Teaching Music Without a Music Room

Teaching music  in the same classrooms where your students work each day with their own teachers is a challenge met by many city teachers in buildings too crowded to allow a separate music classroom. One approach is to load teaching materials and instruments on a rolling cart that serves as a base of operations.

Seven Atlanta-area music teachers contributed to Music à la Cart , a 71-page paperback guide to set-up, management,  and delivery of your cart-based music lessons in schools where there is no music classroom.

In addition, Karen Stafford’s “Music Education Madness” website has a page full of ideas and suggestions for people who work this way.

Protected: Year at a Glance Lesson Planning

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Lesson Planning

Components of an elementary music curriculum or planbook:

• Single lessons
• “Units” or sequences of lessons
• Expected outcomes for the year (by age group or grade)
• Repertoire (performance, listening)
• Resources (available space, materials, time)
• Standards (The Blueprint)
• Assessments (rubrics, assessment formats)

In New York City schools, the first four components are typically determined by the teacher, working alone or with a mentor. Resources depend to a great extent on the physical plant, the budget, and above all on the awareness and commitment of the principal; these can vary widely from one school to another. The standards in place for music teachers in the Department of Education are represented by the Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Blueprint reflects an ideal. The Benchmarks it proposes are a practical guide only if the administration in a particular school can ensure continuity of resources from one school year to the next. In other words: the Blueprint and its benchmarks function at the mercy of decisions about scheduling, staffing, and classroom space (if any).

Another factor that complicates effective teaching and learning in city schools is the rate of “student mobility” (admissions and discharges during the school year) and “stability” (student longevity in the school). For obvious reasons, lesson planning for a highly unstable community requires a certain amount of flexibility.

Skilled planning for teaching elementary-grades music is similar to planning for math or emergent literacy: it involves an on-going sequential process that keeps children continually moving from the known to the unknown.

You can see excellent examples of how this process might unfold in practice by looking at one of the Kodály methodology introductions, in particular Lois Choksy’s The Kodály Method I and II (3rd edition, Prentice-Hall, 1999). Whether the Kodály approach is best-suited for conditions in NYC’s public schools may be debated. Basically, a Kodály program continually prepares children for explicit learning about each melodic or rhythmic concept with lots of experience in singing and playing musical games, so that the new concept has already been internalized, when it is presented. As a result, each lesson in a grade sequence has to include repertoire that can provide that preparation, as well as lots of opportunities for practice, in reading, writing and performing.

General Music Curriculum Framework Document
an interesting guide to planning by Prof. Debra Hadden, University of Kansas (MENC)

Into Music 4 is the music curriculum in the New Zealand Schools. A lot of interesting material can be found and downloaded from their website. Be prepared to explore and be prepared to “translate” into American terms.

Assessment of Music Learning

In 2008-09 the NYCDOE Office of the Arts & Special Projects chose assessment as the focus for its year-long series of professional development events for music teachers. Following the most recent meeting in the series, participants received copies of a 42-page booklet published by Hal Leonard, The Ultimate Music Assessment and Evaluation Kit. The book isn’t an academic discussion of issues in assessing music learning, but provides a lot of examples for teachers who want to explore formal tools for assessing and evaluating their students’ work. There are a lot of examples of rubrics and grade cards, and there’s a fairly up-to-date bibliography of articles from MENC publications, and some things by Howard Gardner.