Deadline to Apply - October 16, 2023

NDEO is now recruiting 150 K-12 dance educators to serve as Professional Learning Community (PLC) participants - 10 under each of the 15 Teacher Leaders! These PLCs will meet virtually each month of the school year starting in January 2024 through June 2026 and will focus on professional learning in the areas of equity, diversity and inclusion; social emotional learning; and teacher leadership through an arts education lens.

Learn More & Apply

CAN Town Hall Virtual Meeting - FREE -- all K-12 Dance Educators Welcome

At this Town Hall, you will hear from current CAN Teacher Leaders in each art form who are part of the inaugural cohort, in addition to learning more about the program, benefits, and how to apply!

Register for Town Hall

The National Art Education Association (NAEA), in partnership with the Educational Theater Association (EdTA), the National Association for Music Education (NAfME), and the National Dance Education Organization (NDEO) launched the Connected Arts Networks (CAN) in 2022. This 5-year grant initiative, funded by the US Department of Education, is designed to create nationwide virtual Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) with educators in visual arts, music, theater, dance and media arts. The purpose of CAN is to build a sustainable model of professional learning for arts educators in PreK-12 public schools and PreK-12 public charters to strengthen their pedagogy, instruction, and leadership skills in order to better serve students.

In year one (2022)  of this multi-year project, CAN Teacher Leaders for dance were selected (Spring 2022) for NDEO via an application and adjudication process as described here. You can view the accepted 15 CAN Dance Teacher Leaders here. Read the Dance Teacher Leaders Selected (CAN) Press Release. 

In year two (2023), the initial PLC of Teacher Leaders will receive specialized virtual training to build their capacity to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and social-emotional learning within dance instruction. After year two (2023), each PLC Teacher Leader will be prepared to facilitate their own virtual PLC, which will include 10 dance educators of their same art discipline and student grade levels in these same content areas, while also emphasizing the importance of leadership skills. We view these content areas as the most pressing for dance educators at this moment in time and believe that we can positively impact students by creating opportunities for dance educators to learn from and with each other.

• Justice, Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (JDEI)
• Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) 
• Standards-based arts instruction and Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

• To develop highly effective arts educators, building their capacity to address ED&I and SEL in their standards-based arts instruction through sustained, intensive, and job-embedded blended professional learning.
• To develop accessible arts-based instructional materials, strategies, and toolkits to disseminate to arts educators nationwide, including synchronous and asynchronous professional development programs and digital resources.