MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

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

With the support of Chicago Arts Partners in Education (CAPE), Walt Disney Magnet School was invited to be part of an inquiry based action research project, the Learning Laboratory School Network (LLSN) of the Music-in-Education National Consortium (MIENC). CAPE has worked with Disney Magnet School since 1999, when it became part of the network of schools working with teaching artists to integrate the arts across the curriculum.

The Disney Magnet School is part of the Fine and Performing Arts Magnet Cluster Program, a school improvement initiative led by the Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Academic Enhancement. In particular, the Fine and Performing Arts Magnet Cluster Program seeks to improve the quality of and access to arts education in 58 arts-focused schools across the city. Schools in this network work towards overall school improvement by systematically addressing eight areas of school operation: leadership, curriculum integration, professional development, instructional effectiveness, inter-and intra-school collaboration, parental involvement, community partnerships, and opportunities for accelerated student learning. In addition to an arts focus, Disney has also incorporated a focus on technology; there are over 13 technology labs in the school. One is a state of the art Digital Music Laboratory, funded in part by the Disney family, and the other is the Fast ForWord lab, which is used to support students who are struggling with literacy skills. The connection between these two programs became the basis for this investigation.

View the Disney School’s LLSN Digital Portfolio