Embedding Carol Dwek’s ‘Growth Mindset’ into the culture of your classroom or ensemble creates fertile ground for the powerful impact of Dylan Wiliam’s ‘Formative Assessment’ strategies. Learn how the ‘Which One?’ activity and ‘Let’s Check’ strategies invite students to show their learning, share their thinking and set up learning opportunities to assist students with their understanding.
Video Transcription:
Hi music colleagues.
Today we’re going to look at the which one activity with the melodic content, so it will look like flashcards on the board, and you’ve revised your melodic content.
So, today we’re going to be using Do Re Mi, I would first get the students to echo me etc. and then we can read. So, we’re going to read each pattern, and you might like to sing a couple of them first, and they respond, and then they can sight-read the other two. They will then show their learning. This is the most amazing work from Dylan Williams, which is formative assessment where the students show their learning. The students will listen, and the teacher will sing just on a vowel. [singing]. And again [singing] the students will aurally derive which pattern it was, and they’re going to show their answer so that we have every student in the class engaged was it one two three or four. Now, before they show their answer, this beautiful work from Dylan Williams Formative Assessment is important so that the teacher knows what the students can hear.
To embed it in your classroom culture is so valuable, but you also need to develop the growth mindset so that students don’t mind making a mistake. It doesn’t matter if they said three when it was two because it’s an opportunity to learn and that whole discovery of ‘okay I’m going to authentically show my learning I’m going to close my eyes, and I’m going to show my learning before I can see someone else and see what they’ve got’.
When the students are more comfortable you don’t need to do that because they are fine because sometimes you’ll find the one student that stuck to their guns and said okay it was one and everyone else is showing three. They could potentially be right so that’s the time for celebration the important next step is to do the ‘let’s check’, so the teacher might say I can see ones and twos so let’s check one ready and the teacher will sing, and the children will sing Sol-fa with their hand signs and see if it matches. Obviously, the teacher’s voice needs to be quite loud, but the children need to sing gently so that they can hear whether they match or not. So the teacher will sing, did it match if they’re not in agreement you can then sing it again. Let’s check number two, and hopefully most students would have realised that that was the one the teacher was singing. So, this is an amazing tool in your teaching that develops melodic understanding and the incredible tool of growth mindset where I’m going to have a go. I’m going to make mistakes, and I’m going to learn from my mistakes, that is after all the most valuable lifelong lesson isn’t it.
The flashcards we’re using today are the Sol-fa set 3 which has the pentatonic tone set, great for the beginners who are a bit older. So from year three up, and you can take out Do Re Mi and Do Re Mi So La. The content is on the back, and you’ll find that on our website, so I hope that’s been a good tip.
Happy teaching!
