Greetings all!
I had the great pleasure of presenting at the National OAKE Conference in Columbus Ohio. It was such an honor to share what I am doing in my room and I hope everyone who attended was inspired to try something new in their room. I did a version of this workshop at the Maryland Music Educators Association Conference in February so I am combining the notes for both here. So let’s dive in!
(This is from December where we made shakers in Early Childhood out of donated containers filled with beans/rice. It was a huge messy party and I highly recommend it)
Ashley teaches in Fairfax County and is an instructor at the American Kodály Institute at Loyola University in Baltimore. She did a fabulous session about differentiation so I wanted to cite her here for more information. In my session I covered just a tiny slice of the differentiation pie so definitely check out Ashley’s work to get a bigger picture.
Our job as music teachers is really hard. We teach anywhere from 350 to over 1000 children and keeping track of each child’s needs can be daunting. Obviously we are looking at IEP and 504 Plans and aligning our instruction to their needs but for the rest of our population, how can we possibly be expected to tailor instruction to every child? The answer is that we can’t. But what we can do is create an environment in our room where our students get to take control of their own learning.
My session was primarily focused on the student’s motivation as the differentiating tool.
According to a study by Hanover Research, “Student choice makes students active participants in their educations, thereby increasing levels of engagement. Notably, researchers highlight the fact that such autonomy is generally associated with greater personal well‐being and satisfaction in educational environments as well as in terms of academic performance.”
So how can we give the students opportunities to control their own learning process in the music room? There are so many possible answers to this question and I am sure you have your own ideas that you implement in your room. My answer was to adapt the Reading and Writing Workshop model to the music room.
You may be nervous thinning about adapting a model that is designed for the general education classroom for music but I promise it’s not as scary as you might think. Let’s look at what happens in the workshop model.
When I was reading this, it all sounded very familiar once you translate it through a music room lens. We are already doing a lot of these things so I hope you are feeling a little less anxious about trying out something new. Let’s look now at what is happening specifically during the workshop time.
Looking at this table, there is definitely a lot of things we are already doing in our classroom. The only tweaks I would make are the amount of time for independent reading and writing and possibly the length of the mini-lesson. The choices that you make are going to depend on the length of your instructional period. If you are working within a 30 minute period you are going to have to cut and crunch more than someone with a 45 minute period. Alternatively, if you are at the middle or high school level, you might be saying this is not enough time for your 90 minute block. Anyone who has ever been to one of my sessions will know that I am all about adapting. You know your kids and you’re constraints so take what can you can use and toss the rest. TLDR: you do you boo!
To make this work, you might have to make a few changes to your classroom routines.
Having kids everywhere working on different things means that your procedures have to super solid. I am at a Responsive Classroom school so we have a specific way in which we teach our procedures.
Talking about Responsive Classroom is a whole ‘nother can of worms so I will let you do your own research on that or check out some of my earlier blog posts. Long story short, I believe it is a great system for teaching children how to develop their self and social awareness in a way that is respectful of their autonomy and voice. I highly recommend it if you or your school are looking for a new behavior support system.
Here is a picture of my kiddos successfully using our flexible seating with no pillow fights!
Ok so let’s really get this show on the road. How do you actually do this in your room? Here is roughly my process of getting this project off the ground.
I made this cute little music coloring page online and added the part on the bottom for their name. Students learned how to use the flexible seating via interactive modeling then were allowed to decorate their journal covers while utilizing the flexible seating. When they were done coloring, they glued the paper to a larger piece of construction paper. Then we hole punched the whole thing and made it into a journal. You will see what the pages look like in a moment. I do not recommend the 3-hole-punch tie the ribbon thing. It took FOREVER so learn from me and just staple those bad boys together.
After we made the covers, students were asked to tell me about their hopes and dreams for their instrument. Thinking about hopes and dreams is also a big part of Responsive Classroom. I found this valuable for me because I could see what was motivating them. That little window allows me to better support and empower them towards that goal as well.
The next lesson, we completed a K-W-(L) chart. I chopped off the L part because I don’t want to hang on to these for the rest of my life. I will do exit interviews at some point to see what they learned but until then, this tells me enough. This is where they choose the instrument they would like to use for their independent study. I required at least three bullet points so that’s why you see three here. This was another valuable glimpse for me to gather information about what they already know and their motivations (which is why we ask kids to do this in the first place).
Now that we have completed all of our preparatory activities, we can finally have our first mini-lesson. YAY!!! It’s only been two months since we began this process……
I made the page above to guide my kiddos in their journaling. After I complete a mini-lesson, my slide looks like this:
I only require my students to fill out the top two bubbles and the date. I encourage them to write in the bottom two bubbles, but they are not required. If they do write something to me, I respond in the box to the right. I will show some student samples a little later.
So let’s see a mini-lesson! Below are the actual slides I show my kiddos.
In this slide, I click on the link and we experience the metronome together. They really get a kick out of this. Then I give them some listening examples.
Listening example above
It is important for me to point out that I always show videos of actual people performing the music. I think the visual of humans playing the music is so valuable for our students to realize that classical music is a living breathing organism. I also make a point of showing a variety of people playing the music. I don’t always use classical music examples either. In fact, I try very hard to show living people of color performing their own contemporary music or the music of their peers to make sure that my students see themselves reflected in the music world.
Listening example above
If you notice, there is a typo in that slide. whoops…..6 classes of 4th and 5th graders did not catch that. Oh well, you can’t win them all I guess.
