InTASC 4 - Table of Contents

Standard #4 - Content Knowledge

I have been teaching music privately for the last twenty-five years and feel confident in the mastery of my content area in general music; however, I enjoy deepening and expanding my knowledge to include current professional opportunities for education that can support my students in the classroom. In Artifact 4.1 I show my ability to access student prior learning and build on that student knowledge to develop new ideas and understanding in a lesson plan for teaching elementary students major and minor tonalities. This lesson activates previous knowledge of happy and sad feelings while allowing students to scaffold new learning about tone, pitch and mood using student interests including favorite songs, and community connection. These community and place-based connections facilitate greater understanding because students are engaged while also being guided to new knowledge using familiar and prior knowledge (Darrow & Adamek, 2018; Ark et al., 2020). Furthermore, I use a recording of students singing from a local middle school during the lesson. When I taught this lesson, I was surprised and happy to learn how many of the students knew friends or family members who attended the middle school. The students seemed to idolize the older students and felt a sense of accomplishment at being able to analyze the complex music --and some shared a goal of attending the school in the future! By using student interests, I can successfully communicate content standards –those of analyzing and describing choral music, and information with students while accessing higher level thinking that is relevant. This allows students to understand applicable content cognitively while avoiding common misconceptions because they are familiar with the subject-matter (Ormond et al., 2020).

In Artifact 4.2 I share a lesson that I learned and taught at a local Orff workshop for music teachers –the Evergreen Orff Chapter. This lesson utilized a popular song which had also gained fame on the social media site Tik Tok two months before; many of the students were excited to learn the body percussion accompaniment to the Wellerman. I provided multiple means of representation to learn the body percussion including digital visual slides, video, audio, and kinetic opportunities. This type of differentiation encourages a variety of learning to effectively understand the content and utilizes student strengths (Karten, 2017). Student Sample 4a shows an email from a student’s guardian, George (names have been changed to protect privacy), who loved the body percussion song and memorized all the words and movements. The guardian wanted to express their thanks for choosing music that their child connected with. Personal interests in the classroom can engage students and motivate them to choose learning autonomously (Knoster, 2017), while clear communication and differentiation support students higher level thinking (Ormond, 2020; Lemov et al., 2016). Student Sample 4b displays how I changed the body percussion lesson from the Orff workshop to incorporate the interests of younger students and to also include a variety of different learning methods including aural, kinesthetic, and visual. Students were still able to connect to the rhythm using body percussion; however, they could also speak certain rhythms while hearing a drum to perform a steady beat, see the pictures that corresponded to the rhythm, and of course move to the music using body percussion.

Artifact 4.1 - Major and Minor Melodies Lesson Plan

In this lesson plan, I present prior knowledge, scaffolding, differentiation, and clear communication of standards as well as student interests and community, place-based strategies-- created as part of a Strategy Resources Project for EDSE 502: Equitable Differentiated Instruction.

Artifact 4.2 Professional Development Orff Workshop Lesson Plan

I adapted this lesson plan by Amy Barene to teach to my 3rd through 5th grade students after attending the Orff workshop.

Student Sample 4a - Student and Guardian Email Communication

This student memorized every verse to the Wellerman, a song we worked on in class, and their parent reached out in an email to say thank you.

Student Sample 4b - Differentiated Lesson for Younger Elementary Music Grades

I adapted another lesson by Amy Barene from my Orff training; this One Day in the Eucalyptus Tree Lesson plan I taught for grades K through 2.