Start the New Year with These Five Teacher Goals
Happy New Year!
If you’re like me, you love the fresh start that January brings us. I enjoy basing my goals off of categories like health, family, faith, composing, writing, and so on. Within each category I write goals that I want to focus on that relate to that area. One of the categories is teaching. Here are five teacher goals that are fun to work towards and to bring into the classroom! Have a goal you’re setting for your classroom this year? Share it with me! I love hearing about what you’re doing.
Five Teacher Goals You Should Try in 2023
Create a lesson process for each class period
If you want more consistency in the flow of your lessons, creating a process for your classroom is one of the most helpful things you can do. What you include in each class period will vary depending on the length of your classes, materials and instruments that you have available, the musical content focus of the lesson, and your personal preference and teaching style. A lesson process can be a simple outline that helps you know the order of what you’ll be teaching or it can be completely scripted out with detailed information. I’ll share my simple outline that I use to plan my lessons. Feel free to use this or modify it to work for you.
Lesson Length: 70 minutes
Opening/Start of Lesson: How I will start the lesson, how the room should be arranged, what I want students to do
Low Concentration: Song, rhythm/melody activity, sight-reading, easy activity
Transition: How I’ll get students from one activity to the next
High Concentration: The main focus of the lesson where I’ll spend most of my time
Transition: How I’ll get students to the next activity
Low Concentration: Game, brain break, easy activity
Closing/End of the Lesson: How I’ll end the lesson, wrapping up what was learned, sharing assignment due next class
Learn a new instrument
Ukulele, guitar, and recorder are great places to begin! A few places to start for learning a new instrument:
Learn how to tune the guitar or ukulele
Learn one or two chords. There are plenty of songs you can teach to students that use only one or two chords - particularly if you teach Kindergarten or First Grade! Those so-mi songs can be accompanied with a steady chord.
Play
If you’re teaching students how to play the ukulele or guitar, acknowledge that you’re learning it too! Try to stay one chord ahead of students. This is how I learned to play ukulele. I practiced the song I was going to teach a week ahead of time and then played with students to playalongs on YouTube during class. Highly recommend the channel ukeplayalongs for this!
Try something new in the classroom
What do you want to incorporate more of in your lessons? What materials do you have in your class that you haven’t used? What are you interested in having students do that they haven’t done before? Is there a personal music skill you want to develop to use in the classroom? Start there. Decide on what you’d like to bring to the classroom that you haven’t done before or that you’ve done in a different way, but want to add this year.
Focus your energy on building repertoire and sequencing for one musical concept
Everything is built over time. A great way to become clear on how to teach a specific musical concept is to focus on finding repertoire, game ideas, worksheets and music activities related to the concept. As you focus your energy on gathering information, look for the following for each concept. You don’t need as much as you might think! A little can go a long way.
Two songs that contain the musical concept
One game that contains the musical concept
Find or create a worksheet where students can practice writing the rhythm, notating the melody on the staff, or developing their understanding of the concept through writing, drawing, or journaling
Other options: play a song on instruments that contain the concept, find a musical selection to listen to that contains the concept, or create/use an activity using technology to help teach the concept
Arrange a pop song piece for barred instruments
This is one of my all-time favorite things to do!! I love taking familiar songs that students love and arranging them for barred instruments and percussion. A great way to begin this process is to find songs that use 4 chords or less, transpose the piece into a key that can be played on ukulele/guitar/barred instruments or can be sung in a good singing range. Older students enjoy sharing ideas for instrumentation and musical form. Focus on basic chords that use a steady beat strum on an instrument while students sing, playing the root of a chord while playing the melody line or building out an entire composition with multiple layers involving barred instruments, singing and percussion. Keep it as simple or complex as you desire, based on where your students are and where you are in having arranged music personally. Begin somewhere! That’s the goal. And build from there.
