Goals for the 2017-1018 school year

Upon completing my Orff training this past summer, I'm aspiring to unpack "process teaching" as it applies to my work with students. This term, "process teaching", refers to the approach that a teacher takes in developing material with students, the outcome of which is dependent upon student creativity. Process teaching reminds me mostly of reverse design where the teacher, in planning, works backward from an imagined outcome in order to break a lesson down into it's most understandable components so that relevant concepts are experienced by students before they are intellectualized, so that these experiences can be built upon at a pace that allows for student skill development, and so that students have multiple opportunities to be creative and, in so doing, determine a big part of the outcome of the unit. There is a lot here to do well, and master Orff technicians really have process teaching down.

One challenge for me is having enough contact time with students. Most of my colleagues from the Orff training cohort see their general music students at least twice per week, and some more often. I believe that frequency has an impact on how well students remember learned material from class to class. The review time required with less frequent classes, makes it take longer to teach and learn a unit. Older students tire of staying in the same material for long stretches - 6 to 8 weeks - and they get bored, prompting me to move on to new songs and units before much master has happened. When more than half of my classes at Waitsfield are held on a Monday, contact time gets cut even shorter with three day weekends there.

One action plan item I am concerned with is music program equity. Crossett Brook has figured out a schedule - for band and chorus, it's really in how lunches are arranged, and for general music it's in scheduling the class in multiple days per week blocks -  that allows students to be involved with multiple music classes per week in addition to their private, pull-out instrumental lessons with little impact on academics. Students are moving through material more quickly and thoroughly with the advantages of greater frequency and, I believe, they are able to make more meaningful musical connections as a result of having more contact time.

More to come...

Goals Reflection 2017

My goal of engaging with long-term planning was well married to my goal of emphasizing student creativity this year. In September I chose a number of pieces that would serve as vehicles for students to improvise, compose, and perform a “finished product” for xylophone, percussion, body percussion, dance, recorder, and voice. For 4^th through 6^th grade, because the material was a bit more rigorous, I had to adjust my long-term plan to accommodate the time limitation that 40 minutes per week allowed, scrapping a number of pieces I had planned on. I simply went with the pace of developing the aforementioned skills that the students set within the context of one piece for each of these grade-level clusters. By June, each class had multiple opportunities to be creative with each of these elements and to develop the aforementioned skills (as well as a better understanding of form, structure, and melodic composition) within the context of just one performance piece. I would have liked to do more pieces that contained these elements, but time – or my understanding of how the time could be best used - did not allow for doing it well. I opted for allowing students to master one piece rather than moving on before they could really perform it cohesively as a group. I stuck to my original plan for student skill development and a standard of performability. Next year, I will be thinking about how to do this skill development simultaneously with multiple pieces.