Reflection on Chapters 2 and 3
Distance Learning has pushed me to re-evaluate all of my curriculum for fifth and sixth grade. This is a big statement to be making, considering I am not seeing some of my students at all, and the rest only virtually, but it comes from an organic place. Much of my curriculum was based on hands-on assessments and projects that featured the twenty two keyboards I have in my classroom. I also made sure my students sang songs from our Music Making books on a regular basis and also taught them movement that went with their singing of the songs from all over the world. Since I cannot teach the pianos virtually because I don’t know if students have them at home, I have gone back to more music appreciation, analysis and history projects that students can accomplish in less than a half hour, as has been delegated during this time. I have gone deep into my old lessons from the last twenty-five years, and have studied many websites and read several books to build a new structure that will work for the next year, if it should continue through next fall and winter.
The curriculum is now all in specific daily lessons on google classroom, and all of those lessons have very specific tasks attached to them, so students who don’t attend my google hangouts will have ways of demonstrating their learning for me for each day that they have music. My classes happen every other week, each day from January until the end of the school year, so I have figured out lessons for all of those classes and recorded them, typed them up, shared them, scheduled straight through the end of 2020. New projects include, composition of a Rondo “Rap” or song, composed using traditional parts of songs, or using speech-like rhythms. Another new project is studying and learning the instruments of the orchestra. Finally, I will be showing them in a video how to conduct in ¾, 4/4 and 5/4 time after listening to “Take Five” by Dave Brubeck’s quartet. A final project is using chrome music lab to create a piece of music and think about musical form.
In the second and third chapters of Digital Portfolios, the author tasks the teacher with creating a yearlong plan for instruction. I have done this, for a different reason than to create digital portfolios, but it is now ready for this as well. The author also wishes for students to have an understanding of how to use technology to keep their best work and showcase it. Because everything that they do is on google classroom, and because they have to use all kinds of different ways to share their learning with me,(screencastify, flipgrid, wevideo, flat.io, smart music, just to name a few) it is all naturally kept and organized in google classroom. They can decide at the end of the year what specific projects and artifacts they might want to showcase in their digital portfolios.
I wouldn’t want to have these conversations with the students digitally, and I have another year with them next year to work on different projects. I am hoping in the fall we will be back together, and we can begin these conversations. First, we can talk about the work they did in fifth grade with me, all saved in their google drive, and then we can be even more purposeful about creating ways to choose and document their work in sixth grade with me. There are several culminating projects in both fifth and sixth grade, but these might not be what they believe are what shows the most growth for them, or shows how they have matured in their understanding of music.
In the fall, we will have these important conversations that have to do with their decisions about their work, their decisions about their growth, their decisions about the skills they have learned in general music class. I am just hoping we will be back to the classroom where I can incorporate the piano keyboard work, the compositions that go along with that, and the movement segments of the curriculum.
No comments:
Post a Comment