Volume 64, No. 1

In many, if not most higher education music programs, students arrive with considerable variations in their prior experiences, knowledge, and skill levels. Students also have their own unique goals and ideas about their future careers that motivate them in their coursework. Consequently, to ensure that every student in the class engages with course material in meaningful ways, the instructor should consider how to differentiate various aspects of the course. According to Tomlinson (2014), differentiation can occur through content, process, product, and/or environment based on students’ readiness, interests, and/or learning profile.

I decided to apply differentiation to a lower-level undergraduate brass methods course taken by instrumental music education majors early in their degree program. In this type of course, there is quite a range of prior experience, with some students already being highly-skilled brass players and others never having played a wind instrument. Additionally, students’ goals and plans for their future careers are often considerably varied. When beginning to add differentiation to a course, I find choosing a few aspects to focus on to be more manageable than attempting to apply the entire model. Each time you teach the course, you can reevaluate and decide which aspects of the course may benefit from more (or less) differentiation based on how the course went the time before. The two dimensions upon which I chose to focus my differentiation efforts in my brass methods course were content and product based on students’ readiness and interests. I chose readiness to address the range of prior experiences with brass instruments and interests to improve alignment with the students' varied career ambitions.

To differentiate based on content, I first laid out the crucial skills and knowledge I wanted all students to obtain through the course no matter the skill level or prior knowledge with which they entered. Next, I identified what content beyond that I could include to provide additional degrees of challenge to more experienced students or to address some of the different career goals students had expressed. For example, during class time, I often modeled for, and later guided, the students in creating multi-leveled parts—starting with a pre-determined tune and creating easier and more difficult parts (sometimes only in terms of pitch or rhythm demands, and sometimes in terms of both). With each new part we added, we discussed what level of student the part might be appropriate for and how we were working to scaffold them in terms of difficulty. Then, students transferred the newly-written piece to their own instruments. I asked them to try several different parts as we repeated the piece in order to find parts that were just right for them to sight-read easily versus ones that would require some practice. In these types of class activities, I encouraged students to push themselves just beyond where they were comfortable while also providing them with autonomy to decide what best aligned with their needs. Generally, students gravitated to parts that would be somewhat challenging, but not too challenging for their current individual skill level.

This type of scaffolding was then reflected in the products each student was expected to submit. I planned the class in four sections, which I referred to as rotations; each rotation had a culminating product. The first three rotations of the course had multi-part portfolios while the final rotation had a culminating project. The portfolio products utilized the idea of a choice board. The first rotation’s choice board had fewer options than the second and third. This was due to several factors: (a) the first rotation was focused on basics and aural skills, with the students working primarily on trumpet mouthpieces; and (b) while some students had prior experience with choice boards, many did not, so the smaller number of choices made this first portfolio assignment less complex in terms of deciding their own mix of tasks. The second and third choice boards consisted of four levels of tasks in two domains, “Perform” and “Teach,” and two or three levels in two other domains, “Create/Compose” and “About.” Figure 1 presents the general format of the choice board itself. In the course syllabus, each task was hyperlinked to a later page in the syllabus that provided students with more detailed instructions and specific grading criteria for that task. When using choice boards, the criteria for how students choose tasks will depend considerably on how you go about designing the board. For this class, students were required to choose tasks so that they completed a minimum number of possible points with at least one task coming from the “Level 4” options. Additionally, they were required to include at least one task from any level of the “Perform” domain and one task from any level of the “Teach” domain.

Figure 1. Possible Choice Board Format

Each possible task students could choose on the choice board typically had one or more corresponding class activity that we had completed over the course of that rotation. These activities both served as a model and helped students understand the purpose of the learning task and what was required to complete it. This also ensured that the variety of learning tasks featured in class addressed different aspects of students’ future careers. In this way, all students were exposed to and participated in most task types but could then choose those that best aligned with the area or skills most relevant to their particular career goals. For example, several students planned on teaching strings or elementary music rather than band. These students tended to focus on the more advanced teaching tasks instead of the advanced playing tasks. In contrast, students who were more advanced brass players tended to choose the Level 4 playing task and/or the Level 4 “Create/Compose” task (which also required them to perform their composition). Last, those students with a strong interest in composing and arranging would frequently choose the Level 4 “Create/Compose” task and opt for less difficult tasks in other domains of the choice board. With each rotation, the options on the choice boards increased both in terms of the number of tasks they could choose from and in the level of choice available within a task, providing students with a stronger sense of autonomy in deciding how they navigated the course.

In an informal survey at the end of the semester, many of the students expressed that they had appreciated the flexibility and types of choices the differentiated portfolio assignments had afforded them. Through developing a range of both content learning tasks and product tasks with consideration to students’ readiness and interests, I was able to engage students in meaningful ways that met them where they were and aligned with their own visions of their future careers. While this was done in a music education instrumental methods course, this approach could be adapted to a wide range of other course types.

References

Tomlinson, Carol Ann. 2014. The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.