Developing self awareness and and social awareness was a team effort; students grew comfortable sharing with each other and offering supportive guidance as they collaborated on music projects and deepened their social relationships to one another. 

The skills that students focused on this year were:

• Instrumental and ensemble proficiency

• Self-expression (through music and otherwise)

• Embracing multiple perspectives

• Goal setting and accountability

Semester 1

How has your Planning Form (Big Idea/ Inquiry Question) [embedded above] changed in the classroom so far this year? What have students added to the inquiry?

With our group this year (who chose the band name "Icebreakerz"), we primarily worked towards these SEL goals by arranging, composing, learning, and performing songs. The group came in with very clear ideas of what music spoke to them and, despite somewhat of an age gap (2 seniors, 1 sophomore, 5 freshman), there was a lot of common interest in bossa nova, video game music, and jazz influenced rock music. As such, it was easy for us to find existing songs that fit our shared interest and start learning them right away. This gave us concrete artistic goals at the outset, and in working towards these goals we began learning how to play together and about our individual and collective strengths/areas of improvements. 

Concurrently to this process, we started improvising together almost immediately. This was a new skill for most, which helped to equal the playing field and create a culture of risk taking and mutual support. Eventually, the skills we developed through improvisation facilitated composition and arrangement projects, and many students performed improvised solos (or solos they composed through improvising) in performance. 

These two activities (i.e. learning covers of songs and improvising) point to ways in which students contributed to an exploration of Belonging in Difference: 

By discussing, listening to, and ultimately learning many different student suggested songs, students shared a part of their own musical and social identity with the group. Students often shared music that others in the group had heard and also liked, while at other times they shared songs that were new musical discoveries for others in the group. Even moments of generative tension around song choice helped students learn about their own individual desires and boundaries, while helping shape and define our group identity. Commonalities and differences helped us understand ourselves, our bandmates, and our band.

By improvising with one another, students explored ways to express their individual musical ideas in the context of the group. Soloists would play with the support of a rhythm section, in dialogue with another soloist ("trading fours" or "trading eights"), in support of an intro, outro or chorus, and sometimes completely without accompaniment. In each of these situations, students navigated musical matrices of vulnerability and support in order to achieve greater individual expression through community.

Throughout all of this, students interpersonal relationships grew. As students grew more comfortable with each other this year, they became open to making suggestions and goals for the group, to guiding each other, and to offering feedback on performances and musical ideas. Many of them did not know each other before joining this group, and by the middle of the year they were writing songs together as a band and developing their abilities to communicate during rehearsals and performances. They truly formed a community of different individuals and valued each others' strengths. Their ability to express opinions and suggest fresh ideas strengthened as they worked together each week.

What are the specific school needs identified by your group in the December PD? How will you use the class’ Big Idea/ Inquiry Question/ Artmaking Practice to address them? Please be as specific as possible.

One of the primary problems that was identified in this PD was a tension between students and security after school: students needed to eat before going to CAPE programs, and security wasn't allowing students to leave to get food and return to the building. This need, while purely logistical and perhaps not bearing much on our big idea, was met by CAPE providing snacks for students for the second semester. This ensured that students were able to follow their creative pursuits without having to choose between meeting physical needs and participating in an art making community at NGHS.

Below, share photos and/or videos of select class activities. Specify what students are engaging with and learning (artistically, academically, and/or SEL), in reference to your Big Idea/ Inquiry Question. You may add different blocks from the right-hand side menu.

Semester 2

How did students respond to their involvement in the Perspective(s) exhibition? This may include: artmaking, curation, visiting CAPE Family Days or Teen Night, discussing their experience, or other.

During the second semester, our first major focus was preparing a set for two events at the CAPE Gallery: a private reception for the Young Audiences Conference and a Teen Night with other high school CAPE programs. We were coming off of a performance of three songs (covers) at the NGHS winter concert, and students were interested in trying something different for these. We decided that we would attempt to write at least one original song for this performance, and discussed different strategies for beginning (improvising, working with loops, predetermining a genre or vibe, learning common pop harmonic or rhythmic strategies, etc). Students decided that they wanted to begin by working with digital tools in the maker space, arranging loops and using MIDI instruments as a starting point for composition. We played with the Digital Audio Workstation Soundtrap in the NGHS makerspace, learning some basics of audio editing as a starting point for experimentation in a digital realm. This continued for a few weeks, with students drafting, experimenting, collaborating, and sharing their music with each other. Eventually, a couple of ideas emerged as favorites, and we returned to the band room to arrange the ideas for the group.

The first original song we wrote, titled Forest Walk, drew on the bossa nova songs we had already learned and left plenty of space for improvisation. Once we learned the basic patterns of the songs, students decided there should be some improvised solos that give the song shape and direction. The vocal improvisations that ended the song eventually concretized into a melody that we kept, and lyrics shortly followed. Our students left this experiment with two concrete strategies for approaching composition: experimenting and playing with digital tools and improvising over patterns as a group. 

Our performance at the Young Audiences Conference was a success, with students walking away with pride at having shared their original work alongside two covers that they loved. They received lots of positive feedback from the visiting teaching artists and CAPE staff, and felt bolstered going into Teen Night. Despite the tight turn around, students decided to attempt one more original song for the Teen Night, a short and fast paced song with many small sections called "Fever Dream." We followed a similar format for this song (starting digital, then arranging it for the group), however this time three freshman students overwhelmingly did the digital work on their own outside of class. This made the process go more quickly (a boon given the few rehearsals between the YA conference and Teen Night) and also resulted in students feeling more ownership over the work. The Teen Night performance included both Fever Dream and Forest Walk, as well as two covers. 

These events articuate perhaps the most powerful outcomes of our performances at the CAPE gallery: students pushed themselves to create original music, learned skills and strategies for approaching composition, were empowered to further pursue composition and improvisation outside of our club, and shared their work and communicated their musical identities to different audiences in the CAPE community.  

What skills did students leave your class with?

Students left class with a variety of musical and SEL skills.

Musically, students:

-learned how to play and communicate in an ensemble

-developed greater proficiency on their individual instruments

-learned strategies for music composition and improvisation, as well as strategies for learning songs by other artists

-explored and experienced differences between rehearsal situations and performance situations, as well as performance situations in different spaces and with different audiences

Socially and emotionally, students:

-achieved deeper understandings of their own social and musical identities, as well as the commonalities and differences between their individual identities in a group

-communicated their differences, boundaries, desires, and needs in the context of the group

-practiced accountability to each other over the course of rehearsals and performances

-practiced empathy, vulnerability, support, and bravery while experimenting and exploring new musical skills

Show evidence of this learning through photos and/or videos of select class activities. Specify what students are engaging with and learning (artistically, academically, and/or SEL), in reference to your Big Idea/ Inquiry Question. You may add different blocks from the right-hand side menu.