Organizing the Music Lesson Plan: Concepts vs Activities
I’m having a hard time with wanting to do as many things as possible for engagement purposes - games, instruments, reading, etc. - but then I feel like we blow through things too quickly and students are lost.
Who is a curriculum developer?
All music teachers are curriculum developers because all music teachers make decisions about what approaches, activities, and resources their students need, and what they are going to exclude from their teaching. Even if we have parameters around what standards to use or if we have specific songs to use in specific grade levels, there is still so much room for making curricular decisions in elementary general music.
Musical Skills and Media:
Musical Skills
Singing, playing instruments, moving, reading, writing, improvising, arranging, composing, listening
Musical Media:
Instruments, singing, speech, movement
Musical Concepts:
Expressive elements, pitch, texture, rhythm, form
Musical Learning Processes:
Orff’s Imitate, explore, create
Kodaly’s Prepare, present, practice
Anne Mileski’s Explore, discover, extend
Feierabend movement from readiness to writing compositions
Musical People:
The goal of our music education is to help students have tools for empathy and communication through artistic expression. This is not music for music’s sake, but music for people’s sake. Music is ultimately a human act.
What will we Learn? What will we do?
Lesson 1 Example - Based around activities:
Welcome song
Instrument activity
Movement activity
Game
Closing song
What do we do next class? What previous instruction can students draw from? How can we help these activities build upon each other?
This is a lesson structure based around how we actualize musical understandings. What we’re not explicitly addressing here is the common thread of the understanding itself.
We have a good sense of the actions students are doing. What are the musical concepts we are actualizing?
Lesson Example 2 - Based around Concepts:
Welcome song
Musical focus 1
Game, movement, activity just for fun, or as a change of pace
Musical focus 2
Closing song
Let’s just take that first musical focus. Let’s imagine the musical understanding is pitch and the tonal pattern is la in sol la sol mi.
Class 1: 7 minutes
Main concentration: In the first class, students sing a song and play a game (Apple Tree). After we’ve played a few rounds of the game, we do a challenge: students inner hear the first eight beats and trace the melodic contour.
Class 2: 3 minutes
Change of pace: In the next class, students sing and play the game but this time as the change of pace. This takes about three minutes. In that time we can still change up the activity by having students inner hear the song and play the game.
Class 3: 7 minutes
Main concentration: In the next class we play the game one time, then students turn to a partner and find a way to show the melodic contour of “will your apples fall on me” with movement or body percussion ( standing on tiptoes, clapping hands, stamping feet, etc.). From there we can identify the melodic contour of those four beats on the board, and aurally figure out that the higher pitch is a step higher than sol. A great way to see that is on a barred instrument, so we identify a step higher than sol on a barred instrument in several different places (if sol is G, if sol is C, if sol is D).
Class 4: 7 minutes
Sing and play the game to Plainsies Clapsies. After a few rounds, discover that the new high pitch is in this song too. Help the teacher map the melodic contour on the board, line by line and discover that it’s the same core melodic pattern sol high sol mi the whole time. With a partner, figure out how to play the song on barred instruments.
Class 5: 7 minutes
In the next class with a partner, students figure out by ear how to play the first eight beats, then rearrange the pitches to create their own version of the song. Students use bingo chips or other manipulatives to write down the melodic contour of their new melody using sol, mi, and the higher pitch, or write down their idea on the five-line staff using sol, mi, and la.
Organizing by Concept instead of Activity or Medium
In these examples, students sing, play barred instruments, move, read, write, arrange, aurally identify, inner hear, and play a game. We also have collaboration with other classmates and creative choice by arranging things for body percussion and re-writing a melody.
You can see how planning this way would lead to a wide variety of musical activities and skills over time. These skills are naturally embedded in the learning process as ways to embody the concept - ways to actualize it.
These activities build on each other because they revolve around a specific pitch concept. Students can figure out the song by ear, re-arrange the melody on barred instruments, and write it down in graphic notation because they’ve been thinking musically about this specific pitch pattern.
One way to think of this is the bubble mind map, with a musical concept in the middle. Then all around that concept are the ways we can show that concept - singing songs with sol mi la, playing sol mi la on instruments, improvising with sol mi la, moving to sol mi la, reading and writing sol mi la, aurally identifying sol mi la…. There are many experiences that bring diversity to the lesson over time, but they’re all serving the purpose of the lesson segment - sol mi la.
There’s a stream of different media and experiences, but they all point back to the same melodic concept. Because we’re teaching a concept and not an isolated skill, or isolated activity, students can build on previous knowledge in a curriculum that spirals and sequences.
