Applying Common Core Standards to Students With Disabilities in Music

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) Initiative is a part of the Standards-Based Education reform movement that calls for clear, consistent, measurable standards for all school students. A standards-based system measures each student against specific standards, with the curriculum and assessments aligned to those standards. The CCSS Initiative is state led and an effort to establish a single set of educational standards for kindergarten through 12th grade in English language arts and mathematics. States’ participation is voluntary. The standards are designed to be relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills students need for success in college and in the workforce. Greater emphases are given to teaching concepts rather than facts, and to students’ analytical skills and abilities to solve problems and think critically.

The CCSS Initiative has created concern for professionals in the arts and in special education. The concerns of special educators are that the academic material and rigorous assessments could create barriers for special education students seeking academic advancements, that appropriate accommodations will not be in place in when assessments begin, and that Individualized Education Programs for special education students will be directed solely to the common core, thus neglecting life skills and vocational areas. The concerns of music therapists and other arts-related professionals’ are preserving their role in education and safeguarding the integrity of the music education and music therapy curricula.

Proponents of the CCSS Initiative believe that students with disabilities, like all students, must be challenged to excel within the general curriculum, and be prepared for either college or a career after leaving high school. Students with disabilities constitute a diverse group of students and possess a wide range of abilities and needs. How states implement the CCSS and how they determine student success will have important implications for the education of students with disabilities. To eliminate the possibility of instructional or testing discrimination, teachers will need to be mindful of the CCSS, and understand how their instructional practices may need to be modified to ensure the success of students with disabilities. Music educators and music therapists working with students who have disabilities may need to do the following:

Program Individualized Education Program goals and objectives that facilitate students’ attainment of CCSS.

Provide instructional accommodations, such as Universal Design for Learning, which fosters active learning by presenting information in multiple ways, allowing for multiple means of student response or expression, and planning for multiple means of soliciting student engagement.

Provide specialized supports such as Response to Intervention—a systematic type of early intervention given to children who are having difficulty learning.

Be knowledgeable about and use contemporary technologies that can assist students with disabilities in meeting CCSS.

Be prepared and willing to adapt their music curricula to support the CCSS.

Adapting music curricula will likely be easier for music educators and music therapists working in Grades K–5 who are more accustomed to using music to support the general academic curriculum. Songs to teach numbers, the alphabet, and other academic information have long been a part of music in early childhood. One website that will be particularly useful to music educators who wish to support the general curriculum, and thus, the CCSS, is Songs for Teaching (http://www.songsforteaching.com/index.html). Songs are organized according to the following categories: mathematics, reading and language arts, science, languages, general education, special education, and life skills. Categories under mathematics include numbers and counting, addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and upper elementary and above math concepts. This last category includes advanced math and algebraic songs (Logic and Reasoning, Bar Graph Dance, Order of Operations) and decimal and fraction songs (The Funky Fraction Rap, Fraction Rock, Invert and Multiply).

Reading comprehension is one of the most important skills a child must acquire in the early grades. Reading comprehension affects a child’s learning in every academic area. The Songs for Teaching website has a host of songs directed toward developing reading comprehension skills, though any song and many choral works can be used to enhance a student’s ability to comprehend English text material. Below are examples of Illinois K–5 CCSS state standards adapted by simply changing the words book to song or musical piece. These Illinois CCSS can be found at the following website: http://www.dps61.org/cms/lib07/IL01000592/Centricity/Domain/1/CommonCoreBooklet.pdf

Ideas for Using Music to Support English Language CCSS by Grade Level

Kindergarten

Remember key details from a song with help.

With prompting, show the composer of a song or piece of music.

Compare one song to another with assistance.

Ask about unfamiliar words in song lyrics.

Recognize rhyming words in a song.

Read common words by sight, for example, the, is, and at.

First Grade

Understand the overall message in a song.

Use illustrations in a songbook to describe its characters, setting, or events.

Describe connections between two people, events, or ideas in a song.

Understand long and short vowel sounds.

Participate in shared research about a song or piece of music.

Add drawings or other visual displays to descriptions found in a song.

Second Grade

Recall stories with their main ideas.

Describe the connection between a series of events.

Ability to show how specific ideas support the main point of a story.

Read grade-level text accurately out loud.

Write on a specific topic and edit his or her work.

Third Grade

Ask and answer questions based on song text.

Be able to tell his or her point of view from the lyricist’s in a song text.

Recall key ideas from a song text.

Use search tools to locate relevant information about a song or piece of music.

Be able to use multisyllable words to describe the music.

Read grade-level material with purpose (determining time and place, characters, etc.)

Use context to determine words and definitions in a song.

Fourth Grade

Describe a character, event, or idea in detail from a song.

Compare and contrast parts of songs, such as themes (love, friendship) or events (holidays, war, etc.).

Use several types of visual information, such as illustrations and animations, and apply to lyrics.

Use two sources of information to write or speak about a piece of music.

Give reports on specific topics related to music.

Participate in group projects to compose a song or report on the country of a world music song.

Fifth Grade

Explain how a series of events make up the story in a song or popular music event.

Analyze multiple points of view of the same event in popular music media.

Draw information from multiple sources to quickly find answers about popular artists.

Ability to write opinion papers on popular song texts, music events, or music video.

Use several narrative techniques in writing a song or about a song, such as dialogue and description.

Summarize a song text aloud.

Most teachers find that using songs to enhance students’ reading comprehension skills also helps students gain deeper understanding of the lyrics, and consequently makes the lyrics more meaningful and memorable. Traditional lyric analysis strategies used by many music therapists can be used to exercise analytical skills used in most standardized assessments. Any time we ask students to compare and contrast, to describe, to infer, to support, to predict, we are reinforcing vocabulary concepts integral to critical thinking. As music educators, we are in an enviable position to further our students’ music learning, while at the same time supporting their overall academic success. Aligning music learning with academic learning is not as simple as combining two curricula together. It demands intentional identification of parallel standards, taught authentically and resulting in both content areas being raised to a new level of understanding.