running head: rathgeber music history domain 1 21st ... · pdf file21st century skills...

21st Century Skills Approach to Teaching Music History:

Project-Based and Flipped Learning in 5th Grade Music

Jesse Rathgeber

Northwestern University

June 15, 2012

Running head: RATHGEBER MUSIC HISTORY DOMAIN 1

Prelude: Does Teaching Western Art Music History Have to Be Boring?

History classes can be an enjoyable journey through time for students. However, history

is often presented in a dry and/or non-experiential manner. Music history can be one of the areas

of study that the second paradigm often holds true. When I take a look back on the my own

music education, most lessons that focused on composers and their historical context were the

least enjoyable and most quickly forgotten. I am surely not alone. In a 2007 study, Campbell,

Connell, and Beegle found that one area of concern middle schooler noted about their music

classes was “boring music” they learned about that did not relate to their musical taste. So, why

is it that music history and “classical” music, in general, is regarded as boring areas of study for

so many students? The problem could lie in the way in which such lessons are presented. How

can music educators expect students to enjoy learning about and retain information on music

history when, all too often, it is presented in the form of outdated, lecture style lessons that do

not seem relevant to students’ lives, their educational needs, and personal preferences?

For my music history domain, I tired to find a way to present Western Art Music History

to my students experientially in an interdisciplinary manner so that they would find enjoyment

and relevance in what they learned. I regularly include classical music in my lessons and fifth

grade students are expected to experience a survey and display a basic level of understanding

about four periods of Western Art Music History; Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th

Century/Modern. Yet, I have always struggled with marking these types of lesson highly

engaging. Therefore, I developed some methods, tools, and projects that would assist me in

teaching this part of my curriculum in a way that would be well received by my students and also

leave them with a developing body of knowledge. In doing this, I attempted to change the way I

RATHGEBER MUSIC HISTORY DOMAIN 2

taught to help develop my students’ “21st Century Skills” of collaboration, critical thinking,

making global connections, self-direction, and use of technology as a learning tool, as described

by Ravitz, Hixson, English, and Mergendoller (2012). Two methodologies utilized as guiding

concepts to achieve these ends are Project-Based Learning (Solomon, 2003) and flipped learning

as advocated by Kahn (2011).


21st Century Skills Approach to Teaching Music History

Project Scope and Components

The overall scope of this project rapidly grew as I began to conceptualize the impact I

wanted to have on my classroom, students, and curriculum. The project started with a simple

school website about music history. Soon, I integrated our recorder performance curriculum by

creating and using recorder arrangements of popular classical works. Next, I began to generate

interactive whiteboard flipcharts to present mini-lessons about periods of music history. Finally,

with the help of our school technology and information literacy coaches, I developed a Project-

Based Learning inspired, student-created music website. The complete scope and its

interconnected nature can be seen in a separate MindNode map.

School Music History Website

As I adapted concepts of “flipped learning” (Kahn, 2011; Koller, 2011) through the use of

my school music website, providing lessons and concepts for students to explore at home and/or

during centers, I discovered that my students were beginning to go online to explore the website

independently. They were coming back into the classroom with the basic knowledge that I would

have originally taught in class, and were prompting deeper discussions. Parents would mention

how their students had spent all night playing along with recorder lessons or learning more about

Holst’s “The Planets.” These findings made me reconsider how I presented information in class.

I realized that I could get my students to independently engage with music class curriculum if it

was presented on my website in an enjoyable manner. As a result, I decided to produce a music

history website to highlight composers, their works, and their historical context for my students


to use as an at-home and center time tool. So, cm-musichistory.wikispaces.com was born and

continues to grow.

