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Evaluation report tells story of Right Brain’s success by Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf


Right Brain is about to plunge into its third round of activity: residencies, professional development and region-wide conversations about imagination being right up there with exercise and vitamins.

Volunteer April Stephens leads an Imagination Interview with a student at Sunnyside Elementary (Clackamas).

The just-released Year 2 evaluation report tells the story of how successful the Initiative has been:

  • Developing a new 21st century framework that asks schools and cultural partners alike to support children’s capacity for what we’re calling the 5 C’s: creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication, and community-building.
  • Stimulating exactly these capacities through school-based residency programs that are moving from modest to fully realized
  • Collecting data in the classrooms of featured teachers to show the value added of infusing the arts.

Because of this excellent work, Right Brain is winning national recognition. The Initiative won a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It has been profiled in the Huffington Post. It had a starring role in a conference on art, science and creativity sponsored by the Exploratorium and the National Science Foundation.

So now that the limelight has been switched on, Year 3 is time to step up the quality and depth of the work with:

  • Deep connections between residencies and the big ideas children can take on – if given the opportunity
  • Strategies for keeping the residency learning alive in classrooms and whole schools long after the artist has left or the performance is over
  • Linking Right Brain outcomes to other indicators of student and school success 

 Download the full 2010 Evaluation Report.



Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf is the evaluation partner for The Right Brain Initiative and a principal researcher at arts consultancy WolfBrown in Cambridge, MA. Read her bio.

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