S.Q.U.I.L.T.

This year my school's school improvement plan focus was on academic stamina. I was immediately in love with it, because I can work on that in my content area. It doesn't involve me sacrificing my subject to help teach fractions or reading strategies. Don't get me wrong fractions and reading strategies are essential; however, it's nice to be able to focus on what I love, music. So I got to work trying to figure out how to incorporate academic stamina in my classroom, and I decided that something I wanted to add to my classes is intentional, purposeful listening of remarkable examples of music. In my county, all of our fifth-grade students go to see the Brevard Symphony Orchestra perform. So, I decided to use the composers of the music my students would hear as the composers of the month, and I chose some of their most famous, sometimes most obscure, intriguing, and exciting works to share with my students. I used an acronym I heard many years ago, S.Q.U.I.L.T. {Super Quiet Uninterrupted Listening Time} to label our task of listening. I worked up a web of HOT {Higher Order Thinking} questions and set up how I would run my listening session.

 

You can view the posters at my TPT store here. I created and used my anchor charts of the elements of music to ground our discussion, and we began to listen. At first, we found the beat lightly tapping the beat on the back of our hands {Thank you Dr. Galt}, and then we moved forward discussing instrumentation then on to dynamics, tempo, texture and beyond. Most recently when listening to our composer of the month for January, I had a student say that John Williams' music could evoke a variety of feelings and that he felt both sad and happy at the same time listening to it. It was a beautiful moment in my room and listen to the students discuss that particular students analysis made me feel like such a proud Momma Bear. Having sixth grade in elementary school can seem like a blessing sometimes and a curse at others but at that moment I was so thankful. I felt privileged to have helped guide that student discover something so eloquent. I feel like this whole academic stamina focus has helped me fully understand the old, 'Sage on the Stage' vs. the 'Guide on the Side' educational idea. I did my Master's Degree at the University of Florida, and one of my favorite classes was with Dr. Charles Hoffer. It was thrilling and frightening, three hours a day, five days a week for three weeks his Socratic method would make you question just about anything, and he frequently talked about the Sage on the Stage' vs. the 'Guide on the Side.'

   

You can view this posters at my TPT store here. Overall I'm very happy with my students progress towards academic stamina throughout this year and I look forward to continuing S.Q.U.I.L.T. for years to come. If you had to focus on increasing your student's stamina, what would you do?