When creating the website, I first set up the overall structures of main and sub-pages

(Figure 1). For each of the historical periods, I created a main site with basic information, a

characteristics page, and pages highlighting a few prominent composers of the period. The

characteristics page included characteristics of the period, some popular styles of song forms,

popular instruments, and an artwork that displayed similar characteristics. Each composer page

included short, kid friendly biographic information, pictures/portraits, suggested works, a link to

a playlist of the composer’s music, and four embedded YouTube performances of some of the

composer’s works performed by a diverse body of musicians. I made an effort to gather my

information for each page from common sources that my students would be making use of,

mainly in the form of textbooks and other survey guides of classical music. Primarily, I made use

of Osborne’s (1984) Dictionary of Composers, Stanley’s (2007) Classical Music: The Great

Composers and Their Masterworks, Kamien’s (2008) Music: An Appreciation (9th ed.), Grout

and Palisca’s (2001) A History of Western Music (6th ed.), and Sherman and Seldon’s (1997)

oddly enjoyable and useful The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music as my resources.

Adding an element of interactivity to the website, I made extensive use of links to outside

resources that would allow my students to independently explore and dive deeper into the related

information. For example, a composer’s birth and death places were linked to maps via

GoogleMaps and unfamiliar instruments and concepts were linked, when applicable, to pictures

or websites that are related. Finally, I made an attempt to accommodate my students’ odd


fascination with how composers died and other afflictions they may have had by making text

links to a children’s health website that described adult diseases and problems in child-like ways.

Student websites

Another major component of this project was actually having my students research and

create music history websites. To do this, I was lucky enough to have the help and expertise of

our technology coach, Robert Hanrahan, who assisted me in generating a basic website structure

(Figure 2) as a template for the students to edit. He also helped me tackle the task of assigning

site-level permissions to each student and introduced me to some of the concepts of modern

Project-Based Learning (Simons, 2003), which led to the forming of collaborative groups,

research targets, and many of the other facets of this project. For the project, students had to

collaboratively research, input their findings, and plan out how the information would be


Figure 1. Overall website structure for the school website

displayed on their websites by making use of web development tools like embedding and

linking. The groups needed to use their critical thinking skills to process sometimes conflicting

research and provide the following information for their websites: musical characteristics,

exemplar composers, a few works by these composers, videos relating to the period, important or

interesting historical events that occurred, at least one piece of artwork from the period that

displayed similar characteristics as the music, and cited sources.

For the first portion of their website project, students researched the Classical period. I

assessed these Classical websites by making use of a checklist that was provided to the students

and by posting the checklist with comments to a document that only the group could access.

Students were encouraged to make revisions as they also started their work on the next period’s


Figure 2. Overall website structure for student websites

webpage. For the Romantic and Modern periods, the constraints and specific directions were

decreased to allow for student creativity and personal choice.

The final part of this project was for each student to independently create a page for one

Modern period composer that they selected from a list or chose based on their research. Again,

the actual requirements for these pages were kept intentionally loose. Student did get very

creative with how they displayed their information and actually began conversations with Mr.

Hanrahan about web development. Also, the commenting feature on the website was enabled for

this step in the project to encourage students to critique and assist each other.

Classroom Experiences and Connections to Recorder Curriculum

The final portions of this music history domain project were related to what occurred in

the classroom (Figure 3). First, I developed mini-lessons to teach the basic characteristics and

context of each historical period. In these mini-lessons, I made use of an interactive whiteboard

software called ActiveInspire to create audio and visual teaching tools. These provided students

with a 10 to 15 minutes survey of general information and musical works about the musical

periods to guide their research and thinking.

For the remainder of the 45 minutes of music class for the week, students went through a

variety of activities to help solidify or extend their understanding of the concepts taught in the

mini-lessons. Some of the learning activities were center-based in which students would explore

music through videos, iPod listenings, and websites for independent discovery. During some

classes, students learned recorder versions of famous classical works that I had arranged for them

to integrate required performance targets. The final set of activities that students would encounter


during this project were experiential based and involved students moving, using focused

listening skills, or composing based on concepts they had learned about in class.

