Welcome to this week's edition of Liquid Logic - STEAM in form and function. I'd like to devote this edition to building a curriculum. There are several ways that teachers go about this, and I'm sure you've read fabulous blogs and journal articles from other more seasoned educators chronicling how to do this. I just want to throw my "hat" in the ring and say - this is what worked for us.
I've had two great luxuries in my career. The first, was having a corporation that gave me the reins and said, "Take it." where curriculum was concerned. I had freedom to construct, create, and teach music any way that I wanted too, as long as I covered the standards. The second great luxury has been my brilliant co-teacher, Sarah Papin-Thomas, who is so forward-thinking that I have a hard time keeping up with her.
In the summer of 2009, Sarah and I began our class integration by searching WHAT we needed to teach according to Indiana's state standards. We used a Venn diagram in the beginning to compare our standards for each of our classes. Then we both looked at what we had taught the prior year for ideas. By the end of the summer we decided to base our project units on themes. Since English is also an art form, we found that we could easily find poetry, prose, music, and pictures to make our curriculum, it was a matter of constructing projects around our content standards.
There are 5 major themes in the Arts: Love, Death, Nature, Psychology, and Politics/Ethics. I had been teaching my choral classes a theme a year. If the year's theme was Love, the students wrote papers about love, sang songs about love, listened to artists works about love, viewed art concerning love, and had discussions about what love really is. The next year we would do the same with Death, and so on... Since there are 5 themes, no student that participated in my classes for four years ever covered the same topic twice. Sarah had been loosely following the state English curriculum with her own twists and helpful additions. She had to look at state reading guides, suggested supplemental works, and other instructional tools and assessments. We began to construct projects that integrated both sets of standards, both sets of content, and both sets of instructional activities.
If you are integrating - look at what you both are currently doing. Odds are, you already have the answer to your curriculum questions. it's simply a matter of unifying the topics in a way that neither side loses.
The first year was rough. We were learning how to work together, and getting to know one another. Our building was under construction and we didn't have flooring, a ceiling, or reliable technology. However, where class content was concerned we began to forge a solid curriculum that was open for synthesis and experimentation, but still structured enough that students didn't feel lost. A key component to our curriculum was the project debrief. During the debrief the students were surveyed and we looked for flaws in our instruction, routine, and system. By allowing the students to point out our flaws we were able to correct the hidden things that both our eyes had missed. While it can be painful to hear a high school student point out a fault - the gain is worth it in the end. To my surprise, most students didn't abuse this privilege but took advantage of it and were quite constructive with their criticism.
Now that we're in our 3rd year of implementation we are almost a well oiled machine. Taking into consideration a number of things that our students told us, most of the kinks have been ironed out and the class flows from one topic to the next in a stream of music, art, and literature. We speak together, divide our work when necessary, assist each other - It's really an accomplishment that Sarah and I are both proud of, but the greatest craftsmanship has come in our lessons. The themes were the key. They gave us inspiration, a connection point for our content, an anchored area to work with, and another way to expose students to the aesthetic beauty and potent power of the arts.
If you find yourself searching for a way to reconstruct your curriculum - the themes may be the way to go? You can devise plans for each theme, and then I suggest finding a reading source to tie your content and concepts together. For example, this year for the Death project we focused on two texts: Requiem, by W.A. Mozart and A German Requiem by Johannes Brahms. Both requiem texts deal with death from different perspectives and have offered up a wealth of discussion points on religion, music, art, writing, history, and even science. We timed the end of the Death project, not only with Halloween, but with a performance of the Brahm's Requiem by the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.
Whenever you can pair an experience with the content in the concept you're going to make strides.
In closing: Look at the themes. Look at what you're currently teaching. Discover the common threads. Find a unifying text. Look for a good way to culminate in an experience. Then do it. And don't forget about the debrief. Let the kids tell you what worked for them and what didn't. That's the ticket.
Until next week!
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