music_education

1) Mr. York is a music teacher and band leader at Hoosier County Middle School. He wants his students to learn about John Phillip Sousa’s impact on the American march genre. To do so, they need to __understand the genre’s place in musical history__ and to know how it changed as a result of Sousa’s writing. In the past, he has always assigned this as a research paper, allowing a few days of in-class library time and then giving the students two weeks to write their essays. In recent years, he has found that students are more and more resistant to writing papers for their band class, and they often submit poor quality work. He would like to try having the students create a research //project// instead of a research //paper// this year to see if it improves the students’ engagement in the topic and the quality of their work. He would like to keep the same timeline for the assignment, but would like to change the final product into something more innovative. Standard H:9:1

2) Mr. Murtzen would really like to do a better job of __introducing his students to instruments in different cultures__ at Littleton Elementary. The school has gone to great lengths to expand the cultural experiences for its students, and Mr. Murtzen would like go above and beyond his previous lessons in world instrumental music. He has workbooks and an old VHS at his disposal but doesn’t feel like these will take his students as far as he would like – he wants the students’ experience to be as authentic as possible. Standards 2:9, 3:9, 4:9 (section 9 collects the music within culture standards at each elementary grade level) Learners: Mr Murtzen teaches all the children in the school, so the full range of students are involved.

3) Mr. Turner’s music program at Trendy Suburb High School has nearly doubled in size in the last five years. Some of the juniors he teaches have told him that they would really like to use one of their senior electives next year __learning to compose music__, which is not a class he has ever offered before. He does not have an extra class period in which he can teach this, but he would like to offer these few students the opportunity to conduct an independent study during his planning period. He anticipates that he could give them some time here and there each week, but that they would need to do most of the learning together and independently for the class to work. Mr. Turner has found that state standards for high school composition have been specified, but they are few and vague, basically just stating that students compose music with little other detail. __Standard:__ This case addresses a set of standards, not a single one. There is an entire collection of Music Theory and Compositions standards for high school students that you can [|find here] __Learners:__ Seniors who enjoy music enough to use an elective on it in addition to their normal music course __Environment__: Student will be independently studying the topic, with the teacher devoting a little bit of "in class" time to it.


 * ALTERNATE CASES IF NEEDED**

4) Miss Juarez is the new music teacher for all grades at Cornfield View Elementary. Her 2nd – 5th students __learn to sing independently and in ensembles with increasingly mature control, breath support, posture, tone quality, and diction__. She would like for her students to learn to evaluate these elements in other singers in the hopes that seeing good and bad examples of singing will help them to improve their own performance ability. She does not, however, feel that it is appropriate for such young students to critique each other in front of the class. Unfortunately, the only materials left by her predecessor have professional singers. Miss Juarez would really prefer for students to evaluate other singers at their level, or even themselves.


 * Learners**: 2nd-5th graders at a rural school. She teaches all of the students in the school.
 * Environment**: Each regular class comes to music twice per week for 45 minutes. Class sizes range from 18-24. The classroom is pretty big.
 * Standards**: "Singing independently and in ensembles with increasingly mature control, breath support, posture, tone quality, and diction" is a standard for each grade level from 2nd to 5th. What is considered "mature" is not spelled out.

5) Dr. Ictus has long been frustrated by the amount of time it takes him to assess his high school students' ability to __play the major, minor and chromatic scales__. Having them come into his office one by one takes up an extraordinary amount of his instruction time every year. He knows that the learning is necessary for the class, he just can't stand devoting so much of time to in-class, one-on-one performances to evaluate them. He is in search of something that might save him time without compromising the quality of the activity.


