About Orff Schulwerk
Orff-Schulwerk is a teaching approach which promises that we and our students will interact as partners in making music. Playing instruments, singing, and moving are treated as ensemble experiences, requiring mutual awareness in order to create successful musical expression. Students are not passively involved in their education. Rather, the room is full of their purposeful activity. We teachers are the guides who introduce the focus of the lesson, and then encourage the students to develop it until they take over, making music on their own. The responsibility for music belongs to all of us, teachers and students.”
-Arvida Steen from the Introduction of Exploring Orff
The Orff Process of Teaching
1.Imitation
*simultaneous
*remembered (echo)
*Overlapping (canon)
2. Exploration
3. Improvisation
4. Literacy and Musical Independence:the ability to read, write, improvise, analyze, and communicate
Tell me I forget,
Show me I remember,
Involve me, I understand.
-Carl Orff (1895-1982)
A Model Lesson includes:
The Objective : Gives lesson focus, states outcomes against which to measure the success of the lesson, names means of achieving objective, and should define where the lesson targets in the process of development of skills and understanding.
Warm-up: A familiar activity to alert the mind and activate the memory and prepare body and voice. It can often present the material from which the lesson can evolve.
Exploration: A series of events elaborating on the lesson focus, It may involve several performance modes and may require several types of thinking skills so as to include all learners, such as practice, transfer, re-identify, improvise, compare, modify, classify, change, etc.
Culmination: The summary through critique, reflection, a short written quiz, a reading, writing, or performance task. By the teacher through observation, use of a written tool, reading performance behaviors or quizzes, analysis of audio or video examples.
-Arvida Steen Exploring Orff