Lesson Planning During Covid-19 - Part 1
As we look at Fall 2020, it seems that the only thing we might know for sure is that the plan is subject to change. That’s why it’s more important than ever to have a strong foundation that won’t change when the plan does.
Where do we start?
Today, we’ll look at how to start planning for disruption-ready music lessons by getting clear on our actual goals for student experiences.
Here’s the whole process:
Decide what you value
Spread out musical concepts throughout the year in a scope and sequence
Choose intentional repertoire to serve your learning goals
Create strategies in concept plans to move your musicians through the learning process
This is the disruption-ready model we follow inside The Planning Binder, so be sure to check it out if you’d enjoy more guidance in this process.
“I’m looking for lesson materials like songs, powerpoints, and games that I can use in virtual learning. I’m kind of panicking on what activities to use! Where do you think I should start?”
Starting the lesson planning process with activities and what music class should look like is understandable, especially right now when music teachers feel pressure to figure out so many new systems at once.
Things like these lesson packs for virtual learning are great for implementing an activity-based lesson quickly.
But then what happens next week? We’re looking for more lesson ideas again.
Share your teaching story
What’s your teaching situation? How are you approaching the planning challenges that come with Covid-19 restrictions?
Fill out the form to let me know.
If you leave the email portion blank, your message will be anonymous. If you include your email, I’ll be able to get back with you.
The Short-term strategy: Planning from Activity to Activity
We often start the planning process by looking for short-term activities that can solve an immediate problem.
This is the small-picture day-to-day part of music education.
Sometimes we jump straight to what music class could look like in individual lessons.
Where that can fall apart:
When these daily activities are disrupted, it’s hard to know what to do!
Since they aren’t connected to anything bigger, it’s difficult to think of new activities that can take place during Covid-19 restrictions.
How can I teach music if we can’t sing in a round?
How can I teach music if we can’t play a circle game?
How can I teach music if we can’t share barred instruments?
These are what class looks like.
That’s not what it is.
In this example, if we don’t understand why we are singing a known song, it will be difficult to know what other activities can achieve the same outcome.
Let’s dig deeper and see what music class actually is - instead of what it sometimes looks like.
A Different Strategy
Rather than looking for quick-fix activities and planning lesson-to-lesson, let’s back up and find clarity in the bigger picture.
This set of daily activities could be exactly the same as the ones listed earlier.
However, now they’re grounded in a foundation of values and long-range plans that intentionally build musical skills and understandings.
Ready for Disruption
This means when daily activities are disrupted, we can quickly reformulate a plan that is still in line with our long-term objectives and core teaching values.
Since we know why we’re doing the activity, we can come up with another way to achieve the same goal, which is in alignment with our values.
We don’t need to start from scratch because the disruption of the activity is not a disruption of the music itself.
Instead of looking for daily activities as the starting place for Covid-19 planning, let’s zoom out and find a solution that will hold up to any form of disruption.
Teaching from your values
This conversation starts with our values. Values are the guiding principles that don’t change, even when our circumstances do.
Our values are the lens we use to make decisions about from money, to our careers, how we spend our time, the music we listen to, how we handle conflict…. And right now they have a direct impact on how we plan for instruction.
Our values are how we make curricular decisions, no matter what instruction looks like.
My teaching philosophy centers around two ideas:
Students should be empowered to make thoughtful, creative, and respectful musical decisions.
Students should be equipped to thoughtfully, creatively, and respectfully interact with the ideas of others.
These two roles - the creative music producer and the creative music consumer - cover the concepts and skills students interact with in my curriculum.
Whatever form the lesson takes, the one thing I know for sure is that my lessons will engage students in these two processes. This has added immense clarity as I create long-range plans inside The Planning Binder.
Your Value System
This year, our teaching scenarios will look incredibly different from what we’re used to. In fact, the only thing that might not be changing about your teaching scenario is you.
What do you value?
What do you love?
What do you hate?
What do you want students to walk away with at the end of their time with you?
What is the tone of the experiences you want students to engage with?
What Our Values Are Not
Your set of values as a music teacher is probably not, “I want students to play passing circle games and share barred instruments inside my music classroom.”
But I notice that’s where we seem to be hung up.
I think we’re getting confused and overwhelmed about what it looks like because we’re using a short term planning strategy.
When we plan from our values, we approach the problems a different way.
It doesn’t matter anymore whether instruction takes place on Flipgrid, Seesaw, Google Slides, six feet apart, in another teacher’s classroom, with a mask on, without singing, or without instruments.
The tools are just that - one possible way we can live out our values.
Crafting a Value Statement:
For an academic assignment, we’ve all had to write about our values in the form of a teaching philosophy. I would suggest that a more practical approach would be to have something more succinct and powerful that you can put on a sticky note, and place on your computer or your desk.
You’ll see it when you feel overwhelmed and need to choose a pathway forward, and it’ll bring clarity to those decisions.
