Curricular Design

One of the core beliefs that guides my music teaching is that it can and should become a life-long source of personal expression and joy, connection and community, and continual learning for everyone. While many students might take private music lessons outside of school, the structure of the music program at EPS is limited to several ten-week courses, often taken sporadically throughout many school years, so in my mind, these courses need to be designed to maximize impact, open up doors of possibility, stimulate interest and excitement, and show the variety of ways in which different people incorporate music-making in their lives in different capacities.

One of the main things that initially attracted me to EPS was the way it presented the importance of these activities like arts and athletics as being equally important to the more traditional academic subjects. These character-building activities instill discipline and persistence, teach teamwork, and give students a sense of family and “home” during their education, and students regularly report to me about music classes being the uplifting moment that gets them through a tough time.

Methodologies for Coursework Design

Some of the structures and methodologies I use in choral music include developing a repertoire of warm-up exercises with students, teaching the use of solfege singing, regularly including ear training exercises, familiarization with written music notation, playing music games and bonding activities, and having a baseline knowledge of choral repertoire, having familiarity with changing voices, vocal categorization nomenclature, seating arrangements, and changing rehearsal spaces to prep for performances.

A visual of each voice type’s range, within a canvas assignment

Within instrumental music courses, students use a method book that helps guide instruction on short pieces of music and familiarizes them with many of the music reading fundamentals. I have developed familiarity with the use/care/repair of a wide variety of instruments, so I can help students assemble/take apart their instruments, while keeping them all in good working order. We develop routines and structures in class like warm-up time, tuning time, independent practice time where I can freely float around the class to give tips and advice, and occasionally lecture time where students are shown something new and try out new sounds & concepts together. We also find some time to incorporating creativity by writing our own pieces (see file below) & building teamwork as a class, and I often work to find very different repertoire choices for beginners vs advanced musicians who have either taken lessons, or taken the class previously.

Structures/Methodologies in Digital music include familiarity with many different D.A.W. (digital audio workspaces) including Logic, ProTools, Soundtrap, Garageband, etc, and how to help present those to students, introducing students to music vocabulary regardless of their prior experience or skill level, hearing their submissions and giving consistent timely feedback about students’ creations. In class, there is a balance of lecture time, demonstrations/listening time, and work time where I can float around to answer questions and check-in on progress with the current skill.

A student’s final project submission for Digital Music, called “Mute City”

Fine & Performing Arts Philosophy at EPS

Our belief is that students in music classes at EPS need to be exposed to all of the practices and norms that professional musicians have. This includes the process of rehearsing together in a goal-oriented and positive team atmosphere, with individuals freely making unprompted pencil marks in their music, gradually getting used to the cycle of rehearsing a wide variety of music: starting by learning all notes and rhythms in a new piece, and then being coached on the finer details by an instructor, such as breathing, pronunciation, articulation, timing the starts and ends of words, and finally polishing a piece and bringing out the fun parts of the music; the dynamics, the movement, the facial expressions, the articulation, all the things that make music performances exciting.

Within all music and arts courses at EPS, we keep in mind the national arts standards when creating coursework. The four main categories of which are: CREATE, PERFORM, RESPOND, and CONNECT. Creating- How can students show creativity and ownership of their learning, even in a class designed for performance? Performing- How will students share their work with others in the community? Responding- What vocabulary can students use to show their understanding of what they’re hearing? How do they feel about their progress in the course, or their performances? Connecting – How does their music connect to history and geography? Who wrote it, in what circumstance, location, etc? How can students build connections/relationships to others in their class?

EPS Musicians preparing for a performance

These four categories (Create, Perform, Respond, Connect) are essential skills for all artists, whether visual or musical, and we use them to guide the direction of our courses, and ultimately our grading practices. While there may be other categories of assignment in certain classes, (Participation grading in choir, Listening & Skill Demos in digital music, Repertoire check-ins in Instrumental Music) each of the courses will have an element of creating, performing, responding and connecting.

EPS’ Pedagogical Tenets

EPS has a focus on experiential learning, critical inquiry, and letting instructors experiment and redesign how they teach concepts. I spend as much class time as possible helping students learn to BE musicians, rather than becoming music critics or music history buffs. Experiential learning is what we do day in and day out. Critical inquiry is an important factor in music classes as well- we often apply new vocabulary words to music that we hear, and we often have group discussions about which songs we should perform. (There are usually more pieces of music learned throughout the trimester than can be performed at the end.) And just as important is the freedom for flexibility in how I teach…it would be very hard to teach music to a variety of grade levels with a variety of experience levels with a variety of instruments without being flexible! Each class has its own, unique quality and size and makeup of students which often leads to wildly different experiences from season to season. As such, the coursework and pace of progress differs greatly each time the same course is taught.

I am able to implement these EPS frameworks by allowing students to question the things they hear, demonstrate skills on their instrument, ask questions freely in a community-minded way, allowing freedom for students to create digital music and challenge pre-established norms, and to create music assignments and projects that showcase their uniqueness.

Updates and Evolution of Coursework

We are constantly updating, evolving and dreaming and scheming within the music discipline at EPS. We have just added some new digital music classes this year, in both middle and upper school, along with the addition of Music Theory in the upper school. We also offer courses that are designed by default to continually update: Rock Vocal Studio, which focuses on vocal skills, recording, songwriting, and music technology knowledge constantly has a new time period & genre focus every time it is offered, along with Rock Orchestra. All of our classes select music relating to contemporary issues and the present culture, even if the music was written long ago. Sometimes certain music classes have no choice but to evolve and change when they are taught by different instructors! (I am thinking ahead to next year when Introduction to Wind Instruments will be taught by Ed Castro and I will be taking on Chamber Choir)

For the future, some of my goals include working with my team to explore the possibility of building out a more robust “two-track” system in the intro-level music classes for students who repeat the course, and also creating a content library online which includes lessons and videos related to music-reading skills to help even the playing field between students coming into class with lots of prior knowledge and those without.