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Robert Herrold 11.9.2012 TIE535 Instructional Design AUSL Fall 2012 TPA Task 2: Instruction Commentary In the instruction seen in the clip(s), describe strategies you used to engage students in learning tasks to develop skills and strategies to comprehend or compose text. For this segment of the lesson, the objective is to get students to accurately speak and play the rhythm of the poem. The ultimate objective of the whole unit is to get students to use the rhythmic patter of the words in the poem to improvise 16 beats of melody on xylophones. The instruction for this segment focuses around me modeling a strategy for the students, and scaffolding their understanding of and execution of this strategy. The strategy teaches students to analyze the rhythm of written text and to extract musical rhythmic information from it. First, students become familiar with the text (this happened through a game we played with this poem in the previous lesson), then students learn to speak the text with rhythmic accuracy, then they transfer that spoken rhythm to body percussion, and finally to playing rhythm on instruments. a. Cite examples of strategies aimed at engaging all your students and examples aimed at engaging specific individuals or subgroups. If you described any of these fully in the lesson plans or the planning commentary, just reference the relevant description. My strategy for engaging the students was focused on engaging the class as a whole through call and response. The students were familiar with the text from a story that we read together, and a game that we played which used this poem in the previous lesson. My strategy included expanding upon students prior knowledge of this text, and analyzing and experiencing the rhythmic values of the text, ultimately transferring their language knowledge into musical/rhythmic knowledge. The prior lesson, which focused around the game and poem, was essentially the hook for this lesson. The aim for the fun story and game from the previous lesson is that students would be engaged with the

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text in this lesson. Since the poem was a part of the game and students had repeated it several times, they would be familiar with the words and their rhythm. b. How did these strategies reflect students academic or language development, social/emotional development, or cultural and lived experiences? The lesson was designed to meet students present levels of ability in relation to their musical content knowledge regarding rhythm. But it also relates to students ability in literacy. The words in the poem are simple, one to two syllable words that I am reasonably sure students are familiar with and capable of reading and recognizing. Since I am not assessing students proficiency in reading, it is important that the words in the poem are not particularly challenging. In fact, they are designed to be familiar words. The strategy that I am modeling is the transferring of rhythmic properties of reading to rhythmic playing of instruments. Those are also the skills that I will be assessing later in the unit. Since I am challenging students specifically to use this strategy, it is crucial that the language in the lesson be familiar so that it may be applied with proficiency. In other words, I want to ensure that I am assessing students proficiency with rhythm, and not necessarily students proficiency with difficult language. Cite examples of language supports seen in the clip(s) to help your students understand that content and/or participate in literacy discourse central to the lesson. The primary language support in this assignment came in the form of a visual aid on our classs Promethean Board. By having the text projected on the board, I hoped to ensure that the text itself, especially memorizing that text, did not cause students to struggle with the rhythm. As I said earlier, since I am only assessing students musical rhythmic proficiency, I wanted the text itself to present as little challenge as possible. Another language support was just ensuring that students were very familiar with the text before we analyzed it rhythmically. Playing the game with this poem in the last lesson was a strategic choice that was made to ensure students success in the next lesson. Also, the fact that the text is a rhyming poem helps students to quickly memorize and recall the text, so that students can focus on analyzing the text and making musical inferences from it, instead of struggling to read and/or memorize it. How did these strategies reflect students varying language proficiencies and promote their language development? Since our student population is composed largely of English Language Learners, as well as students who struggle with reading, I must carefully consider students language proficiency when utilizing text in my music lessons. Students experience the language in at least three different ways: visually on the board, aurally through call and

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response, and musically by physically playing the rhythm of the text. I was very intentional pertaining to the call and response portion of the lesson, that students learn and experience the rhythm of the text one line at a time. I wanted to ensure that students were not overwhelmed with too much text at one time, and also that students learned the text correctly the first time. Furthermore, this sort of rhythmic dissection of text is something that students are familiar with from different reading strategies they have encountered in Language Arts lessons. It is a strategy that students can use going forward as they continue to develop their language proficiency.

Describe strategies for eliciting student thinking and how your ongoing responses further their learning. Cite examples from the clip(s). In the clips I reward and elicit student thinking explicitly. One example is when a student, Rogelio, begins to clap the rhythm of the text before I even prompt the students to do so. I reward this thinking and inference by pointing Rogelio out as a model. He read my mind. Did everyone see what Rogelio did? He was clapping the rhythm of the words as he spoke the text. This sets up the expectation that students should be thinking ahead to the next step in the process. I also ask students to analyze the word seven and to infer the rhythm of that word by asking how many syllables are in the word. The question itself is a pretty simple one, but I am careful to allow students to answer anonymously by showing the number of syllables on their shoulder and then calling on a student who I know has the right answer. This elicits student thinking and participation by providing the opportunity to offer an answer, even the wrong answer, in an environment where student thinking is encouraged, rewarded and necessary. 4. Reflection a. Reflect on students learning of concepts and academic language as featured in the video clip(s). Identify both successes and missed opportunities for monitoring all students learning and for building their own understanding of skills and strategies for comprehending and/or composing text. As a whole, the class comprehended the lesson material to the level I expected. The lesson was scaffolded so that students would be successful with the rhythm and not overly challenged with the text itself. The class as a whole was engaged with the material. I feel comfortable moving forward to the next segment of the unit which will

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have students transfer their rhythmic knowledge of the text into melodic improvisation on xylophones. However, I feel like this lesson represented my tendency to over-do the I do portion of the lesson. We have used this particular strategy before with this class, and so I dont think I was necessarily asking them to do enough of the learning on their own. Perhaps I couldve started them off by explicitly teaching the first couple lines of the text through call and response, and then had them get into small groups or pairs to use the strategy to analyze and play the rhythm of the last two lines of the text. This would allow students to take greater ownership of the material and of the strategy itself. If you could do it over, what might you have done to take advantage of missed opportunities or to improve the learning of students with diverse learning needs and characteristics? I would increase the We do and You do portions of the lesson to require more student independence in utilizing this strategy. Also, I would have taken the opportunity to more explicitly state the objective of the lesson/strategy, and to inform students that the ultimate goal was to improvise melody on the xylophones using the rhythm of the poem. This would inject more engagement into the lesson and context for their learning. Finally, even though I mentioned the word rhythm frequently in the lesson, I would have liked to more explicitly state that we were exploring rhythm. If I could do this lesson again, I would have students answer questions using the word rhythm, to ensure that they have experience using the word themselves as a part of their academic vocabulary in music.

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