I want students to ____ so that they ____.
I want students to feel that their musical voice belongs so they can lead healthy and optimistic lives.
I want students to experience joyful musicking so they continue to music outside of class.
I want students to express their unique musical perspectives so they reach their full musical potential.
Clarity with our teaching values allows us to move into creating concrete plans with less stress. The question is no longer about what app to use - the question becomes about what learning experiences will embody our core beliefs.
Then we can move from values to long-term, actionable plans.
from Values to LONG-TERM PLANS
With a clear value statement, we can move ahead with creating learning goals.
Long-term plans give us a zoomed-out view of our strategies and goals for student learning experiences.
There are many ways you could break down the curriculum design process. Here is the approach I recommend and use inside The Planning Binder.
Scope & Sequence
What it does:
A scope and sequence maps out the elements and concepts from the curriculum outline that we’ll cover throughout the program and throughout the year.
Practical plans for Fall 2020:
In Fall 2020, I encourage you to slow down your curriculum outline and your scope and sequence. I recommend using this time as review, instead of plowing forward in the curriculum.
That was the answer to this colleague who reached out about my lesson planning recommendations for virtual learning:
Hi Victoria!
I hope you're doing well. Do you have any general tips for adapting resources to remote learning formats? I know my students are going to need to review materials and that I'll need to space the concepts out, but beyond that I'm not really sure what to teach or where to start. Any help you could give would be great.
Part of my response about pacing and curricular content was:
Slower is Faster
It’s worth it to take a step back and go slowly instead of trying to cram material into your year. Don't think of it as losing time. Think of it as maintaining a foundation so students are set up ready to rock next year.
I recommend that you consider making the entire first semester a review of the foundational skills and understandings students need to be successful musicians.
Focus on Core Musical Skills
When all else fails, musical skills boil down to the singing voice and steady beat. If you have to restructure your curriculum, restructure with a focus on these two elements. As long as those are in place, you will be fine moving forward!
4. Keep it fun! You are back in the classroom after your challenges from this past year. Your students have a passionate and caring music educator. You are setting up for some incredible learning experiences.
Repertoire
The repertoire is the core of what we do! We don’t learn in isolation - we learn in a musical context. The repertoire is that context, which means repertoire decisions are some of the most important parts of the planning process.
We want to choose repertoire that is both artistic and meaningful, and that has a clear pedagogical use.
Where to Find Songs
There are so many incredible resources out there for song selection!
Click the links below to read about selecting material.
What to do with the songs you choose
Once you have your songs picked out, it’s a good idea to analyze them for their classroom use.
Here’s a video to get you started:
Concept Plans
Once we’ve clarified our values, broken them down throughout the year, and chosen repertoire, it’s time to brainstorm the actual teaching strategies we’ll use in the classroom.
This set of ideas can go by many names, but I like the term “Concept Plan,” since it describes a collection of strategies for teaching a concept.
A concept plan combines your values, musical goals, and repertoire and puts them all together in a plan for teaching sequentially.
Where will students start the learning process? Where do you want them to end? What action-based learning experiences will get them there?
You can read about concept plans in this blog post:
And you can look at an example of a Kindergarten concept plan in the video below:
A Look at the Whole Process
Let’s go back to the Instagram dm from earlier:
“I’m looking for for lesson materials like songs, powerpoints, and games that I can use in virtual learning. I’m kind of panicking on what activities to use! Where do you think I should start?”
Here’s an example of the whole planning process, starting from values and moving into daily activities.
In the example above, students listen to new music, clap the rhythm of the words, improvise a B section, write it down, and self-assess their work.
Each of these activities can be done both in-person in a socially distant setting, in a virtual setting, or in a hybrid setting.
If one of the activities becomes unavailable, we won’t need to panic because we know what the activity is connected to. This process eliminates scrambling from activity to activity because there’s a long-term strategy connected to a wider value system.
In this post, we’ve looked at how to plan disruption-ready music lessons by getting clear on our values and goals, instead of simply looking for daily activities.
Decide what you value
Spread out musical concepts throughout the year in a scope and sequence
Choose intentional repertoire to serve your learning goals
Create strategies in concept plans to move your musicians through the learning process
When we look at our values and goals first and align learning activities from there, our lessons are ready for disruption.
What do You Think?
What do you think about this approach to planning? What’s a planning challenge you’re still facing?
Fill out the form to let me know.
If you leave the email portion blank, your message will be anonymous. If you include your email, I’ll be able to get back with you.
Planning Resources
If you’re looking for a long-range curriculum that’s flexible and artistic, I recommend checking out The Planning Binder.
If you need a “done-for-you” lesson resource so you can take a breath and figure out a better long-term strategy, consider these complete video lessons.
In the next post, we’ll look at how resilient pedagogy can bring a practical approach to choosing daily lesson activities.
