A few of you lovely #UWSMTeach students have asked for further guidance on how to structure Assignment 2. Well, for a start, please refer to my Lecture 7 notes which summarised what I’ve already told you. To expand on those:
- In your teacher notes page, tell me about two students (give them names). One is special needs and one gifted and talented.
- Tell me as much about each student. What they can do, what they can’t.
- Create resources for the general class, and then differentiate by making resources for these two characters – one is extension work, the other modifications to make it practicable.
You don’t have to write an arrangement this time, but you do need to completely resource the unit of work, so you’ll at least need to refer me to published arrangements you’re performing, or provide something for performance experiences such as chord patterns, ostinati, or melodic lines, backing tracks etc.
Just the same as before, you do need to provide a unit of work which covers all three learning experiences (performing, composing and listening) and you do need to deliver it online. I suggest you start at the same point – pick your listening/performance repertoire, name the topic, and create composition tasks that back up the concepts that you focus on.
You could use exactly the same structure. Remember the slide? It looked something like this:
So, imagining my special needs student is called Emily and my GnT student Fiona, I could easily tack an extra page onto each experience for them. Then it would look something like this:
Of course, you don’t have to name Emily and Fiona on their pages – to avoid stigmatising them you could simply name them “modified” and “extended”.
In fact, when working with stage 5 students I always create three levels of task. Level 2 is where I want them to be, extending them gently, level 1 is for those who are behind and level 3 for those who find it all easy. I provide many fewer steps for those on level 3. I’ll show you some of my resources like this next week in lecture 8.
This then gives you another idea more like the first – provide the three pages for learning experiences, and then three levels of task either on the same page, or hanging off it. Taking this idea even further, you can design a whole different pathway for students at different levels:
I would suggest in this instance each page would be a separate page, because you don’t want really long pages for each student.
So that’s the structure. Please don’t use this blog as an excuse not to read the learning guide, which has plenty of good tips and a process for writing your content. The marks are more in the content than the structure, but it does need to hold together well. Remember that this assignment is looking for integrated technology, so be daring, try out new things that you didn’t in the first assignment. Good luck!
