After our second face to face. I was able to continue to narrow my focus on what I want to focus on this year with Cohort 21 – at the end of the session I had come up with this question:
“How might we develop more student-centered materials that encourage vulnerability and creativity while also providing meaning feedback for student growth?”
I was able to receive some helpful feedback and resources during our gallery walk, and with those, plus putting this question into ChatGPT – I was able to think about more specific aspects more clearly such as assessment, activities, and topics for the students to write about.
Now that we’re in January, I’ve started to actually put my plan into action – kind of…
Over the winter break I was able to do a deep dive collecting resources and looking at materials that would make sense for my students – the nice thing of developing something from scratch is I can make it more personalized for the students in front of me. Knowing their strengths and what they need to focus on really helps as I’m looking at it through a specific lens.
Now the way I tend to work is to think about what they’re final project or performance will be and work backwards – what skills do they need? What am I pulling from the curriculum? What prior knowledge is needed? How much time do I need to get them there? As I’m working on this with a colleague some of these questions are still up in the air – which is fine! Every couple of days we chat about how things are going and when either of us are going to be in classes together to help pace the material. It’s a learning curve for both of us as it’s an unfamiliar topic and method of teaching/planning but I’m learning a lot and reflecting on how to improve moving forward not only to next year, but even for the next class.
So far, looking back on the first few lessons of this new project – the students seem very invested. They are eager to create and work on music. The challenge has been finding the balance of learning about the history with also giving them space to explore and play around with material on their own. Even today, I had the first lesson with one of my classes on how to rap over a beat – they didn’t realize how much there was to think about at first. I even had to spend a couple of hours really going over everything on my own time to be able to communicate to my students…but being able to be vulnerable on my end with them helps them be more vulnerable with their peers.
It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of this pans out…professionally this is keeping me engaged as I’m doing my own learning and experimenting with my students and building connections with them in a different way.
A high moment for me was last week when I was on dismissal duty; one of my Grade 8 students came up to me as he was leaving to thank me for teaching this new unit and said “I can tell how much work you’ve put into these classes! I’m learning so much and my friends are even talking about it during other classes” Not going to lie – it feels nice to get that feedback (and to get some inside scoop haha) especially since I’m not feeling as confident bringing this topic into the classroom yet.
Well…that’s it for now. This blog will help me over the next few weeks to reflect on what has been happening in the music (and English) room and see how this can grow for students in the future.