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You're listening to that music podcast with Bryson Tarbet, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind that music teacher at the elementary music summit each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher, and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve. Show Notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at that music teacher.com.
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Welcome back to this episode of that music Podcast. I'm super excited that you joined us here today, as we're going to be talking about how you can use your lesson structure to reduce the chaos in your music classroom. So if you've been around a while, you know this is probably not this is probably not a surprising thing for you. I love structure I love allowing our classrooms to have structure in a way that allows our students to be set up for success. But I also think it's a great way to just make sure that we're not adding extra chaos to what is, let's be honest, in an elementary music classroom is already some type of chaotic situation to begin with. So why is structure important? First thing, there are a lot of students a lot of populations, that having a similar structure is going to reduce their stress and anxiety that they perceive in your classroom, a lot of neurodiverse students can really respond well to that, myself included a lot of students who are ESL students who are still kind of understanding, you know, kind of getting the grasp of the language, students who have experienced trauma can really, really have that structure can be really important to them. So having your structure, even if you have some flexibility in your structure. But having that kind of common structure in your lesson is going to be a really great way to make sure that your students are able to be successful in the classroom. But you're also going to ideally, keep that engagement high. So what does my lesson structure look like? I'll be honest, my structure looks fairly typical to a lot of CODA influence teachers that you might know, I will start my class with some sort of activity. Ideally, I'm greeting them at the door and bringing them into the door through music making. So I know I've talked before about having the students do engine engine number nine as they're walking through the room. But there are other ways that we can get students into the room by making music even if it's just saying, Alright, well, when you get in the room, I want you to start joining out if there's music playing, or I want you to start singing, the song that we sang last time, as we start moving in, I'll give you a pitch. Once we have a few people in the door, whatever I can do to get them making music from minute one second one is going to be incredibly beneficial. So once we get in the room, ideally, we're gonna play some kind of game that is essentially reviewing what we did last time. So if we're working on rhythmic concepts time TT, we might play a game that has some ties and T's in there. But the game or the activity, ideally is a kind of a way to get them hooked into the lesson. So it might not necessarily be bringing time TT super explicitly to the front of their minds, but they're able to do it. So maybe we're going to be clapping the rhythm as we play the game, or whatever ways that you can incorporate that concept that you're doing. But the goal of this part of the lesson, for me at least is to get them seen, get them moving, get them engaged, get them on board. And then once we do that, we're going to go use a transition. So like we've talked about before in Episode 47. In Episode 110, we talked about using stories using some sort of transition to get them from point A to point B, so especially for moving places around the room. So usually, that's when I go into either rhythmic work or melodic work. So I'll either have them go to the board, we're going to work on something together, and then maybe break out into groups. Or maybe we'll go into groups and then maybe come back together. But whatever rhythmic or melodic work, we're going to use this first section of class, that's where this is going to come from. Ideally, it's one that we just kind of practice using that gain at the beginning. Sometimes it's not, depending on the concept. And depending on just like do I need to get these kids like as a first period of the morning, and I need to get the gist up and moving. But most of the time, and ideally, the song that we were seeing at the beginning is going to have some similar concepts that go into that first, either rhythmic or melodic work. Once we have that rhythmic or melodic work, I'm going to have them transition into what I call like storytime. So essentially, they're going to come over and sit in front of my chair. And that is when I share silly socks. So silly socks I stole from my wonderful cooperating teacher, Megan McDonnell, basically, I wear a different pair of silly socks, and the students get to share their socks, and I share my socks and it's just like a minute and a half. But it's a way for us to get to know each other. Once we go out. We go into a greeting. So I might say hello, second graders, and they'll say hello, Mr. Tarbet. And then I might say something along the lines of oh, if you're wearing green, and then they're only gonna say hello, Mr. Tarbet if they're wearing green, so that's a great way to get students to sing without saying hello Bryson and they might go, I don't want to say so that's a great way to get them to sing in small groups rather than kind of putting them on the spot and make them do solo singing. Sometimes I may do that depending on the student and depending on where we're at, and depending on kind of how their relationship is you But most of the time, I try not to do Scylla singing, unless we're kind of like doing it in a game. So after that we flip, we do the flip flop. So if we did rhythmic work with the beginning, and we're going to do melodic work now, and then ideally, we're going to wrap up the game, or wrap up the day with some other sort of game. Now, this might have a different, you know, there might be more games, more activities during storytime, I typically read a book, especially if I can find a book that relates to those concepts, why, you know, either implicitly, or just kind of like, really super obvious whatever way that's going to be. I typically love using books, because books are awesome. So that's my typical