Professional Development and March Madness

This week was a bit of a strange one for us. We had an early out on Tuesday, but with the snow, most of our students were late to school, so the first hour had very few students, and after that, students were in flux anyway. Between "I Love to Read" and Valentine's Day excitement, the whole schedule was a bit discombobulated and while I did have a President's Day activity that briefly introduced the idea of Orff Instrumentation to some of my older students, for the most part, it wasn't anything notable. I had a sub on Thursday and Friday so I could attend the MN Music Ed Mid Winter Conference, and I took a lot of ideas from that to implement in our programs. I'm working on a proposal to purchase a classroom set of ukuleles and diversify our recorder complement by adding alto, tenor and bass recorder. I also made some great connections with colleagues and worked on some curriculum review for both the band program and the general music program. So this week's reflection is a bit disconnected, but I did start to build anticipation in students for what is happening in music in March.

What?
Music March Madness is a bracketology kind of thing that I am going to do with students at both schools during the month of March. Each week, I will play a piece from all of the genres still in the bracket, and students will get to vote on their favorites. At the end of the month, we will determine a school winner. While we haven't started the process of listening and voting yet, I did hang up the poster and introduce the idea to students to start building anticipation. There are four divisions for the genres:
1. Classical (Romantic, Baroque, Opera and Impressionism)
2. World Music (Bollywood, Kpop, Mariachi and Polka)
3. Contemporary Music (Pop, Rock and Roll, Country and EDM)
4. Miscellaneous Genres (Musical Theatre, Ballet, Movie Music and Concert Band music)

So What?
This is a fun way to get students excited about listening to new kinds of music and introducing genres that previously they wouldn't be exposed to. The competitive nature of this gets them discussing the genres, making arguments for what is the 'best' kind and trying to sway peers to vote with them.

Now What?
As I was putting up the bracket in the hallway, several teachers stopped to talk to me about it. The teachers want to get involved as well- they want to have their own voting in the teacher's lounge and also fill out brackets based on what they think the students will pick. I think this is going to be a really fun way to bridge connections across the schools with colleagues and students. I will be collecting data from how each grade level at each school votes as well.  I plan on reporting back the results at the end of March.


Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 17, 2019 at 1:40 PM

    Sounds like you are going to have a fun, competitive way of introducing students to different music genres as well as hear where their interests lie. The staff want to engage as well and make a competitive game out of it by guessing where they students will vote.

    What are some strategies you have considered to get your students to understand the different genres?

    ReplyDelete

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