Noel Community Arts High School Inclusion Champions

These are teachers who were nominated for modeling Inclusive Practices at Noel Community Arts High School in honor of Disability Awareness month. To see other schools nominees, visit our Disability Awareness Submissions page.

“While in this remote world, our Arts teachers are expected to teach every student at our school. To make that happen, the Arts teachers need to deliver the majority of their instruction asynchronously with a single live or synchronous class each week for each period they teach.

Our dance teacher, Mistelle, works with students across 6th through 12th grades, including our students who are serviced through our MI Center Based Programs. Dr. Arseneau is our 9th and 10th grade MI Center Based teacher and he noticed that his students thrive when they can collaborate on projects rather than work in isolation.

The students in Mistelle’s class were assigned a project to develop their own choreographed dance to music of their choice. Our MI staff has been working above and beyond by meeting with the small groups of students to work on each of their individual projects but they were beginning to get overwhelmed and students were losing interest and motivation. Dr. Arseneau and Mistelle partnered during our PD time to collaborate on developing a project based approach that would encourage student collaboration in the hopes to increase motivation.

Each young dancer was offered the opportunity to develop their own choreography; then as a group the students voted on their favorite dance. The students then practiced the dance and coached each other through the moves with the support of the MI staff and special Office Hours provided by Mistelle. Once the students were confident with their dance, they met with Mistelle and she recorded the three young ladies together on the same Google Meets screen.

Even though we were all in our respective homes, these young ladies were able to dance together. The project was a success! These young women were so proud of themselves and each other. Their motivation sky rocketed and they were very excited to show off their work. I am very proud of the effort that these two teachers put into making this remote environment more meaningful and more collaborative for our students who are our most vulnerable learners”

— Nominated by Elizabeth Nix