MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

“Looking at the projects presented in the Music Learning Leadership seminars, there was a stark difference between those that were a ‘music lesson’ combined with ‘music integration’ and those that were simply ‘integration’. I think that this idea of M+MI actually adds more integrity to music education. Both aspects must be equally important.” - Deb Schram, Henderson LLSN School Music Specialist, Florida Atlantic University

• Music Plus Music Integration (M+MI) occurs when an educator or educators consciously and seek to intentionally balance ‘teaching music for its own sake’ with ‘teaching music for the sake of its connection with other forms of learning.’
• M+MI ensures the ‘integrity of music integration.’ M+MI alerts music teachers and classroom teachers to the integration of concepts and processes that are both inextricably linked with musical development and their application to other subject areas and social development.
• M+MI aims towards teaching and learning that is mutually reinforcing across disciplines.
• M+MI can occur in the context of music instruction, a music integration unit, or when both are occurring simultaneously.
• Music Learning Leadership as a team building process ensures that Music Plus Music Integration programs will develop and be sustained in schools.

The Detailed View of Music Plus Music Integration

The Standards-based Music Plus Music Integration (M+MI) Program Criteria
Continuum

• For all students in all music learning environments (classrooms, studios, residencies)
• As a distributed responsibility for music teachers, teaching artists, and classroom teachers
• Integration of All Music Standards Based in Music Learning whenever possible
• Principle of differentiation and synthesis
• Relevant to instruction, assessment, professional development, scale-out process
• Conceptual, cognitive, metacognitive, development beyond behaviors
• Comp process
• Purposeful

objective i. Provide Every Student with the Opportunity to Progressively Master Musical Concepts and Skills Authentic to ANY Music Culture or Tradition that:

• Promote Experience and Knowledge of Musical Elements:
  engages skills and content such as rhythm (duration and silence patterns), pitch (frequency patterns, contour), melody (linear combination of rhythm and pitch patterns), harmony (simultaneous vertical combination of sounds), dynamics (volume), articulation (sound shape/envelope), timbre (tone color), etc., that are common elements of music and sound in study of any music tradition or culture.
• Promote Mastery of Musical Literacy Skills (behavioral):
  focuses on the development of multiple musical language and literacy skills (listening, instrumental performance, composition, improvisation, reading, singing, analysis, critique, etc.) necessary to fully understand musical literature of any specific tradition or culture.

objective ii. Provide Every Student with the Opportunity to Acquire a Comprehensive Understanding of Musical Concepts and Skills By:

• Deepening understanding of music concepts and skills through analogous understandings in other subject areas
  Employ multiple representations such as visual displays, numbers, words, movement, etc. to capture understanding of music
• Providing Multiple Entry Points Into the Learning Process:
  Ensure the depth of musical conceptual development through the intensive experience of particular musical styles or genres through many ‘entry points’ that make music accessible to all children.
• Facilitating Rich, Often Simultaneous, Cognitive Processing (multi-tasking):
  expand the range and depth of music learning through engaging a comprehensive set of cognitive processes that compel students to listen (discriminate, describe …), question (investigate, analyze, discover…), create (invent, improvise, compose…), perform (demonstrate, interpret…), and reflect (assess, revise …) in conjunction with their music learning activities.
• Encouraging Comparative Understanding:
  enlarge the range of musical styles, genres, and cultural contexts of music making and meaning toward a comparative understanding of musical concepts, skills, and literature across many cultures.
• Promoting Collaborative Learning:
  Support large and small group peer learning focused on positive social-emotional development of every student.
• Involving Higher Order Thinking and Creativity Skills
  Pay attention to higher order thinking skills that draw on creativity, experience, and understanding of metacognitive practices throughout the learning and assessment process that promote learning transfer and better understanding of the learning process.
• Expecting and Honoring Aesthetic Experience
  Expect and prepare students to have deep aesthetic experiences in music alone and when combined with other art forms such as film, opera, theater, dance, etc.

objective iii. Provide Every Student with the Opportunity for Music Interdisciplinary Learning that Integrate music across the curriculum through:

• Balanced Music Integration Learning that is Mutually Reinforcing:
  focuses on how music learning is made more coherent through its connection with other subject areas and, at the same time, on how music learning enhances learning in other subject areas and social-emotional development. Thus, learning is measured by two-way transfer, interaction, and correlation rather than by one-way causal models.
• Multiple Representations as a Gateway to Integrated Interdisciplinary Learning
  ensures that all children are prepared to integrate skills and content through a rich interchange of multiple representations, multiple learning modalities, multiple intelligences that allow for increasingly coherent and stable understanding of both music and its connection with other learning.
• Understanding Fundamental Concepts Shared Between Music and Other Subjects and Social Development
  identify and investigate fundamental concepts, skills, procedures, historical contexts that are shared between music and other subject areas and social-emotional development.

objective iv. Provide Teachers With Professional Development That Optimizes the Music Plus Music Integrated Learning Environment (research-based, fully accountable program implementation)

• Action research:
  creating an ethos conducive to M+MI program development depends on the collaboration of Artist-Teacher-Scholars focused on building school capacity and improvement based on an action research methodology of inquiry, investigation, documentation, assessment, and evidence.
• Ongoing Teacher Professional Development:
  effective and sustainable M+MI program development requires constant training of teachers as Artist-Teacher-Scholars in music and other subjects in order to optimize understanding of the intersections among disciplines and social-emotional development.
• Effective Team Leadership:
  creating M+MI programs as “agents of change” in schools requires integrative teaching and learning, planning, curriculum design, documentation, assessment and teaching based on principles and practices of inclusive, collaborative team leadership (administrators, classroom teachers, music teachers, guided interns, parents, etc.).
• Progressive Teaching Practices:
  M+MI programs require teaching skills that draw on knowledge and assessment of cognitive development common to music and other subject areas (e.g., stability, reversibility, flexibility, expressivity, verification, accuracy, etc.) and the ability to bridge knowledge and skills across subject areas (teaching for transfer, practice, distillation of principles, higher order thinking, meta-cognitive strategies that focus on learning to learn, etc.).