Band Karate Part 1

Band Karate

I know of some programs that have implemented a system whereby students can "pass" leveled assignments as a way of ranking students based on achievement.  Most notably, the "recorder karate" method published by the Music K-8 catalog.  When I moved to middle school band a few years ago, I immediately recognized the need for motivating all my students, no matter what their musical ability level might be.  In any given group, I may have students that just started their instruments in the same class as students that have been playing for several years and are performing at basically a high school level.  My band program currently has around 170 students and is growing.  I did not want to let my high-performing students get bored, nor did I want to let my developing students get frustrated and drop out.  Ideally, I could come up with a way to keep all of them engaged and working towards improvement.

I do not have much individual time with students, so coming up with a system that would allow students to know what level they are currently on, and what they need to pass for the next level was a pretty big priority for me.  Record-keeping would also be a challenge.

Progress Chart

My first step was coming up with a way to determine test lines from our lesson book.  Luckily, we have been using Standard of Excellence for a long time (I also used it at the school I first taught band) and I knew there was a chart in the back that has specific lines to be passed as playing tests,  I knew I couldn't possibly test the whole book, but I wanted the test lines to be more than just one song per level to make sure they were developing specific skills for each level. Here is the chart from the Standard of Excellence band book.  I can't say the SoE book is the be-all end-all for methods, but we have made an investment into the books in our district, and retooling to a new method isn't in the plans.  I find it to be no better or worse than any other band method out there.  By now, they have all pretty much copied each other's strong points and are fairly interchangeable.

It was kind of coincidental that the chart had 10 columns, or maybe the kind folks at Kjos publishing planned it that way, but it was pretty easy for me to adapt the chart as my way to show what songs needed to be passed for each level.   Column 1 for Level 1, Column 2 for Level 2, etc.

Testing

When I started this process, I took a few minutes out of the end of class for testing. Quickly I discovered a few things.  First off, at least at the beginning stages when students were passing a lot of levels, this was a very time-consuming process.  Keeping the rest of the class engaged while I was testing was also an issue.  Secondly, students would sometimes play the same line 3,4 or more times in an attempt to pass it.  I wanted to maintain very high standards as to what I considered "passing" so I was reluctant to pass students that did not seem to have mastered the line, but I also did not want to frustrate them by having them play the same line over and over for me until they passed.  SmartMusic has been a real boon for me. You can read all about SmartMusic on this page.  using it, students can practice on their own, with feedback, until they master the line and can submit it to me for grading.

More on my data gathering, reward belts, and leveling details in a later posting.