Have you ever felt behind in your plans? We dedicate a lot of our time as music educators to planning. How we plan our music classes and ensembles and what a lesson plan from our program looks like says a lot about how we think about curriculum and pedagogy. I’ve never really thought in terms of creating a “lesson plan” even when I was required to write my “lesson plans” out in a green-covered paper planning notebook to be turned in to my assistant principal each week, years ago. I often stapled a set of papers detailing a long-term project into the book for a particular week and drew an arrow through multiple days of classes (an approach that was not always appreciated by my admin). More recently, I started transferring plans for the classes I teach at ASU from Google docs to Obsidian. Instead of thinking of these plans as lesson plans, I refer to them as Plans of Possibilities, which is more reflective of the way I think about planning. Plans of possibilities are flexible, often nonlinear, and oriented to what might occur rather than what needs to be covered.
I have goals in mind when I plan and design learning experiences but am also very flexible and constantly modifying what we do in relation to what occurs in a class. I also often plan for projects that have the potential to be generative and in which ideas, principles, and aspects of learning and teaching emerge.
The application, Obsidian is a fantastic tool that makes it very easy to constantly tweak plans and plan for possibilities, whether that means multiple options of activities, exercises, or projects that I design ahead of time or riffing off whatever occurs during a class and making connections to related ideas and concepts or principles of learning and teaching. This approach – a plan of possibilities – is just one aspect of a planning process informed by ways of thinking about curriculum and pedagogy. Watch the video below for some ways of approaching plans of possibilities in relation to music learning and teaching. While I discuss aspects of a music learning and teaching course I facilitate at Arizona State University, the principles and concepts can apply to other types of music classes and ensembles. I differentiate plans of possibilities from approaches that are more focused on covering content or planning a set or sequence of activities.
Check out the video and leave a comment on YouTube. How do you plan for your music classes or ensembles? What other thoughts or questions do you have?