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.