- over 560,000 hours of learning in, through, and about the arts to more than 155,000 Maryland students annually.

Arts for Learning is a mission-driven organization that values community, innovation, and passion. The staff, board, and teaching artists have a shared commitment to advance equity in the field of education by working tirelessly to generate opportunities for students to imagine, create, and realize their full potential through the arts.

The After School Arts for Learning Academy (ASALA), operated by Arts for Learning Maryland (A4L) in partnership with Baltimore City Schools, offers students the opportunity to imagine, create, and express themselves through the arts.

This action-packed program runs four days a week, three hours per day
. Students explore diverse art forms—from illustration and spoken word to percussion, drama, and dance—while also strengthening literacy and math skills through co-planned, arts-integrated instruction. Each site serves up to 156 students in groups of 26, taught by certified teachers and professional teaching artists.

Mission, Core Values, and Anti-Racist Practices:

ASALA’s mission is to provide students with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn with outstanding teachers and teaching artists in a dynamic, creative, supportive, and student centered environment.

• Believing in the potential of all students to achieve through the arts.
• Honoring students’ voices and creative processes.
• Creating safe, inclusive, and brave learning spaces.
• Cultivating strong relationships with students, families, and staff through a culture of learning, collaboration, and reflection.
• Encouraging critical thinking, problem solving, inquiry, imagination, and creativity through multiple pathways of teaching and learning.
• Knowing, honoring, and leveraging the cultural knowledge and lived experiences of students and communities.
• Ensuring every student is known, loved, supported, celebrated, and valued.
• Creating inclusive environments where all students’ unique talents are discovered and cultivated, and where their identities are reflected all around them and matter through acknowledgement and affirmation
• Confronting biases and taking small, but consistent steps to eliminate systemic racism in education.
• Cultivating spaces where Black joy thrives.
• Engaging with families as true partners in the work.

The Arts Integration Coach plays a critical role in ensuring high-quality, rigorous, and meaningful learning in both literacy and math at ASALA sites. Serving as the site’s arts integration specialist, the Coach supports teachers and teaching artists with collaborative planning, lesson development, classroom management, and observation.

The Coach works across multiple sites and is an integral member of each Site Administration Team.

• Monitor use of instructional resources and reallocate as needed.
• Ensure timely submission of weekly instructional outlines.
• Track and document arts integration/co-teaching planning time.
• Support daily site operations, transitions, and logistics.
• Participate in student, family, and community events.
• Create a positive culture aligned with ASALA’s mission and values.
• Support completion of required documentation (attendance, surveys, rubrics, reports).
• Uphold all health and safety requirements (BCPSS, CDC, WHO, A4L).

Professional Development

• Facilitate and support PD prior to program launch.
• Conduct site readiness checks before the first day.

Mentoring & Coaching

• Develop and maintain a weekly coaching schedule.
• Provide in-class observations and written feedback.
• Offer classroom coverage to allow peer observation.
• Co-teach as…