Abstract
Dear colleagues,
It is with great excitement that I write you this letter announcing that NAfME and the Council for General Music Education are expanding Music in Our Schools Month® (MIOSM®) to October and March. We will be launching the new format called “Process Into Product” in the 2018–2019 school year.
The Council recognizes that teaching students how to create music, respond to music, and perform music is not an easy endeavor. We know that prior to a performance there are months and weeks of practice and process that are rich in learning and vital to the outcome. Our goal is to highlight this journey in addition to the final concert or product. As educators, we can share these key learning moments throughout the process, with families and community members alike. We hope to share those moments when our students are teaching and connecting with one another, be it playing a challenging xylophone part with proper technique, or that moment when we laugh together when we are dancing and we forget that next move. We can invite others into our classrooms via video or in the many ways that your school allows, to best highlight the “how” of learning, and invite everyone into these magical moments that make our final concerts even more precious.
Many of us have already experienced showcasing our students in the various learning stages when we put on what has been coined as “informances,” and this is exactly what we are proposing with this new design of “Process Into Product” MIOSM in October and March.
The Council will provide NAfME members with pieces of music, ideas from which you can launch lesson plans for those pieces, samples of possible informance programs where your students can teach their parents and community members, and so much more! We are looking for the opportunity to supply you with a variety of materials so you can showcase the process of making music whereby your students teach the parents and community members through an exploratory process. We envision this process to begin in October with the October MIOSM as the demonstration of the process. Then, when March MIOSM comes around, parents and community members will know, firsthand, the academic growth that took place in only a few short months listening to the final product. The council will supply the necessary materials for this new format for the first grade, and expand this each year to come; however, we encourage you to take a leap and include as many grade levels in this as you would like, and share your materials with all of us to learn and grow together. This will be a yearly process of building the framework from which a multitude of new ideas can be launched by music teachers across the nation. Additionally, the council will choose one song that can be performed across all grade levels to be used in our March MIOSM.
We want you to find the joy in making and creating music with your students and to see the beauty in their growth, so there is no need to worry about having everything perfect for a parent or community sharing. We will also provide you with a few talking points for the “informances” that will help all see the positive in students’ growth. We want to make sure that we are providing you with all of the necessary documents and information that will make this easy for you! We will do the research, supply talking points, and provide easy access to the music and the materials.
By simply inviting parents and community members into the music classroom and having them experience learning about music with the children, all you have to do is do what you do best—facilitate the learning for the people in the room just as you normally would. Some of you may also decide to facilitate the learning by having students teach their parents and the community members. There are so many ways that you can make October MIOSM exciting and easy to do that we hope you will walk away thinking, “Why haven’t we done this before!?!”
We hope that you find this new endeavor to be beneficial for your students and your community. Please know we are working to serve you as we embark on this new adventure together where “Process Into Product” becomes the well-rounded focus of MIOSM.