Teachers plan and deliver effective instruction and create an environment that facilitates learning for their students.
Element A:
Teachers demonstrate knowledge about the ways in which learning takes place, including the levels of intellectual, physical, social, and emotional development of their students.
Artifact (EPES): Five-part General Music Lesson Plan Outline
Elementary school students thrive with varied activities. I worked with my cooperating teacher, Paul Maley, to plan five-part lessons. Students almost always begin with a movement warmup, often using Dalcroze Eurhythmics. “Trees and Giants” is a movement activity with rhythmic prep on tubano drums. After movement, students are ready for the first concentration, focused on the melodic concepts sol, mi, and la. The students practiced these concepts with an inner hearing activity, where they try to guess a familiar song played by me on trumpet and hear the words in their head. We played the game associated with the same song after concentration. The change of pace breaks up the lesson with more movement – here, I played piano and students walked to the beat in a circle. When the music stopped, they displaced the beat to their hands. The second concentration was focused on the rhythmic concepts purple (two 8th notes) and red (one quarter note). Students connected syllables of a rhyme, “Thunder, Lightning,” to notated quarter and 8th notes. This also promoted phonemic awareness and the connection of English and music. The lesson closes with more movement. In this “Fourth Note Game,” I play four notes on the piano, and the students jump and land together on the fourth note. This helps them internalize pulse in different tempos and react with the whole body, preparing them to do so with instruments. By having several short activities, students are able to meet granular learning objectives one at a time in both rhythmic and melodic concepts.
Element B:
Teachers use formal and informal methods to assess student learning, provide feedback, and use results to inform planning and instruction.
Artifact (EPES): 5th Grade Scale Building Worksheet
Part of the spring music curriculum for EPES fifth grade students is singing, building, and notating major scales. Each class builds a new scale each week, and my cooperating teacher and I use the same worksheet throughout the unit. During the scale-building activity in class, we informally assess students’ notation and singing to inform pacing and scaffolding. Once the unit is over, the worksheet demonstrates the body of students’ work as a formal assessment, and we can gauge the students’ progress and where they might need more instruction in the next unit. As such, the worksheet functions as a tool of both informal and formal assessment. The worksheet above demonstrates that the student was confident building G and D major scales, but struggled with F Major because the first note was wrong. This informs my instruction because I now know to take extra time to ensure the students’ first note is notated correctly. I used peer-assessment strategies to ensure success with the first note, which led to more success in notation in the rest of this scale for this student.
Element C:
Teachers integrate and utilize appropriate available technology to engage students in authentic learning experiences.
Artifact (RMHS): Google Classroom Music Theory Assessment
The RMHS band, orchestra, and choir programs have an aligned music theory curriculum for all 9th Grade students. During my student teaching, I taught Units 8, 9, and 10 of this curriculum in the 9th grade Symphonic Band class. I primarily taught music theory concepts in these units (major, minor, augmented, and diminished triads) through playing and singing the triads as a class, writing them by hand on staff paper, and having students aurally identify the different triad types. However, for assessments (including formative “check-in quizzes” and end-of-unit tests), we used Google Classroom and Forms so students can move at their own pace with assessments. They can hear listening examples with headphones to not distract other students and submit their test when done. The system grades answers automatically to save grading time, and compiles data on students’ readiness with the concepts. While the learning experiences of these concepts are still authentic to the discipline (playing, singing, writing on paper), we still use some technology to gather data and inform instruction.
Element D:
Teachers establish and communicate high expectations and use processes to support the development of critical-thinking and problem-solving skills.
Artifact (RMHS): Lesson Plan for Rocky Mountain Winds – Including Student-Led Rehearsal
I am constantly helping my students build their independence as musicians. In the lesson outlined above, I followed a general progression from teacher-led rehearsal to student-led rehearsal. I began by leading a rehearsal process (shown on Page 2 of the PDF for Rhosymedre) where students play a segment, listen for all the parts, and determine their role in the music. After leading the process several times, I turned it over to the students, who started and conducted themselves with their breath, and gave feedback to each other. I have followed similar progressions in different pieces, including Standridge’s Havana Nights and Leemans’s March of the Belgian Paratroopers. In every case, student-led rehearsal helps the students develop problem-solving skills, self-assessment, metacognition, and critical listening and thinking. By modeling rehearsal strategies through teacher-led rehearsal, I can communicate high expectations that the students then work towards in their student-led rehearsals. Most importantly, it helps the students become independent musicians capable of collaboratively preparing music with others.
Element E:
Teachers provide students with opportunities to work in teams and develop leadership.
Artifact (EPES): 4th Grade Peer-Assisted Learning Arrangements with Ukuleles
Group work is effective and successful when there is a deadline, an objective, and all students must be successful for the group to accomplish the objective. In the photo above, 4th Grade students at EPES are collaborating to create a four-chord progression on their ukuleles to perform for the class. They only had 5 minutes to come up with a progression, practice moving between the chords, and ensure that all group members were prepared to perform. This allowed students to develop leadership and work as a team to accomplish a musical goal. It was pedagogically valuable to watch leaders emerge in each group. As I’ve gotten to know the students more, I can intentionally create the groups with mixed ability levels. Students who are struggling can learn from a strong peer, and advanced students have the opportunity to help their peers.
Element F:
Teachers model and promote effective communication.
Artifact (RMHS): Symphonic Band Weekly Announcements Document and Daily Slides
In the RMHS band program, we make weekly information documents and daily class slides to proactively communicate details about rehearsal schedules, events, and assessments. This allows us as the directors to plan rehearsals one week at a time, but also provides students with a resource for prioritizing their practice. RMHS has a complex “crossover” system where students can take band and choir classes concurrently, and their schedule for those students is different each day. The information for those students is provided on the first slide. This first slide also reinforces a strict beginning of class by listing the time class begins and the exact time of day. Students are expected to be in their seats playing the warmup chorale at the bell, so the slides are helpful for communicating what chorale to play and the exact time, especially with schedule changes such as late start on Wednesdays or assembly schedules. The slides also contain instructional materials such as rhythm reading exercises, in the exact rehearsal order for the day.
While they can be time-consuming to create, these methods of clear, proactive, and abundant communication with students pays dividends with student preparedness and time saved in rehearsal.