Reflection: Nat'l Anthems General Music Lesson #1

This afternoon I conducted part of my 8th grade general music unit on national anthems in front of my Secondary Methods classmates.  My objective for this lesson was as follows:

Students will be able to compare national anthems and hypothesize about nation’s history and core values and based on the lyrical content and musical characteristics of their national anthem.

This lesson and the previous lesson (I started in the middle of my unit) would prepare students for a project where they would compose and present their own anthems whose lyrics and musical characteristics (melody of a pre-existing national anthem) reflect the key values of a fictional setting of their choice.  

I recently attended a professional development seminar where Professor Joseph Abramo discussed his philosophies on teaching pop music in middle school.  One of his ideas that stuck with me is to allow students to explore and share their broad ideas, thoughts, hypotheses first and guide the class discussion towards the narrower key points you are trying to get them to understand.  

I started out by asking students open-ended questions about national anthems (What national anthems do you know? Where have you heard them?) and share what they know.  This reassures the students that they already know a little bit about national anthems.  I could have totally plucked out "God Save the Queen" on my guitar and shown students that they know already know the melody as "My Country Tis of Thee"  

I already know that students realize they hear many different national anthems at sporting events such as the Olympics and the World Cup, thus I guided them into my youtube video of the world cup.  To save time, I should have had the students writing down at least 3 takeaways from the clip rather than having them discuss in groups.  

When discussing what the student's took away from the clip, a couple students (Abe and Natalie) hit on some of the key points I wanted the class to know.  I didn't have to drill this points into their brain, they figured them out on their own.  I could have really kept the class engaged by saying,  "That's a good thought Abe!  You're on to something.  Hold on to that idea just a bit longer."   

If I had gotten to the last slide (10 seconds away), students would have discovered that the Chilean and Brazilian national anthems are both classified as Latin American Epic Anthems (genre), many of  which were written by Europeans (colonization) and contain many verses; all of which are part of their official anthem (why the fans/players kept singing).  So let the kids explore and share their ideas without discriminating between right or wrong and guide them towards what they need to know.  Let learning feel like discovery with the teacher, not a lecture to the student.