Finally, each period ended with a debriefing discussion about what students learned and a

listening activity that helped students relate music of each period to modern, popular music

styles. One example of such a lesson occurred as we were listening to Coldplay’s “Paradise” as a

connection to the music of Brian Eno, as he produces a great amount of Coldplay’s records. As

students listened, they began to spontaneously shout out connections to every other musical

period.


Figure 3. Classroom components of the project

Coda: A Reflection

This domain project was very rewarding and, at times, very tricky. Nonetheless, it has

already had a major impact upon how I intend to plan lessons in the future. By integrating ideas

and talents of other educators, I was also able to expand my knowledge of progressive education

methodologies and ideologies. By working closely with classroom teachers, information literacy

coaches, and technology coaches, the reach of a music curriculum can become expansive. Not

only can the music curriculum reach into other non-academic areas, but also, with higher buy-in

by other staff members, curricular planning can quickly become more interdisciplinary and

holistic.

However, the most amazingly worthwhile outcome of this project is the impact it had

directly on my students’ learning and enjoyment of classical music. Through each step of the

project, I attempted to make the music cool and show its relationship to the music that my

students enjoy, while also avoiding every chance to make judgment calls about the quality of the

music. By showing students a composer’s works, how they crafted their compositions, and the

socio-cultural context that they lived and worked in, I attempted to show them why classical

music is unique without telling them that they have to love every work and value it above any

other style of music. Also, by “flipping” my classroom the way that Kahn (2011) advocates for, I

opened up class time for deep, student-directed discussions that were engaging and educational

to myself and the students. By attempting to integrate “21st Century Skills” (Ravitz et al., 2011),

I placed a lot more control over the learning process into the hands of my students, which they

seemed to relish. By fostering collaboration, critical thinking, and self-directed learning through

the use of Project-Based Learning (Solomon, 2003), I saw my students encounter challenges


together, grow, and create amazing websites that displayed their learning. The students even

independently engaged in revisions to their websites and some are continuing their work over the

summer. Finally, by adding in the always “hip” and “cool” allure of technology, I helped my

students see how technology can be a tool for their learning as well as for their entertainment.

The overall impact of this project will not be felt by me, directly, since the fifth grade

students will bye moving to middle school in August. However, I know that what they

experienced and how they grew was meaningful and valued by them because so many ended

their time in elementary school discussing this very thing and/or comment on their websites. One

student put it this way:

“At first, I thought, ‘how boring, I hate that old stuff!’ But now, its so cool how

the music I like is kind of connected to stuff from a long time ago. The best thing

about it was that we kind of had us figure it out on our own, so we had to think

and pay attention when we were in class and when we did the research stuff. I feel

like I just solved a big puzzle!” (Student, personal communication, June 3, 2012)


Resources

Campbell, P. S., Connell, C., & Beegle, A. (2007). Adolescent’s expressed meanings of music in

and out of school. Journal of Research in Music Education, 55(3), 220-236.

Kahn, S. (2011, March). Salman Kahn: Let’s use video to reinvent education [Video file].

Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/

salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html

Koller, D. (2011, December 6). Death knell for the lecture: Technology as a passport to

personalized education. The New York Times, D8. Retrieved from

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/daphne-koller-technology-as-a-passport-to-\

personalized-education.html?pagewanted=all

Ravitz, J., Hixson, N., English, M., & Mergendoller, J. (2012). Using project based learning to

teach 21st century skills: Findings from a statewide initiative. Paper presented at annual

meetings of the American Education Research Association, Vancouver, BC. Retrieved

from http://www.bie.org/research/study/PBL_21CS_WV

Solomon, G. (2003). Project-based learning: A primer: When students are challenged to get to

work solving real-life problems, the world becomes a classroom. Here we offer a guide to

getting started. Technology & Learning, 23(6), 20.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/science/daphne-koller-technology-as-a-passport-to-personalized-education.html?pagewanted=all




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