James Patrick Jensen

Ubd and the Ensemble: Goals, Big Ideas, and Where to Start!

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Essential Questions: What do my students get out of this music? What is this standard really getting at?

Goals and the Music Ensemble

As musicians and music educators prepare  for performances, they set goals related to the musical content in order to make the best use of their time. Private instructors give their students goals and benchmarks in preparation for a recital so that their students have a clear understanding of what they need to accomplish in their practice each week.

Musicians are great at setting (and accomplishing) goals! It’s a natural part of what it means to be a musician as we prepare for performance. So the question isn’t whether or not to use goals in the music ensemble, but how best to identify and implement goals as we plan for performances and meaningful rehearsals.

Goals and Content Standards

As the NCCAS continues to prepare the new Common Arts Standards, music educators are responding with a lot of ideas as to what the goals of our profession should be (Tim Purdum, a K-5 Music Educator from Waterloo, Iowa, has some great posts about these new standards). I had a great discussion last week at the weekly #musedchat on Twitter about the role and purpose of performance in a whole music education philosophy (especially @ramccready).

Now, I won’t get into my thoughts on the NCCAS standards in this post, but they do attempt to identify some of the larger overarching goals of music education and art education as a whole. They identify three artistic processes as a means to organize our thinking about what we want students to do: Creating, Performing, and Responding.

One of the ways that McTighe and Wiggins encourage teachers to identify the larger curricular goals for a class is to examine the standards they have been asked to teach. When teachers begin with these processes (and the standards that fall under them), they can identify some of the big ideas contained within the three processes (Which are, in fact, even bigger ideas!).

For ensemble directors, I’m not sure starting there is always the best idea. It is absolutely necessary to consider how to teach standards within the ensemble classroom, but beginning with those standards does not account for they ways in which ensemble teachers teach and reteach musical concepts and big ideas over and over again through the use of musical literature. The repertoire guides the scope and sequence as teachers design for musical learning and musical experiences. Therefore, it may be necessary to develop the larger goals for ensemble learning in conjunction with the repertoire being used.

The way to the goals is not as important as the process of identifying the goals and big ideas needed for a skilled, musical performance by the students.

Priorities: Where to Start?

UbD encourages teachers to organize their content standards, understandings, and skills into three groups to identify what big ideas students need to grasp by the end of an instructional unit.

Individual pieces of music, scales, and methods exercises are not necessary for students enduring understanding of music-making throughout their lives. Even the skills required to play an instrument or read music may not always be what students will take from our ensembles and remember 20 years down the line(Though I would certainly like them to!)

Sorting content knowledge according to these categories helps us identify what we want students to take with them when they leave our classroom.

Sorting content knowledge according to these categories helps us identify what we want students to take with them when they leave our classroom.

Examples

Here are a few goals and understandings that I’ve identified through my study of UbD. Keep in mind that goals should always relate both to the content standards you are working towards as well as the repertoire the ensemble is performing!

  • Tension/Release
  • How did we get our modern system of notation?
  • What is music?
  • Is music a “language?”
  • Music as tool for social justice
  • Breath and musical production

Feel free to suggest some more big ideas that you have found helpful in designing student learning!

Enduring Understanding: Identifying the big ideas that anchor the total design provides students with direction and cohesiveness in all learning experiences.

Note: The UbD and the Ensemble series is a sort of guided tour through the book Understanding by Design by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. In this series, I attempt to connect the work they have done to vocal and instrumental ensembles and the challenges of designing rehearsals with student understanding in mind. Please comment with your own experience in teaching music for understanding!

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30 Day Blogging Challenge Day 3

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Day 3: In which area do you think you can improve the most?

There’s an ease to master teachers when they are in the classroom that I

David Newell’s new book Classroom Management in the Music Room: “Pin-Drop Quiet” Classes and Rehearsals

sincerely admire. When I think of the best elementary music educator that I’ve observed, I think of someone with an intense mastery of the craft, a curriculum design that gets results, and an infectious personality. (I should go visit her at school sometime soon!)

One thing that I recognize in master teachers that I haven’t managed to pin-point and define. I’ve written about David Newell’s seminar on classroom management for the music classroom before here, but until I have my own classroom, I won’t be able to fully implement his strategies in a meaningful way with my own students.

While I was implementing his strategies I wasn’t fully confident with them. They weren’t my own. I was borrowing from an expert. And that’s okay. I often told my choir students at my second placement school that I didn’t much care if they really believed the words they were singing, but they needed to convince me that they did. “Fake it ’till you make it” may sound like a disingenuous practice, but I think it’s a valid way to come into new teaching strategies and find success outside of my comfort zone.

Some things will come with time. I’d love to be the best teacher ever right away,

Photo Manip by karl683 2012

but I realize that so much of what a great teacher great is experience working with students and learning from mistakes.

So here’s to some new mistakes and new lessons!

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30 Day Blog Challenge Day 2

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Day 2: What do you believe is your greatest strength as a teacher?

What’s the saying about “man’s best-laid plans?” One of the best lessons I learned in Student Teaching was that a well-thought out lesson plan will sometimes go south. That half of your students will be on a trip. They aren’t picking up something as quickly as you hoped. You weren’t informed about a fire drill. Someone tries to throw a chair.

I think one of my biggest strengths as a teacher is my ability to adapt to unusual circumstances and be flexible in my teaching and planning. As a student teacher I worked with four very different cooperating teachers, and an ever-changing landscape of student interactions. Many days my plans were fine and I think I taught some great lessons during student teaching. But there were certainly times where things did not go according to plan.

