Please write a blog post about your current understanding of the concept of developmentally appropriate pedagogy within your field of study/expertise.
It is crucial to use the concept of developmentally appropriate pedagogy when planning out units and lessons as a teacher, especially in the field of music. Understanding the limitations with the grade levels you are teaching and knowing how your student’s brains are working is important to help them learn and succeed to the next developmental checkpoint. If students don’t have the foundation for certain skills, it makes teaching newer concepts later much harder.
One example of this is using the Dalcroze teaching method. This is a way of teaching music through dance and movement. It is helpful for building the foundations of rhythm, expression, listening skills, and interpreting music. These foundations are crucial for developing higher level skills such as blending, style, counting, and pulse. Because of this and its accessibility, it is perfect for younger musicians, particularly in grades preK and elementary school. Many of these practices are actions that young children already do and enjoy, and doing it within the classroom can help guide these students to understanding what parts of music make them want to move that way. This can create stable foundations to develop more concrete concepts later in their music classes.
Another example is the Kodaly teaching method. This method begins the process of teaching students notes and pitches within the Western scales using hand signs and simple syllables to represent the degrees of a scale. This technique helps students with pitch development, understanding intervals between notes, listening and adjusting, and harmony as well. Using this method is a good next step for elementary students because it builds off of the foundations taught using the Dalcroze method and takes the next step to understanding music.
This expands further into band and orchestra ensembles, especially when students are starting to learn their instrument. They need to know how to hold their instrument and how to produce notes before learning the fingerings for certain notes. Taking these small steps for older elementary and middle school students is important because they are still developing the ability to multitask. When teaching the upper level students at the high school level, you are able to give them harder music and to be picky with the style in which they are playing it because they have a good foundation of the basics.
