The overall purpose of the Langberg Foundation is to facilitate the radical design of the US education system at all levels. Colorado is one of twenty states that have enacted two laws that help to make the mission possible: a Charter School statute and one creating alternative paths to teacher certification. The Langberg Foundation is working in partnership with the Our Musical Heritage, a foundation of the Denver Musicians Association, to create a charter school in the Denver metropolitan area that will provide a learning laboratory for bringing professional artists and musicians into the teaching profession via the alternative certification route.

The "Harmony School", the working title for this new charter school, will begin with students from the ages of three through ten, and the curriculum will be arts-focused, with particular attention to music as an integrating force for learning across conventional disciplines. The faculty will be comprised of three categories: master teachers, who will be continuing members of the Harmony School staff, professional artists and musicians, who will join the staff for the one year necessary for them to obtain their teaching licenses, and bridge-builder teachers from within the same school system, who will spend one year in Harmony and then return to their respective home schools.

Although the design team for Harmony School brings many years of experience in school reform, it has been decided to initiate an exercise to elicit the best thinking of people across the country as to what essential elements must be included to create a successful learning environment for all the students. The Langberg Foundation list will be the heart of this process, but it is hoped that Langberg Foundation web page will attract many other responses at well.

We are utilizing a process called the Delphi Method. This is a means of structuring communication to allow a group of individuals, as a whole, to deal with a complex problem. If you will respond to the question below with just three powerful ideas, we will collect these and send back to you the complete list of ideas from all of the respondents. We will then ask you to choose the three best ideas from list, we will collect the results of this second iteration and do a third "mailing." It is our hope that by the third set of responses we will have arrived at, or be very near to, a consensus on the essential elements for the design of an ideal learning environment.

If you were going to design a school that would be arts-focused and using music as an integrating force, what would be the three components that you would consider essential for this environment to be effective?

Please communicate your thoughts to us via email or via snail mail. Your information will be compiled with other Delphi participants and the results will be returned to you for further development and feedback.

Email: harmony@langberg.org

Postal Mail: Langberg Foundation, 5376 S. High Road, Suite 100 Evergreen, CO 80439 USA