Why should I try long term planning?
If you’re reading this then I bet that you’ve heard of long term planning and want to know more. That was me a few months ago and I came to the conclusion that no matter what I needed a long term plan for each of my classes for the next school year. I teach middle school band, choir, and music history at my school. I knew my first year of teaching performing ensembles at this school that my students would have a very minimal, if any knowledge of music. I’m talking basic stuff like quarter and eighth notes, instrument names, treble clef note names. I wasn’t hoping for much, but I was hoping. They surprised me and seemed to remember a fair bit, so I was ecstatic.
That being said, in my district we are expected to submit lesson plans every week. Teaching three different subjects I had to write 15 lesson plans a week! I’ll be honest, I mostly just made up stuff that sounded good and then did whatever because none of the lessons made sense. I knew what to teach, and in which order, and I knew how I wanted to teach it. However, when it came time to put the plans onto paper, I just could never find the time.
This led to me planning concerts, but then doing most of the work at the last minute. I spent many days hoping that the kids had learned anything in class. And I was basically just surviving. I knew that something had to change before I went into the 22-23 school year. So this blog will describe reasons why I am sold on long term planning and the next blog post will break down how I made my long term plans.
What is long term planning?
Long term planning is basically a way to see all the things you need to cover in a year up close at all times. My goal for beginning band is to make it to page 40 of the beginning band book and be confident with those concepts. So in my long term plans I blocked out concert dates, the dates I would have to do instrument try out, any testing windows that I knew about or could guess on, and then I plugged in the sequence of note learning and so on a so forth.
Long term planning is a handy tool to see where you are, see where you’re going, and see what steps need to be taken to get to the goal.
Why is Long Term Planning important?
- I Needed to be able to see most of the year in one go
If you’re like me then you’re a very visual person and you are a busy person. I wanted to be able to see every single thing that I will teach in a year along with all the other things that I reeeeally hope I get to teach throughout the year. In my current year-long plan I have dates, rhythms being taught, notes being taught, expressive and mechanical topics, composers, and musical cultures that I would like to teach. I only use this document to list topics on a general date in the school year.
My old year long plan from last year is based off of a template from my school district and it just didn’t suit my needs. In that document we were asked to list our topics, standards, and vocabulary terms. This is fine, but since I have so many things that overlap together it just seemed impossible to fit a band or choir curriculum into that template. This template works fine for music history and I probably won’t be changing it much, but I needed a significant overhaul for band and choir.
- When you feel terrible, the plan helps you un-cluster yourself
I’ll be honest, we took too many rest days because I just felt so anxious about
deadlines and other things that I couldn’t even begin to focus on trying to teach my students. We had many cleaning days… However, during testing season I experienced that if you plan in advance (better than I had been) that it’s still really easy to teach even if you don’t feel wonderful and ready to go that day. So I’m developing the long term plan for next school year in hopes that I can get over the “I feel really terrible today” funk.
- It’s a lot of work upfront, but It’ll help you make daily plans faster
Once again, I have to plan for band, choir, and music history. That’s three different classes and three different curriculums I teach everyday. I very quickly this school year fell in the ocean of lesson plans. I was able to keep my head above water this year with music history because I could still get something useful out of the pacing guide that I made in the beginning of the school year.
- You’ll have a better idea of what to put in your pre and post assessments
This past year I relied on quizzes after each subtopic to help me figure out what students understood and what they needed more help with. This isn’t a bad thing at all, but it meant that there were more days spent test taking than were probably necessary. I want to spend more time actually teaching my students next year and I want to do more formative and less summative assessments. I also want to have my students be able to look at their growth from the pretest to the post test and be able to see actual growth, not the “our teacher had to take a few questions off the test and add two or three more because she lost sight of what she was doing half way through” growth.
I know which notes, rhythms, vocabulary, symbols, and “extras” to include on my pre and post test in the next school year. Knowing what I want to assess via a paper and pencil test I can also determine a suitable playing test for my students so that they can demonstrate the skills in multiple formats.
In Summary,
I hope I’ve been able to convince you to try a long term plan for your ensemble class next school year. I am excited to try it and have been eagerly planning my first unit already. (My inservice days are going to be really easy next school year!) If you’re interested then come back next week and see how I actually make the long term plan! I’ve already completed both plans for the bands next year, so you’ll get to see the long term plan for the choirs being constructed.
Displaced Pedagogy 