I also include emotions because I want the kiddos knowing that they can use topic of the mini-lesson to convey a feeling or message in their own music. Are these descriptions and definitions overly simplified and reductive? Yes. Are the humans I teach nine and ten years old? Also yes. If you teach older kids, scale it up to meet their vocabulary needs. TLDR: you do you boo!
Because the mini-lesson is meant to be mini, I do not show the entire video. I will do a maximum of 30-45 seconds. Kids can only do something for as many minutes as they are old. So if you are teaching three year-olds, they can only do an activity for three minutes. If you are teaching ten year-olds, they can only do an activity for three minutes. (See what I did there? #thestruggleisreal)
Below is a sample of how the students journal after the mini-lesson
I have a little stamp that I use to “check off” each journal. This is their ticket to the instruments. No stamp, no iPad. Sorry-not-sorry Johnny but you have to do at least a little bit of work to get your tech fix.
You can find all these journal pages in a google drive folder here! BONUS: It’s in English and Spanish 🙂
The last thing that needs to be done is goal setting. This happens once the kiddos have had some time to explore the instruments and get a feel for what they really want to accomplish. To do goal-setting, I use SMART Goals which I found on TpT. When I was young and poor I would make things like this from scratch but now I am willing to for over $5 to save myself 4 hours of work so thank you TpT!!
For this, I actually make the SMART Goals the mini-lesson for that day. I go over what a SMART Goal is then tell the students that I will be interviewing them to hear about their goals. The SMART Goals template is pretty long and involved so I don’t want to turn off their brains by asking them to write it themselves. I make a big production out of the interviews. I made a little press badge, put my form on a clipboard and got a fake microphone. They get a kick out of me making a big deal of interviewing them like they are a famous person. Also, it allows me to ask more clarifying questions to get to what I am really looking for. Here is an example of an interview I did last week.
When it was time for the “timely” box, I actually took out a calendar and showed this student what today was, and how many more lessons we would have before June. He decide the beginning of May was a doable so I wrote it down. For “attainable” he just gave me a smile and shrugged so that’s basically what I wrote. Short and sweet right?
The other thing I am doing during the independent work time is pulling small-groups.
Small-group time is for teaching a skill or concept that does not apply to the whole group. The Elements of Music apply to the whole group, but tuning the guitar does not so I would teach that skill in a small-group setting. I am also looking at what they write in their journals to me in the “I need help with…” bubble. If a few kids write to me about wanting to learn how to write lyrics, that would be a great small-group lesson.
So what are some other mini-lesson topics we could do?
Here is the list I came up with before the session:
The incredible attendees did some brainstorming and came up with a few more topics: Meter, practice habits, arranging and staff reading (clef, lines and spaces, etc.).
So I am going to drop a little disclaimer right here and I realize it might be a little late. I recognize that I am extremely lucky to have as many resources at my school as I do. Even though we are a Title 1 school, I have an absurd amount of money thrown at me to spend both from my central office as well as from our very active and generous PTU. That is not the case everywhere so I put it to our attendees to brainstorm a little about how they could use this model in their room if they are short on instruments.
Here is my initial list, then what the attendees came up with.
Attendees suggested that we could use un-pitched percussion. Another suggested that the model could be used in beginning band or orchestra and a third attendee thought that this would be possible to use with voices only. Additionally, the fabulous Lauren McDougle, who is the director of that very same America Kodály Institute that Ashely Cuthbertson teaches at, suggested that we could lay out all of the instruments we have and ask the kiddos what we could do with them. I love that idea and am always pro giving room for as much student voice a possible so snaps to Lauren!
The last thing to cover is the sharing portion of the workshop. Students can share at the end of the lesson what they’ve been working on or you can designate specific share days at the end of each month. I prefer the latter because I am never on top of my game enough to wrap everyone up with enough time for a share, clean-up, and line-up. I will be the first to admit that the last 5% of my class period is always a hot-mess-express of instruments being put away and kids jostling into line. It’s a weakness of mine and something I need to work. It’s coming from a place of wanting to give the kiddos as much time as possible to play but no excuses! I gotta get.it.together.
At the very end of the “unit” there is always a celebration event where parents and friends attend a publishing party. This is such a joyful experience for the kids and their families and it validates them as published authors. We have a few opportunities for this within our already set up calendar expectations.
I am considering doing both a “poster session” and a more formal concert. The “poster session” will be where I invite younger grades to sign up to come to the music period of a 4th or 5th grade class so that there can be a one to one interaction between the lower elementary students and their upper elementary composer counterparts. I will prep the younger ones with potential questions to ask the composer and I know there is going to be some really special connections made.
I am also interested in doing a volunteer-only concert. I have some very driven kiddos who are just DYING to be on-stage. I am anti-talent show so we aren’t going to go that route, but I definitely need to have my kiddos who want to be on stage for their friends and families get that opportunity to shine.
Here are the main two iPad apps that my kiddos are using to compose and mix beats.
They’ve made some fabulous stuff and I have used it as the transition music during concerts when classes/grade levels are coming on and off the stage.
And that about sums up what I covered in my session. I showed a few more videos of my students performing their draft compositions which you can find on our instagram page.
I hope my session and this post have helped to spark an idea. If you have any questions or want help brainstorming, feel free to email me anytime.
Like I’ve said before, you know your kiddos and your classroom so keep what you like, adapt as needed, and toss the rest. TLDR: you do you boo!
Sing-cerely,
Lucia S.