Music educators now have essential questions on which to base their instructional units and by extension the lesson plans within those units. These questions are meant to get at the heart of the discipline of music. They are not like questions students might be asked such as "what is binary form?" or "who was John … Continue reading What Are The Answers To Music’s Essential Questions?
If you are a pubic school music educator, then you are accustomed to writing and posting instructional objectives for your students. In my district, student learning objectives must be posted on the front board at all times so that anyone observing the class can easily see what you are expecting the students to know and … Continue reading Learning Objectives and Essential Questions
One of the challenges school music teachers face is the wide range of grades many of us teach. It is not uncommon for public school music teachers in the United States to teach every student in a school that serves children from pre-kindergarten through 8th grade. Many music teachers teach 500-700 students throughout the course … Continue reading Depth of Learning in Music Classes
Assessment and data collection can be a irksome thing for music teachers. On the one hand, our subject is typically not included in mandated standardized testing, so there are not mandated assessments and reporting systems in place for us. On the other hand, we often feel as though music can not be assessed, because artistic work is subjective … Continue reading Assessment Is Important in Music
While lesson planning is essential to delivering quality instruction, I must admit that I often don't enjoy writing lesson plans. The task often becomes more time consuming than I would like as I search for materials that will be just right for a particular class and objective. While there is a certain flow from one … Continue reading Supercharge Your Music Lesson Plans
In my school district, the objective at the top of each lesson plan, and the objective must begin with the phrase "students will be able to." The idea is to state an objective in terms of what I want the students to know and do as a result of the lesson. This is a helpful way … Continue reading Why Do Essential Questions Improve Music Teaching and Learning?
For most music teachers, organizing instruction into units makes a lot of sense. Typically, we see see students once or twice a week, or every day for a few weeks out of the school year. Teaching a series of lessons all grounded in a single topic helps reinforce important points from week to week, and … Continue reading Where Do I Begin?
Many of us will be giving our winter or holiday concerts in the coming weeks. With the rolling out of the new core arts standards for music, our concerts will be the performance process and the present standard. The interesting thing about the way the standards are laid out for performance is that all of … Continue reading The Concert Is Only Part of the Performance Process
There is much to recommend developing our students into independent and engaged students. The two are related: engaged students go beyond what is asked or required, and generate their own questions that drive their learning. By contrast, dependent students are often compliant, but not engaged. It is easy to settle for a compliant student, even … Continue reading Developing Engaged Learners in Music
One of the most important things any teacher does is set an instructional objective for every class meeting. For music teachers, these goals ought to be tied to our profession's content standards which will soon be the new NCCAS standards. Standards help teachers focus their planning and teaching on what has been identified as most … Continue reading What Do Class Objectives Look Like in Music?