Paul Price

Paul Price

Artifact for ISLLC Standard 2: An education leader promotes the success of every student by advocating, nurturing, and sustaining a school culture and instructional program conducive to student learning and staff professional growth.

Name of Artifact: Lesson plans including MP3’s of lesson and examples.

Date: March 28, 2009

Course: EDU 695

Rationale: I have chosen a lesson developed during my Differentiation class at UNE to connect with this leadership standard. In this lesson, we discussed rock and roll style, history, content, purpose, and many other things as we delved in to many musical ideas from different angles. The lesson is designed to be in 3 parts, and I gravitated toward my strengths in performance and guitar as strong demonstrators in the process. I was able to provide a fun history of rock and roll and describe many concepts through using familiar vehicles, such as Garage Band, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. I used John Jacobsen’s Music Express publication with the lesson, as well as centers for viewing examples and listening, and one entire lesson involved me giving a 40 minute “history” of the guitar’s role in rock and roll. This is included in the MP3 catalog. The lesson “sneaked” many fundamental musical ideas in with the fun and “with it” aspects, and several of the classroom teachers were intrigued enough to collaborate with me to make it fit with lessons of their own. This fits with Standard 2 in all aspects, and I feel I have added something interesting to my—and possibly others’—curriculum. One important way to develop teaching and leadership strengths is to recognize interests among students and use it to its full advantage. I feel this lesson corresponds with many ideas students find fun, and it has developed interest for me to constantly keep searching for ideas that are creative in my curriculum.

Reflection: This lesson provided many highlights for the students as well as for me. I often take for granted that students are used to me being a professional guitarist, but in this case I had a structured demonstration for them. I connected many familiar ideas that the students had and demonstrated how the sounds were actually created on the guitar. It had a great impact on the students, and they were never bored. All three parts of the lesson were very successful, and the students were very interested as we did the centers. They moved from viewing videos to listening to discussing various instruments and the instruments’ roles in the bands. Due to the huge success of Guitar Hero and Rock Band, most students are familiar with music made in decades past. I took full advantage of this familiarity as we studied the unit.

This lesson was very large in scope, and I will continue to use it on a somewhat smaller scale. The demonstrations and history sections will be included, but I will condense some of the other ideas in order to shorten the length. I feel that using materials given to us can sometimes lead to complacency among teachers and students. If I simply used the books in my curriculum and nothing else, my music classes would not be effective and the learning environment would suffer. The results of searching for materials and creating a plan and a unit are so rewarding that I constantly strive to come up with new ways of teaching the same ideas. I think teachers of music must connect with students of all ages with what is current in their world, even if it is despised in ours. The mileage I have gotten from “High School Musical” is amazing. Simply connecting with familiarity and doing so with differentiation leads to so many pathways to teaching musical—and any—concepts.