 * Learners**: Students participate in high school band voluntarily.
 * Environment**: Each band class is big, 40-90 students. They meet for 1 hour daily.
 * Standard**: INH 2.2 "Play major scales, three forms of minor scales, and chromatic scales"

6Mrs. Blackwell directs the bands, orchestras, and choirs at Normaltown High School. She is finding that her students spend less time practicing at home with every passing year, and she thinks that the individual and isolated elements of practicing simply don’t interest her students who seem to be obsessed with facebook, cell phones, instant messenger, blogging, and all the other novelties she has seen proliferate in the last 10 years. She knows that her students need to spend time playing and critiquing music for their instruments, but desperately wants to keep up with the times so that her students stay interested in band, orchestra, and choir. The state standard that students __improvise harmony and melody as played by other musicians__ is a difficult one for her to make time for during school and one she feels has the potential to be improved upon using communications technology, which she is not especially familiar with herself.


 * Standard** H:3:1-7 "Improvise harmony and melody as played by other musicians"
 * Learners:** High school students participate in music classes voluntarily, meeting for 1 hour per week. Her class sizes vary widely, from as few as 20 students to as many as 80

7) Mrs. Yin’s music program has declined in numbers quite a bit in the last few years as many students’ parents have lost jobs at the local factory and can no longer afford instruments and lessons. As a result, she has smaller sections and has no players on certain instruments in her beginning band. An important standard for beginning musicians is to __understand the relationship between different instruments and different pitch groups in an ensemble__, but her piecemeal band simply doesn’t have the numbers or instrumental diversity to teach this concept in the way she is used to. She is willing to devote quite a bit of time to an alternative, but doesn’t know how to go about teaching it without a full band at her disposal. __Standard__: understand the relationship between different instruments and different pitch groups in an ensemble __Learners__: Any student may enroll in beginning music classes. A full range of students is represented __Environment__: The class is large, but not compared to classes at other schools. Mrs. Yin has limited space and resources.

8) Mrs. Oldschool – longtime director of the Wealthyville High School choirs – hates to “waste” her classtime with anything other than rehearsal. The state of Indiana, however, demands that she teach certain other standards, her least favorite of which is teaching the __physiological basis for good singing posture__. After all, if they do it right (and they do), who cares if they know why? Nonetheless, she has to address it. The longwinded lecture on the respiratory system and the “diaphragm diagram” she always uses bore the students to tears and they never have a very good understanding even after four days of what she thinks is wasted time. __Standard:__ CHH.8.2 Understand the physiological basis for good singing posture and technique and demonstrate healthy singing habits. __Learners:__ High school choral students from all grade levels. Some have had more science courses than others. __Environment__: Typical choral class.

9) Journaling has long been an aggravation for Mrs. Brown-Harris, the music teacher at Indianapolis North Middle School. The school encourages (actually demands) that she incorporate journaling into her practice, and __responding in journals to musical examples is an Indiana standard__ as well. Mrs. Brown-Harris, however, has had no success with it. Her students think it is "stupid," and she can’t read every response every day, so the students put very little effort into it. She would like to have students produce a similar product to a journal entry, but would like fewer responses to read and to have students ideas read by and/or contributed to by each other in hopes that the level of seriousness would improve. Standard 6:8:2 Learners: Typical middle schoolers, if that's possible. They mostly hate to write and hate to do "stupid" stuff like write journals. Environment: Right now it takes place in a beginning music class. Mrs. Brown Harris is open to options though.

10) Miss LaFontaine – entering her 22nd year teaching music at Plainsville Primary School – cannot stand the thought of __singing__ the same songs in her school’s ancient kindergarten songbook. The songs are //so// outdated that the kids don’t even understand some of them. The words are about farming and soda shops and other things that simply aren’t in most of their lives anymore. Additionally, the songs are so old that the kids don’t know any of them, so it takes forever for them to learn the tunes. Miss LaFontaine doesn’t have any kids of her own, so she doesn’t really know what songs kids grow up singing these days, but she would like to modernize her repertoire for this year’s kindergarten class. She would love to survey her students’ parents about songs their kids love, but doesn’t think that kindergarteners will be able to reliably get paper surveys home to mom and dad. Standards K:1:1-4 Different types of music (different categories) Different instruments