Planning For Instruction
1. Planning Guidelines
- Selection of Choral Repertoire
- Analysis of Selected Repertoire
- Objectives
- Strategies
- Assessment
2. Planning a Unit
3. Planning a Lesson
- Opening Song
- Vocal Warm-ups
- Sight-reading/Musical Literacy Exercises
- Announcements
- Rehearsal of Choral Repertoire
Planning Guidelines
Selection of Choral Repertoire
- A good composition, no matter what the level of difficulty, has qualities that are lasting.
- Your selection of music should provide for a balanced diet of music over a three-year period. Choral music colleagues, retailers, and publishers are valuable aids in choosing repertoire.
- Analysis will often bring to mind related pieces that can provide interesting rehearsal strategies and enrich the cultural/historical component of your program.
- Thorough analysis of the music’s text, form, rhythms, melodies, harmonies, texture, dynamics, and style is a necessary foundation for enriched performance and significant learning.
- Identify the musical concepts you will emphasize in teaching this piece.
Objectives
- Ensure that all the foundational objectives will be addressed over a three year period.
- The most appropriate learning objectives are often derived from an assessment of the needs of the students in your Choral 10, 20, 30 classes.
Strategies
- Engage students in verbal/abstract, visual, aural, and physical modes of learning.
- Ensure that singing, listening, and composing are integral components of your choral program.
- Learning objectives should guide you in formulating teaching strategies.
Assessment
- The degree to which your students have achieved the objectives should guide you in revising what and how you are teaching.
- Share information with parents and administrators about the comprehensive learning taking place in your choral class.
- Grades should reflect more than performance and attitude.
The sections on selection and analysis of repertoire are based upon The Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance Project, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1977. Used with permission.
Planning a Unit
In planning an instructional unit the teacher should:
- Plan the length of time to be spanned.
- Identify those foundational objectives to be addressed.
- Select repertoire that is appropriate for achieving these objectives.
- Determine appropriate specific learning objectives and Common Essential Learnings to be incorporated in the unit.
- Plan a sequence of lessons.
- Include Indian and Métis content, where appropriate.
- Ensure that a variety of experiences have been included in the unit (discussing, researching, composing, listening to music, conducting, reflecting, etc.).
- Ensure that experiences from all three components (creative/productive, cultural/historical and critical/responsive) are included.
- Analyze and research the repertoire used, select appropriate resource materials and prepare student study guides as needed.
- Determine appropriate means of assessing the degree to which students will have achieved the foundational objectives targeted for this unit. Remember to plan for continuous evaluation, rather than evaluating only upon completion of the unit.
Planning a Lesson
If you are fairly new to choral directing, here is a format that represents a "tried and true" sequence of activities for a one hour lesson that incorporates well-established choral teaching techniques and methodologies.
1. Opening Song (2 - 5 minutes)
Start each lesson with a canon, partner song, or choral selection with which the students are familiar. Choose a selection that the students enjoy singing.
2. Vocal Warm-ups (5 - 10 minutes)
The following is an example of a generic warm-up routine. When choral selections have been chosen for the class, the warm-up exercises should more specifically address the technical challenges posed by the repertoire the students are studying.
- Have the students stand for the entire warm-up. Ask the students to interlock their fingers and turn their palms away from their bodies. Stretch the hands up to the ceiling and hold for a few seconds. Unlock the fingers and, moving only the arms, slowly lower the hands to the side of the body. Students should now be standing with good posture.
- Release any tension in the jaw, keep the shoulders relaxed, and keep the chest high in order to have plenty of space for air. Have the students slowly inhale while keeping their lips in an "oo" formation. This will develop the ability to inhale fully.
- Have the students exhale in short, rhythmic staccato bursts on s, sh, f, or k sounds. This will gradually strengthen the muscles used in supporting the breath.
- Have the students, with hand on stomach, inhale against the hand. Sing the vocalise below, keeping a slight tension against the hand. To achieve uniformity in vowel formation, use word references such as oo as in zoo, o as in no, ah
as in father. Also transpose the sequence down to E, Eb, D, Db and C.
- Sing the following exercise slowly and phonate through the n and the oh sound. Retain the same buzz in the tone (resonance) from the n sound. To eliminate tension, which frequently occurs in the upper portions of the vocal range, roll the shoulders forward or back, roll the head, or bend forward like a rag doll. Also transpose this pattern up to F#, G, Ab, A and Bb.
- For the following exercise, tell the students that they should sense an increase in the vertical space inside their mouths when they ascend the perfect fifth. There should be no break in the sound between the first two notes. Ensure that the two-measure pattern is sung in one breath. Also, transpose up to F#, G, Ab, A and Bb.