It’s easy to get frustrated. To let the students talk until the bell, to play a simple game. Certainly better planning is needed, but in those moments, when my best-laid plans have been laid waste (even by a Kindergartener!), I find that I figure it out. I don’t know if it’s intuition, training, or sheer luck, but the teacher in me comes out. You find ways to make it work and meet the students where they are.

Is it always perfect? Of course not. During one of my supervisor observations I realized I had not properly pre-assessed the knowledge of a group of late elementary students and had to completely revise my plan, but I saw their frustration and didn’t try to charge forward with my plan. It seems like such a small thing, but I recognize now that it was an important moment in my teaching. I messed up, recognized it in the students, and fixed it on the spot.

So my greatest strength as a teacher right now is flexibility (and content knowledge, and pedagogy, and student relationships, and a bunch of other principle friendly lingo). Maybe one day my planning will catch up to my teaching, but until then, I know I can adapt and adjust to any situation those students can throw at me!

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30 Day Blog Challenge Day 1

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Day 1: How did you decide to become a teacher?

When I started college I was a pre-seminary student pursuing an undergraduate degree in Vocal Performance. During my sophomore year, I decided to drop the seminary certificate and pursue education as a career.

Photograph of The Boxcar Children books on a shelf.

I loved The Boxcar Children books as a kid! Will need to find a set before I have children of my own! Creative Commons License 2011, janielle23, http://www.flickr.com/photos/janellie23/5557021621/

I’ve always loved school. In elementary school I would have my father drive me to school early to get everything ready and make sure I was prepared for the day’s learning. I’ve always loved to read. We joke in my family that my mother once collapsed in the library while pregnant with me, and that I’ve loved to read ever since. I’ve always loved music. I remember standing and singing in my classes at my first elementary school and being told I had one of the best voices in the class.

But I’m not a teacher because I love school, because I love to read, or because I love music. I’m a teacher because I believe education is the place that I can best make a change in this world. Teaching is the most fulfilling work I’ve ever done, and I’ve only been a student teacher! There’s something incredible about making music with students and helping them find their voice and their song.

As a student teacher I worked at two different schools, with four different cooperating teachers, and with close to 700 students from grades K-12. I will never remember all of them. But I will remember that it was there that I discovered my love for teaching. It was not a chore to get up in the morning and drive 30 minutes to school with coffee in hand.

Instead, I greeted my students cheerfully (even at 7am!) and asked how their weekend was, or how the One-Act was coming along. I decided to become a teacher because I think I already was a teacher. When I wanted to be a pastor, I was drawn to the teaching aspects of the office.

Keep Calm and Teach On

Copyright 2012 Ashley Kipp at Simply Designing http://simplydesigning.blogspot.com/

As I wrote in my post, Teacher to Student, I have felt a great loss in my transition back to being a college student. I don’t receive the same fulfillment as I did during student teaching. But a bit of that spark comes back each time I browse the classifieds of districts I’m hoping to apply for, and I look forward to the day when I have students of my own again.

I guess I never did really decide to become a teacher. Instead, I chose a major and teaching found me along the way. I’ll never look back.

 

NMEA 2012 Day 2: I Miss My Students?!

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Only a struggling young teacher would be this excited about a book with a title like, “Classroom Management in the Music Room: Pin-drop quiet rehearsals and classes.”

Of all the really great sessions and performances I saw today (including a stunning performance by the University of Nebraska – Omaha’s Symphonic Wind Ensemble), my favorite was by far David Newell’s extremely practical, common sense approach to classroom management.

After the last few weeks of middle school choir and band, I was on the prowl for the best resources, strategies, and techniques for managing large numbers of middle school students. As soon as I saw the title of the session (the pin-drop quiet part seemed excessive), I knew I had to be there! Thankfully, we sat down just before they started turning away people due to capacity concerns.

I took pages of notes in Evernote, recorded audio of the whole session, and had to track down someone else’s copy of the handout to take a picture of it! I intend to purchase the book as soon as it is released. I don’t want to say too much, because I think Mr. Newell deserves every penny and ounce of credit for creating such a fantastic resource, but he managed to take the classroom management techniques I had heard described for years in college education courses and apply them to the specific challenges of music classrooms.

I can’t recommend his management sessions strongly enough, and I’m sure his work on teaching rhythm is just as fantastic. In fact, that will be some great reading while I await the publication of his new book.

One more day of professional development tomorrow including performances by my own Concordia University Nebraska Wind Ensemble, the Doane College Choir, and a Nebraska Choral Directors reading session and conducting/Alexander Technique Workshop with Dr. Courtney Snyder of the University of Nebraska Omaha (whose conducting took my breath away at the UNO performance mentioned above).

One more day of meeting professional educators as a young teacher, not just a student. My cooperating teacher was awarded the chair for Middle Level education, and it was great to meet some of his colleagues throughout the state, as well as various clinicians and professionals from the state and the nation (including current national NAfME president, Nancy Ditmer and the president-elect).

One more day of affirming experiences that remind me that I have chosen/been chosen for a profession that I believe in so strongly and love so much. In fact, all of this talking about teaching music has made me almost miss seeing my students (which is almost masochism at this point).

I know I’m not a master teacher yet by any means. But I know that the Mr. Jensen that will stand before his students on Monday is not the same Mr. Jensen they have known for the last 4 weeks. It’s a new day, and I’m ready to make music.