MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

Overview

When the Music Center/Morrison Elementary School partnership first began their work under the guidance of the Music-in-Education National Consortium’s Learning Laboratory School Network, the initial interest was to investigate connections between music and literacy. But an understanding of even the semantics of the inquiry would need to evolve. What began as an investigation of “music and literacy” shifted to “connections between music literacy and language literacy” and ultimately arrived at the more clearly expressed intention: How can teaching be structured to reveal explicit connections between the two different disciplines of music and language arts, wherein literacy in one discipline leverages literacy in the other, and vice versa?

View the Morrison Elementary School’s 2005-2006 Digital Portfolio

Overview

In 2005 Thornhill Elementary School not only became one of the seven Music Integrated Literacy Enhancement schools in the Oakland Unified School District, but also became a part of the Music-in-Education National Consortium’s Learning Laboratory Schools Network (LLSN), a group of schools nationwide committed to placing music at the center of school culture in order to enhance student learning, create dynamic professional development partnerships, and build school community. Throughout this first planning year of the MILE Program, Thornhill served as the hub for LLSN Project professional development, curriculum design, data collection, and documentation. The curriculum design process went through three stages: Development, Implementation, and Reflection.

MILE Curriculum Development

Thornhill Elementary and five other MILE schools began designing and developing music integrated curriculum at a 2005 summer planning intensive held at Thornhill. Because Thornhill had just become a LLSN school, certain Music-in-Education National Consortium (MIENC) frameworks were cross-fertilizing the MILE program. For example, teachers at this first summer intensive utilized the MIENC’s Listen, Question, Create, Perform, and Reflect (LQCPR) framework (see JLTM, vol.1) to design music lessons and units that would be integrated with Language Arts, Social Studies, Mathematics, and Science the following year. By the end of the three-day intensive, five units were created and shared with the other schools, including an Order and Sequence mathematics lesson and a science lesson that allowed students to investigate When Sounds Becomes Music.

View Thornhill Elementary’s LLSN Digital Portfolios

• 2007-2008 Jazz & Democracy Project digital portfolio
• 2006-2007 Thornhill Elementary digital portfolio

Overview

At a 2004 Chorus America meeting to discuss arts integration, John Ceschini met Larry Scripp, the director of the Music-in-Education National Consortium’s Learning Laboratory School Network, and discussed Kensington-Parkwood (KP) teachers’ interest in learning more about music and music integration. The research-based nature of the Consortium appealed to many at the school as a way of studying and documenting the impact of the arts integration program. In addition, the focus on music learning was important to increasing teachers’ comfort levels with music in the classroom.