- Sing major scales, down and back up, slowly in quarter notes. Sing the scale in canon so that the groups will be a third apart. Once this has been mastered try a fourth apart and then a second apart. For more advanced musicians, work on chromatic scales in contrary motion. (A unison will occur halfway through.)
Regularly modify the warm-up routine so that it constantly challenges your students.
3. Sight-reading/Musical Literacy Exercises (5 - 10 minutes)
Developing the musical literacy of your students will in the long term greatly expedite the learning of choral repertoire. When your students become musically literate, they will be more inclined to take advantage of opportunities afforded by church
and community choirs both now and as adults.
Typically, Choral 10, 20, 30 classes comprise students representing a diversity of musical background -- no formal training, band, piano, theory lessons, etc. Therefore it is usually desirable to provide students with opportunities for small group instruction. For example, a group of advanced students might be sent to a practice room to prepare a part-singing exercise, while other students remain in the main rehearsal area with the teacher to work on unison reading exercises.
Material for developing reading skills may be selected from canons, repertoire in the students' folders, exercise books, music series, etc. The sequence of sight-reading material should be conducive to the gradual development of music literacy skills.
At some point during this portion of the lesson, students should be required to sing as soloists or in small groups.
a) Readiness/Preparatory Activities
In each lesson, employ at least one of the following strategies:
- Learn by rote material that contains similar rhythmic/melodic motives to those to be encountered in upcoming lessons. (Do not learn choral repertoire by singing along with a recording.)
The section on Vocal Warm-ups is adapted from Hoffer, 1991, Teaching Choral Music - A Course of Study. Copyright 1991 by Music Educators National Conference. Reprinted with permission.
- During the warm-up, vocalise on rhythmic and pitch patterns derived from repertoire to be studied in the near future.
- Sing or play on the piano a piece of music the students have in their folders. Have the students identify the measure, note, or word on which you stopped.
- Have students identify sections in their music that are a restatement of material previously presented in the piece.
- Have students identify the time signature and provide a rudimentary explanation of what this means (e.g., 4/4 time means four counts per measure, a quarter note receiving one count).
- Teach students how to identify the key signature. This will be an initial step in utilizing a system (e.g., tonic solfa) for reading pitches.
b) Activities to Develop Understanding of Duration-related Notation
Adopt a counting system. Here are examples of both numerical and syllabic (Kodaly) methods. Use one of these systems to introduce new note duration patterns and to rehearse portions of the repertoire that rhythmically challenge the students.
c) Activities to Develop Understanding of Pitch-related Notation
Adopt a system for singing intervals based on the key of the music. In the tonic solfa system, do, re, mi, etc. correspond to the first, second, third, etc. degrees of a major scale. If you are uncomfortable with solfa syllables, then use a system in which numbers correspond to the scale degrees.
For example, in G major:
In E (harmonic) minor:
Write on the blackboard or overhead projector the scale on which a section of music is based. Write the scale in whole notes, with the corresponding solfa syllable/ number below. When the teacher points at a note, the students sing (on pitch) its solfa syllable/number. Employing this technique, devise exercises that will assist the students in mastering portions of their music that pose pitch-related problems. Rehearse difficult sections of the repertoire by having students sing the solfa syllables/scale numbers rather than the text.
4. Announcements (2 - 5 minutes)
Review specific homework/practice expectations.
Make announcements that pertain to extra-curricular choral activities in the school.
Inform the students of any events (radio/TV programs and/or community concerts) that would be beneficial to their musical development.
5. Rehearsal of Choral Repertoire (30 - 40 minutes)
The material selected for intensive work should represent a judicious mix of musical styles. Have a clear plan as to what teaching strategies will be employed to meet your specific aims for each piece. Successful pacing of the rehearsal is largely dependent on alternating the familiar with the new in a sequence that provides the singers with variations in tempo, dynamics, and tessitura.
Try to employ exercises and teaching methods that will involve the entire class. Design exercises for the entire choir that address a problem that one section is encountering in a certain piece. For example, have the weak section sing the selection
as written while the other sections hum.
In correcting errors, speak right to the point with a minimum of words. An imbalance between talking on the teacher's part and singing on the students' part precludes a well-paced rehearsal.
Engage the students in assessing their choral singing and in devising rehearsal strategies to address specific problems. Listening to recordings of their own rehearsals and to commercial recordings of fine choirs is essential. Schedule student presentations that will reflect their research on the cultural/historical perspective of their choral repertoire.
Include at least one activity that will require the students to change their location in the classroom. Some possibilities include mixing up the sections of the choir, holding sectional rehearsals, and having students sing in a circle or facing the rehearsal room walls.