Grades 7 & 8 Songwriting

Songwriting:

Students in grades 7 & 8 classes will be challenging themselves to write their own songs over the next few months in 2015. My students have music twice a 10-day cycle, so this means a 50 minute music class usually once a week, except for the Gr. 8 class that is scheduled on two consecutive days and consequently have a long two week break without music class.

My plan is to use this blog to document my observation of students involved in this process. My hope is to become a better music teacher and facilitator of the creative process.

Throughout my music teaching career I have rarely assigned students the wide open assignment of writing a song. Mostly because I would personally be terrified if someone asked me to write a song, as I suspect the majority of music teachers would also feel. So, instead I have usually designed creative tasks to be smaller and more "manageable", placing creative constraints on the assignment so students manipulate only parts of the music.

Go Big or Go Home!

Since joining the Find Your Voice 2013 pilot project of Musical Futures, I have become more fearless in my teaching. I'm realizing that a BIG shift is needed in the way we teach music if our goal is to align school music experiences more closely with how our students experience music in the world outside of school. I want to welcome all students equally into the process - not just those who have taken private music lessons outside of school, or in my district, those whose parents pay for them to join an instrumental music program. In the real world, songwriting can be messy and convoluted, idiosyncratic and enigmatic. I want to give my students a chance to delve into music and explore the world of songwriting. I want them to have a chance to express themselves through their music.

What do students think about songwriting? Words from a quick brainstorming session:

Students put stars beside the words they would first think about to get started on this project.

Any surprises? How about "failure" or "embarrassing to perform"? I need to consider that some students' fears and possibly past experiences are holding them back from even approaching this assignment.

Inspiration:

I always like to start any new work with a few ideas that are "Challenging and Inspiring" to get the creative process moving. Here's a diagram of one conception of the creative process from the Ontario Arts Curriculum, 2009:

So, we watched Mark Ronson's TedTalk about sampling music. I know he has a certain cache with my students because of his work with Bruno Mars on the recent hit song Uptown Funk.

Our favourite Mark Ronson quotation:

"In music, we take something that we love and we build on it"