lesson structure, the way that looks when things change are, there's a few different things. For one thing, if I'm doing a code I presentation lesson, so for instance, if we're presenting quarter rest, we are not going to explicitly talk about melody that day. So instead of doing rhythmic and melody, or we're gonna do rhythmic, and then rhythmic, so essentially, the first part is gonna be for the rhythmic prep, we're going to be making sure they're ready to go into the presentation moment, then afterwards, we're gonna have the presentation moment and then immediately go into practice. So essentially, it can be rhythm, rhythm rhythm, if we're doing rhythm presentation that day. But other than that, my lessons tend to be a fairly similar following that structure, sometimes we'll split up the little different, the rhythmic or the melodic chunk into two different things. So maybe two different ways of exploring that rhythmic thing, or two different ways of supporting the melodic thing. Depending on the students, depending on the activities to spend, depending on where we are in our curriculum sequence, those things might change. But the overall structure of how things work is going to be very typical. My students know that when they come in the room, they go and sit on a.we might sometimes stand up, we might sometimes stay sitting down. But they know that we're typically going to start on those dots unless I tell them otherwise when I greet them to the door. So let's talk about transitions. Just briefly, because I know we've talked about transitions a lot before, but they're so important. So again, we talked about this before in leopard episode 47. And then last week in Episode 110, about how you can use transitions. But the goal here is to get them to do something as they are moving that structure is going to be incredibly, incredibly important. So how do we get started? How do we start implementing a common lesson structure. So first of all, if you are into that music teacher community, you will be getting a my lesson plan template in your resource pack for this month. If you want to grab that join us inside the community and grab that template as long as well as all of our other paths, resources and masterclasses, you can check out the link in the show notes as well, or heading over to that music teacher.com/tmt community for that music teacher community. But regardless of what lesson structure you're following, I think the first thing you need to do is just start decide on what do you think in this moment is the best thing you can do. And then move on from there, you're gonna make mistakes, you're gonna realize that you're spending too much time on some things and too little time and other things. But if you don't get started, if you just start every single time you're creating a lesson plan, you're just kind of doing something completely different. You're not going to get down the road, on getting things better. I have an extra plus side about having a lesson structure that is similar, you're able to lesson plan so much quicker, because you're not reinventing the wheel, you're just figuring out what's going on the wheels, right? When automakers are coming up with a new car, they tend to start with the wheels, they know they're going to be round, and it's probably going to be four of them. Right? They're not making everything up completely new, every single time. So why does this lesson structure do to actually reduce chaos? First of all, you as the teacher know what is coming, the students, they know what's coming, at least generally, the anxiety of not knowing what's coming next is reduced for a lot of students. And it also makes it in a way where students know that even if this part is really, really hard, and it gets really making their brains work, they know that next is going to be something that's going to be a little bit calmer, to help them kind of have that stress and less. That's why I like having that kind of storytime in the middle of my lesson is that that melodic or rhythmic work that we're doing the first chunk of the lesson, it tends to be higher brain power, we call you know that maybe like the kids will say big brain, big brain time, right, we're using a lot of our brainpower, it's going to be tricky. We're doing different things, we're implementing different things, we're using manipulatives we're writing on the board, we're doing popsicle sticks, and there can be a lot of students that are gonna get easily frustrated. But they know that the next thing we do, they're going to be able to relax a little bit. And when we go in, they're able to let their guard down, they show me your silly socks, we do the greeting, we've read the book, and then we're transitioning back into some big brain time or so we're able to get the students back into that higher state of arousal as we're getting them digging in deeper to the musical concepts. And honestly, I think that is the biggest reason why I love this kind of lesson structure that I use is that there are periodic pockets of relaxation. And I don't mean relaxation necessarily as we're going to stop do some SEL stuff but literally just like we're not doing Being 100% Full speed the entire time, we're giving students the opportunity to relax a little bit, we're giving them an opportunity to let their brain slow down a little bit, rather than constantly quizzing them constantly being on these, this high energy, high activity, high stimulation activity, so let's be honest, it can be really easy to get overstimulated in music classroom. So by allowing these opportunities of rest within that is going to allow so many students to be super successful, and it's also going to just help your students overall because they know what is coming next.
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Thank you so much for listening to this episode of that music podcast. It would mean the world to me if you would leave a review wherever you're listening to this. If you're on iTunes or Spotify you should be able to scroll all the way to the bottom we would love that five star review. But even if it's below five star we would love for you to let us know in the review. What is something that we could do better? What are you looking for more of and how can we better serve you as the amazing elementary music teacher that you are. With that being said we hope to see you next week as we talk about a another topic that is super important for elementary music and I will talk to you then
