S14: E264 Implementing What You’ve Learned in Your Levels Courses
You’ve spent a week or more learning new ideas, meeting new colleagues and friends, and making music in amazing ways.
How do you incorporate all you’ve learned? Here are a few ideas…
If you’ve had the opportunity to take a Summer Levels Course, you are truly fortunate to have learned from some of the most amazing educators. You come away with a wealth of ideas and experiences. You want to capture everything you’ve learned, take it to your students in the fall and immediately implement all of the incredible pieces, strategies, lessons, and joy into your classroom. You’re likely changed as an educator. Your thinking was challenged. Your musicianship was pushed and grew in many ways. Now what do you do with what you’ve learned and how do you bring it to your students?
Start Small.
Make one change. You could do this several ways:
Focus on one grade level. Build from the youngest ages in how you shift things.
Implement one area of musical experiences. Add more movement to each grade. Focus on teaching more drum pieces. More xylophone ensemble pieces. Using prepare-present-practice to scaffold learning through singing.
Make a Plan for Implementation
What has to change in your to add in something new or shift from doing things one way to another?
When I switched from using ta, titi, tikatika into using the TAKADIMI system. My students were speaking rhythms one way and I wanted to shift how we speak rhythms because I learned from Carol Krueger during the summer and was influenced by what I learned and how much easier I saw that students could understand rhythms using this system.
Create Content
What do you need to create in order to present new song material? Manipulatives, Google Slides, Google docs.
Make google slide presentations for individual songs.
Create scaffolded outlines of rhythmic and melodic content that you want to teach.
Start making those Kodály Song Collections. Set a goal to create one or two songs each week this summer. A little at a time makes a difference in the long term!
Practice Your Musicianship
If you’ve just had Orff Levels and you want to continue to grow in your recorder playing, practice! If your students learn the soprano recorder, consider working on playing the tenor recorder. Practice your skills by playing recorder repertoire and when you begin your recorder unit with students, play the tenor recorder when teaching soprano. Maybe you learned the autoharp in a Kodály Level. If you have access to one, tune the instrument as your teacher shared and practice playing.
Write elemental pieces based on themes for speech and drum pieces.
Take short poems and create melodies within specific modes.
Connect with Your Classmates from your Levels Courses
One of the best parts of a Levels Course is the teacher friends you make. Lifelong connections for many. Get together with your friends. Plan out things that you both want to do. One of you creates one thing and the other creates a second thing. Then share with each other. Discuss how things are working, what you’re working on and reflect on what you’ve learned together. As you implement ideas throughout the school year, keep connecting and sharing how things are going with each other and listen to ideas that are working or not working. Learn from each other.