A roomful of elementary schoolchildren listened to the performance by Piaclava, a clarinet-viola-piano trio. Some children mimicked the motion of playing piano. Others twirled their hair and their name tags. Still others made hand motions in time with the music.

“We’re learning our ABCs, and they have sounds,” a prekindergarten teacher, Kristiana Vervoordt, said when the music had stopped, asking the musicians to show their sheet music to the children.

“Our ABCs have sounds, too,” the violist, Jessica Meyer, said, playing a scale.

“How do you read that?” a little boy asked.

“We learn the alphabet, but in notes,” Ms. Meyer explained.

The children, the musicians, and a Lincoln Center Institute teaching artist, who mediated the conversation, were demonstrating a teaching and learning technique called “aesthetic learning.” The technique is to provide a framework for instruction in everything from music to math at the High School for Arts, Imagination, and Inquiry, one of the 52 new small public schools scheduled to open in September.

The leader of the new school, Stephen Noonan, and other aspiring principals throughout the city completed concept papers and proposals before the announcement of the new schools early this month. That, it turns out, was the easy part.

Between now and the opening day of school, Mr. Noonan isn’t just perfecting aesthetic learning and coming up with the first work of art that will run through instruction in all classes for the first term of school.

Principals and the intermediaries at the organizations sponsoring the new schools will also spend the next six months wooing students and teachers, cementing private partnerships, learning how to cut through the education bureaucracy, devising plans of how to get along with other school leaders,and configuring school buildings.

The way the city’s Department of Education sees it, the 52 proposals it approved are the “textbooks” that lay out the structure of the new schools. Now, the department and the intermediaries will help “operationalize” those plans.

Officials from the department’s Office of New Schools are already meeting individually with the new principals to answer questions and help them evaluate school blueprints and communicate to the School Construction Authority how they would like their classrooms to be configured.

Early next month, the department will start holding weekly three-hour sessions at City Hall Academy, in the basement of Tweed Courthouse, to teach principals the skills they’ll need come September.

“We’ve been working with this group of applicants to make the process as seamless as possible,” the chief executive of the Office of New Schools, Kristen Kane, said. “We meet weekly with new school principals to go over instructional matters and operational strategies that they need to be working on.They’re sequenced and organized around tasks they need to complete before opening.”

The education department approved new schools about two months earlier this year than it did last year. That gives principals more time to map out the upcoming year.

Principals and their intermediaries said they appreciate the extra time, but they said the next six months will not be easy.

The timeline goes something like this: Right now, the schools are trying to attract students by sending principals and other representatives out to school fairs. Most want to attract about five or six applications for every slot available, so that the first-year class will be full of students who want to attend. The students must fill out their New High School Choice Forms by March 1. Once the application deadline passes, the schools move into the teacher-recruitment and professionaldevelopment phases.

Each intermediary organization has come up with its own professional development plan.

The College Board, which is sponsoring three new schools, will hold sessions in “Leading the College Board Way” for three Saturdays in March.The executive director of the New York Education Initiative of the College Board, Helen Santiago, said the College Board opened the sessions up to other intermediaries so there could be a larger dialogue, and they’re already packed.

The Urban Assembly, which is launching five new schools, is meeting every other week with principals and pairing them with experienced mentors, its executive director, Saskia Levy, said. It is also encouraging principals to work with their staffs to map out the instructional vision for the school and to cement long-term partnerships with nonprofit organizations and businesses.

Outward Bound, which is creating three schools, is teaching its principals how to use its renowned teaching framework, “expeditionary learning,” with professional-development sessions on “community exploration,” “curriculum mapping,” and “how to plan/implement a learning expedition,” the executive director of New York City Outward Bound, Richard Stopol, said. It is also sending in mediators to make sure principals mesh with other principals already occupying the buildings they will have to share.

The Institute for Student Achievement, which is starting three schools, is committed to “inquiry-based student-centered instruction,”a model in which students are the workers and teachers are their coaches.

“The students are learning the knowledge. They’re researching it. They’re creating. They’re looking at facts and doing critical thinking based on the facts,” the director of education programs for the Institute for Student Achievement,Anthony Hoffmann, said.

The institute plans to spend some of its grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on training principals in that ideology. Principals will also work with teachers to develop an appropriate curriculum and perfect instructional techniques. The institute will also conduct a five-day summer program to prepare the new staffs.

Starting the first Wednesday in March, the Department of Education will begin holding weekly sessions for principals. In the summer, principals will work with custodians to set up the space, as professional development and other preparations continue.

A regional instructional supervisor for mathematics in the Bronx, Edward Tom, who will be principal of the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, said that on top of training from the city and his intermediary, Replications Inc., he is planning a staff-development retreat in August to help everyone get on board with the school’s mission.

All the work that Mr. Tom and the other new principals are doing currently to prepare for September is being done without pay. Many of the principals, like Mr. Tom, are already on the city payroll for other jobs, but they will not be paid as principals until July 1. Teachers will get their first paychecks in September.

Mr. Tom said he is selling a rigorous college-preparatory high school focusing on math and science. Students will have two “foundational years” in the ninth and 10th grades, when they will receive 420 minutes a week of math, English, and science. By 11th grade, students will pick a math track or a science track, which they will pursue for the rest of high school.

“The most important part to what I’m trying to offer kids is their right to have choice in their local community,” Mr.Tom said. “It’s definitely my area of expertise, and the area I feel I can really develop a strong plan around.”

All the people involved in starting a new school said the next few months would be challenging. But all also said that with a full year of experience, this year’s task will be easier than last year’s.

The founder and president of the Urban Assembly, Richard Kahan, said this year’s process is “faster and more constructive” with a “tighter” schedule and better-quality professional development.

“We are not reinventing the wheel. Each year, we are learning with each other,” he said. “There’s no question that it is a difficult transition — taking a building that is a failing building with a lot of students and phase in a small school while you’re phasing out a large school. … But it’s getting smarter, if not necessarily easier.”