I recently changed the curriculum of one of my classes to be a more project-based class. My want and desires are to give students an opportunity to dig deeper into a musical subject. As to not make my classes all about performance. It seems as if the only context given for learning about the history and theory related to piece is solely to prepare a student’s ability to connect with what they are performing. That approach worked great for my higher-level performers, and it didn’t reach students who were still learning (or relearning) the fingerings on their instrument. That is a subject for another day.
The class looks more like this, I pick a subject or an artist and we do the following things.
- Make Connections
- Respond to Art
- Create
- Perform
Since I look at this as a cycle, I tend to do these when the class is ready to do them. Often I’ll introduce a piece of music as a listening assignment, we typically learn a melody related to the subject shortly after. Students are given assignments that are grade and given time to research the subject, (i.e go listen to music and learn something time).
About midway through the term, students come up with proposals for a project. Many of them are ambitious, but eventually, I keep them grounded.
By the end, students present their research about the subject. Some choose to put together a performance in groups, others choose to create a piece of visual art representing the subject. Some even put together a slide show with a particular point of view.
So far so good. Students have created some of the following:
Comic Strip
A children’s book
Created a short film (very short film)
Written and or performed in a one-act play
Like I said this may just work out.
My insights won’t offer anything new to the conversation, but I am very appreciative of having another platform to jump from when discussing certain topics with my students. We talked about the music and the imagery of the film. We talked about the significance of the cast and why representation is important. We even got to discuss (or at least I mentioned) they ways in which we view our parents and our roles with them as we get older and start to understand the world differently.
Ideas around representation and imagery of people of color were front and centered in my thoughts as students, a colleague and I watched parts of 
partly because a lot of the people that march in the drum and bugle corps I was a member of went there. I knew they had a marching band and that was a big factor in my appreciation of that school.
I was accepted to LaGuardia and I was very relieved to be going to a specialized HS in NYC. The movie FAME was about that school, so I was secretly humming that tune to myself when I got the news.
It’s the middle of summer, my kid is watching cartoons while I look at my units of study for the up coming school year. Since I am a middle school band director, I tend to worry about how effectively I am helping students learn specific skills on their instruments and the other parts of music
, like music theory and music history. Never mind connecting them to other subjects studies at out school and finding ways to stay in touch with anything current and relevant to middle school kids, while thinking about making global connections to all we do.
Ed Castro's Blog 