MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

written by hector armienta with contributions from meg madden (executive director of music in schools today), laura spiering, (second grade classroom teacher), and tai schoeman (principal of el dorado elementary)

story: Underserved and economically disadvantaged school community with little district supported arts instruction and no comprehensive arts education strategy forms partnership with MILE program and MuST and MIENC LLSN Network and creates viable music integration program.

key elements:

• Description of partnership dynamics and professional development: How to create music-integrated curriculum and build basic research capacity; summer Institute helps teaching artists and classroom teachers understand the importance of thinking collaboratively and beginning with questions, developing a line of inquiry, assessment strategies, etc.
• Pilot Program: Music integrated with Life Science curriculum: Tempo and dynamics and animal life cycles; includes description of interactions, some teacher reflections, and a description of pre- and post tests with artifacts showing results.
• Mentoring, Professional Development Exchange with Thornhill: Schools host site visits and share successes and challenges.
• Year 2 in-school scale-out: K-5 sequential music program; research program expands to 2nd and 3rd grade.
• Integration focus shifts to language arts: How can students better understand syllabication and the meaning of words through music? How can students better understand rhythm through language?
• Integration curriculum example 2nd grade: word definition and word fluency, syllabication and rhythmic patterns.
• Increased sophistication of Pre- and post assessments
• Culminating event: for each of the word list words, the students developed musical scenes.
• Integration example 3rd grade: Inquiry questions: How can music help students identify elements of a story (i.e. characters, setting, problem/solution main idea)? How can language arts help students understand musical form and make compositional choices (about tempo, dynamics, and instrumentation when composing/improvising a “narrative” piece of music)
• Tiger and the Big Wind and The First Two Monkeys: Students identify story elements (characters, setting, problem/solution, main idea) and details within the folk tales, and then create a music theater piece in order to learn about musical form and composition.
• Sample score by the students
• Pre- and post-assessment examples
• Summary describes successes in community building and social-emotional development, as well as professional development.
• Scale-out plans: Within the El Dorado school, building an effective team of classroom teachers and teaching artists, as well as an additional Curriculum/Research Specialist. Outside El Dorado and Thornhill to Green Oaks Elementary in Ravenswood City Unified School District in East Palo Alto. Through a pilot opera program developed in collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera Guild, made possible by consultancies with the MIENC.

Download this LLSN Report as a PDF