This year with my year 13 music students we are deciding to make a point of not focusing on assessment as being the driver of learning in class (as it should never be but is rarely the case in most NZ schools). Therefore we are deciding to focus on projects our students can complete through the year. Projects such as making an album, composing for student films, making music videos. You can see details of my holiday planning for this course here.
We are now nearing the end of term one, and what a busy term its been. But what is hugely satisfying is that the majority of my class are loving the projects they’re working on and making great progress. It should be noted that not all students in year 13 music have decided to have a project as a major focus. They’re quite happy completing the tasks and learning as required by NCEA and that’s great. So, what has this PBL thing looked like this year? Well, a bit like this:
Working on composing for film in Apple Logic Pro X
Reviewing ideas for composition
Our “Studio 2” featuring a Slate Raven touchscreen mixer
Gus using Studio One Pro to record vocals and then tune them with Melodyne and convert to MIDI
Class working on their blogs
All students have laptops which makes working on blogs very easy
Students working on Logic Pro in “Studio 1”
We started the year spending quite a bit of time searching for inspiration and listing the interests and skill sets of the students. I’m very big on collaboration and I want the students to help each other out as much as possible. To keep our ideas and skills at the forefront of what we do we created an Inspiration Wall where students pin up interesting musical related images and text as well as list their outline of their project.
Students have also setup WordPress blogs where they keep a diary of what they’ve found interesting in class and on field trips. Every time we do something in class, or they do some work, they’re expected to document their progress on their blogs. You can see some of them here:
Reading through the blogs you can see we’ve done a few things to focus the students on the craft they need to develop to realise the art they want to produce. These have been:
Guest presenter – Luke Di Somma (local conductor, producer, arranger, composer, MD, etc). The students were very inspired by chatting to Luke and he dealt with issues such as: where he finds creativity, how he manages his ‘business’, what motivates him, what is required to ‘make it’ in the music industry, etc
Visit to local studios and tertiary providers – as recording and technology is a big part of the students’ projects we visited MAINZ and had a great presentation from Ivan Shevchuk.
Watching music production tutorials from AVID doing our own mix of the tracks shown in the video.
For the rest of the term we’ve been largely focusing on getting the first part of their projects completed. This has involved teaching them about how to use our recording equipment and how to mix. There has been a lot of one-on-one instruction about crafting their compositions and arrangements. At this stage, we’re just trying to record demo’s of everything as it’s unrealistic of them to produce good quality recordings in term 1 when they have so much learning to do around music production. It will mean a lot of recording and mixing in term 3 and 4 so we’ll see how we go…
To assist with their learning about recording and mixing we’re going to start a course in mixing through Weathervane music. Their Instructors Toolkit looks like it could be a great syllabus to work into our music course to advance their music production skills. I’ll do a separate blog on this once I start using it with my students.
Where to from here…
Well, we’ll need to refocus on what it means to be creative and to make great Art. We’ve spent quite a while focusing on their craft and finishing the first aspect of their projects, so we need to redress the balance and get focusing on what they are trying to achieve with their project by the end of the year. We’ll get more industry professionals in to talk to us and will visit local producers who can demonstrate their workflow and assist with the discussion around where to find inspiration. Students need to do a stocktake of all they’ve accomplished this term and now that they know what they’re in for need to come up with specific goals that must be achieved in term 2.
We’ll also be joining with the year 13 media class to provide the music for their original short films they’re creating. This is very exciting and as we’re well setup at St. Andrew’s College with movie composition tools and equipment I’m expecting to see some very professional looking/sounding films in the StAC Film Festival this year.
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