Music Tech Week 6

The focus of week six was instructional design.  Instructional design is an important part of teaching because it allows the teacher to predetermine the sequence of instruction in a way that is best for students.  Understanding how people learn is an important part of instructional design.  I found the concept of constructivisim to be important when thinking about instructional design in music classes.  “Driscoll (2002) describes learning as contextual, active, social and reflective” (Bauer, 2014 p. 147).  This description of learning is constructivist in nature.  All four of the concepts described by Driscoll in the quote from Bauer (2014) are important to consider when designing units or curriculum.  Students must have a context within which they can process and understand new information.  In music, if a teacher is trying to teach the concept of syncopation but students do not know the difference between a downbeat and an upbeat, explaining syncopation using those terms is likely not going to be effective.  Understanding a student’s or class’ prior knowledge is required to understand what contextual knowledge that student or class has related to the topic and can guide instruction in a way that allows the teacher to teach new material within a context the students will understand.  Learning is an active process, especially in music.  Active music making is at the core of much quality music instruction.  It is not enough to simply describe how to play an instrument or sing, students must actively participate in order to truly understand the concepts or skills being taught.  Learning is social, even with the use of technology in modern classrooms, students do not learn in a bubble, they interact with other students and the teacher to learn new material.  This is important to remember as a teacher because a teacher cannot simply expect the students to understand material from reading a book or using a website.  The reflective step of learning is one that some teachers might overlook because it does not require much action from the teacher and it is after the learning has supposedly taken place.  It is important for students to reflect upon their learning so that they can evaluate their learning.  An example of a music student reflecting on their learning would be to make an audio recording of them playing an instrument and then listening to the recording with a rubric or other evaluation tool.

Backward design is also a concept that I found to be important in the reading this week.  This seems like the best way to design units and instruction because it establishes a goal or learning outcome for students before instruction begins.  With this goal in mind, the teacher can backward plan a sequence of instruction that will logically build upon itself so that students can achieve the learning outcome that is required.  The value of backward planning is that it allows the teacher to plan ahead of time what the sequence of instruction should be so that it establishes a context within which students can learn new material.  If students do not understand subdivision of a beat, playing a piece that has 16^th notes in it would not make sense to students if they have not seen the relationship between 8^th notes and quarter notes.  If 16^th notes are a learning outcome that a teacher has determined is important, using backward design would allow the teacher to set up lessons in a way that allows students to understand the concept of subdivision in a systematic way and students would have experience with subdividing beats before the 16^th notes are introduced.  Without backward design, teachers run the risk of haphazardly introducing concepts as they appear in new pieces of music without a logical step leading to the new information. 

This week we were also introduced to WebQuests.  These projects are learning activities where most of, if not all, of the information students interact with comes from the Internet.  The website has a great list of examples of WebQuests and describes in great detail how to design a WebQuest.  I have assigned similar assignments to students in the past, but the easy design strategies on the WebQuest website make this a good model to follow.  I will likely use WebQuests in the future in my classes.

Reference

Bauer, W. I. (2014).  Music learning today: digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.