When it’s time to expand this toneset to include other pitches, students can build on their aural skills to articulate what they notice about the new pitch. Is it higher or lower than what we know right now? How much higher? How much lower? Does the new pitch happen in other songs we sing in class? Does it happen in songs we sing outside of class? When we know how far away it is from other pitches in our conscious vocabulary, we can figure out songs by ear on barred instruments, recorders, piano, or guitar.
The beauty of concept-based teaching is that it allows for the transfer of knowledge across many different skills, both inside school and into the real world.
Activity-Based Teaching
In contrast, if we organize things around activities
Welcome song
Instrument activity
Movement activity
Game
Closing song
It becomes tricky to see the thread that ties these things together. Let’s imagine you’re searching Pinterest for a fun activity for 3rd grade. You find one that you love and you use it in class. Students love it as well. Great! That’s a win! But there’s a problem… the fun activity is over… now what do you do in the next lesson?
If I teach you how to play a song on barred instruments or the recorder and that’s the entire lesson segment, then next class I need to find a new song to teach you. We’re constantly starting over from scratch each lesson.
Without knowing the purpose of the activity, it becomes difficult to know the next steps. This means we’re constantly searching for the next lesson idea. We’re stuck looking for activities we can do, instead of looking at the students to see what they need from us next in order to actualize a musical concept.
Another challenge of the activities-based lesson experience is that it means we’re searching for activities online and then we end up with an overwhelming amount of activities that we’re struggling to organize and sequence in the lesson. You’ll remember this from the original topic comment, of the colleague zooming through activities and then looking around and everyone is lost. This happens when there’s no way to curate lesson ideas.
When we reframe to thinking conceptually about education, things become “much easier to digest.” It’s a shift in thinking from “how to do the activity” to “how to actualize a concept”
Long-Range Planning Questions
This way of planning is tied closely to long-range planning.
Clarifying Questions:
What am I using this song / game / activity / piece to teach?
Where does this activity lead? What is the natural next step?
The medium and the skills - the doings of the music lesson (the games, the instrumental activities, the songs, the literacy activities) are there to actualize the conceptual understandings of how music is constructed.
Criticisms of the Concept-Based Approach to Curriculum Planning
As with everything in life, you’ll find people with different opinions on this topic!
Music as Science, or Music as Art?
One concern about this concept-based approach is that when you break down the elements of music into little pieces - melody, form, rhythm, etc - we turn music into a science, like how the periodic table is broken down by elements. The concern here is that music should be used as a way for humans to express themselves. When we make things scientific elements, we’re taking away the true point of music - human expression, human feeling, and human communication - and making it stale.
This is a valid concern! It may be more valid in curricula that break down elements into small pieces: one unit on rhythm, one unit on form, etc. Something to keep in mind is that there is not a good way to effectively isolate musical concepts from each other. When we sing a song, that song has a musical form. We’re singing it with some type of musical expression.
There’s also an assumption in this criticism that science and art are fundamentally different things. This is a viewpoint that is common today, but it hasn’t always been around.
Whose Sequence is it?
When we plan based on musical concepts, we’re normally talking about progressing through a series of musical patterns.
Pattern examples for pitch sequences:
Sol and mi - la - do - re - high do (often used in Kodaly-influenced teaching)
do re mi - low la and low sol - sol and la - high do (often used for older beginners)
do re mi - sol - la - fa - low la - ti (often used in Feierabend-influenced teaching)
Different musical cultures also have ways of thinking about pitch, tonality, and melody that are distinctly different from this use of solfege, which means it can be difficult to apply our way of tonal thinking to another music and musical perspective.
Where’s All the Other Stuff?
What about things that don’t fit into this mode of planning? Things like instruments of the orchestra, music history, and listening lessons don’t necessarily fall into a specific category of musical concepts.
If you choose to include these elements, I like to view them as side dishes to the main course. There’s plenty of room to teach what you care about in your music curriculum, so if you care about these things, where might they fit in the meal? Often this can be done in 3 - 5 minute segments across several different lessons, right before the closing routine.
Another way to answer this question is to go back to the questions we asked earlier:
What am I using this song / game / activity / piece to teach?
Where does this activity lead? What is the natural next step?
Is there any way to tie the “extra” material into what students are already learning? When you choose listening lessons, are there any musical concepts in the listening piece students can notice, move to, sing along with, or play on their own?
Thinking about the purpose of the “other stuff” can help clarify where it falls in the lesson.
Where to Go Next
Conversations about how to structure the music lesson are closely tied to conversations about values and long-range planning.
