Establishing Program Goals
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LONG-RANGE PLANNING
Establishing Program Goals
Establishing long-range goals for your music curriculum is an essential part of deciding what to do and what not to do in your classroom. Throughout your career, as you interact with colleagues in your school system, through courses, workshops, and professional readings, you will encounter numerous suggestions of ideas for teaching music. How will you decide which of these ideas is in keeping with what you believe about teaching and learning music? How will you decide which ideas to bring into your classroom and which to leave out? How will you decide which are the things your students need to know? With the limited contact time allotted to music education in most school systems, how will you establish priorities?
Some of these answers will lie in school districts’ curricular guides. Some states provide suggested curricula as well. In many cases, however, these curricular guides are either very specific (indicating, for example, specific pitches or rhythmic values or musical works to be taught at a particular grade level) or very general. While teachers certainly need to attend to the suggestions made in the various “official” documents dealing with music curriculum, making decisions about what to do on a day-to-day basis requires some additional thinking on the part of the individual teacher.
In thinking about what you will teach your students, first consider where you might like them to be when they exit your program. Considering contact time and scheduling issues, what do you think would be reasonable for a high school graduate of the district’s music program to be able to do and know? What do you think your graduates should look like and be like? What should they know about music that will significantly impact the rest of their lives? Once you have an image of where you are headed, you can begin to break this vision down into smaller chunks, and begin to have some idea about what you might want a fifth grader to be able to do, and so on.
While this step is an important one, it is equally important to consider the view from the opposite direction. Looking at curricular planning from the viewpoint of what an exiting student should look like can create a situation that puts pressure on entering students to accomplish a certain amount in order to reach that exit goal. Therefore, it is equally essential to consider what students will be like as they enter your program. What do five-year-olds come to school already knowing about music? How can you capitalize on what they know to help them grow so they will eventually reach the goals you envision as exit goals?
In your thinking, try to “play both ends toward the middle.” Consider exit goals, the nature of students entering the program, and the amount of time your students will spend in music classes, and think about whether your goals are realistic and attainable. Try to envision where you think students might be at the end of second grade, fifth grade, eighth grade, twelfth grade. What will students who get involved in performing ensembles know? What opportunities will there be for students who opt not to perform in ensembles? What are they likely to know about music as a result of being in your program? With experience, you will adjust your goals and eventually develop a sense of what is possible within the constraints of your own circumstances. As a professional, you will need to answer many of these questions yourself, specific to your own situation, students, nature of course offerings, amount of contact time, and so on. However, there are some general, encompassing issues that can guide curricular planning.
Who Should Study Music?
First you must think about who will be in your music class. In most music programs, all students participate in general music classes, at least at the elementary school level. In many programs, however, by the time students reach ten or eleven years old and enter middle school, music is no longer an option for everyone. In high school programs, access to music education is generally even more limited. As a profession, we need to consider whether or not this is a reasonable way of “doing business.”
According to the most recent research and theories of the ways the brain works, all people have the capacity to understand and make music. Music is a way of knowing. It is one of the ways in which everyone’s brain is capable of functioning. According to Howard Gardner, it is a kind of intelligence, one of several kinds of intelligence of which all people are capable[1]. Gardner characterizes music as one of our symbol systems--one of the ways through which we formulate understanding of the world--a unique way of knowing, different from other ways of knowing. Music is part of our world and music-making is part of what it is to be human.
If it is so that everyone has the capacity to understand music, then it must be the right of every individual to have the opportunity to develop that way of thinking and operating. Perhaps school systems do not have the right to limit students’ access to one of the ways of thinking they possess. Further, neuro-psychological researchers are beginning to explore the relationships among the various ways of thinking. From her work in this field, researchers like Frances Rauscher suggest to educators that the development of one way of thinking may effect the individual’s ways of engaging in other ways of thinking. Certainly there are process connections. Learning to put ideas together to solve a problem using one way of thinking should certainly impact one’s ability to engage in the same kind of process using another way of thinking.
Why Study Music?
Much has been written on this topic in the field of aesthetics and philosophy of music and arts education[2]. It is not the intention here to deal with this question in depth. However, this is a fundamental question for all arts educators. Music teachers need to be conversant with why they are making the choices they make. Whether conscious or not, teachers’ decisions about what and how they will teach reflect their own underlying beliefs about the nature and purpose of arts education. Therefore, it is important that teachers reflect upon and come to understand their own beliefs, and then consider whether the choices they make in practice are in keeping with those beliefs.
Curricular Goals that Promote Artistic Understanding
Program goals for the development of music curricula should be rooted in the intrinsic value of music itself (Reimer, 1989; See footnote 2). Experience in music classes should enable students to increase their structural understanding of music, based on the belief that a greater understanding of music will result in a greater capacity for experiencing the aesthetic value of the music. The extent to which the listener is able to comprehend the expressive characteristics of a work is directly related to his or her level of understanding of the work itself. In other words, the more a student understands about the structural aspects of a musical work--how it is organized in terms of form, texture, or meter and how the expressive characteristics such as dynamics, tempo, timbre, or articulation function to produce the desired effect--the greater his or her capacity for aesthetic response. One can not teach aesthetic response. The teacher can only help the student to increase his or her understanding of the ways in which music “works” in hopes that increased structural understanding will foster aesthetic understanding.
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[1] All music teachers should know the work of Howard Gardner. As an introduction to his work, read Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1983) and The Unschooled Mind (1991), both published by Basic Books, Inc., NY.
[2] See, for example, Reimer, Bennett. (2003). A Philosophy of Music Education: Advancing the Vision. NJ: Prentice-Hall.