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10 teacher-tested strategies to engage reluctant writers. John Spencer. (2020, October 27). Retrieved April 23, 2023, from https://spencerauthor.com/reluctant-writers/

Easy ways to help your music students write for different purposes. Sally's Sea of Songs. (n.d.). Retrieved April 23, 2023, from https://www.sallysseaofsongs.com/2021/10/easy-ways-to-help-your-music-students.html

Fisher, D., & Frey, N. (2012, March). Writing, Not Just In English Class. National Association of Secondary School Principals. Retrieved April 23, 2023.

A range of writing across the content areas. Reading Rockets. (2015, February 23). Retrieved April 23, 2023, from https://www.readingrockets.org/article/range-writing-across-content-areas

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This video, found on spencerauthor.com, provides an option for helping reluctant writers in the classroom. The video provides an overview for what they call "Genius Hour", or "20% time", which allows for the student to write about a topic they are interested in. The students are given a period of time to pursue something they are passionate about, which may help them enjoy the process of writing. In the article I discovered this video from, the author asserts that "his doesn’t guarantee that every child will love writing. Sometimes it takes a while, especially when students have a fixed mindset. However, it’s a great start, because you’re telling your students,  “I value what you have to say. I’m interested in your geeky interests.”". I believe this is important, especially in a music classroom, because it shows the students that although we will be doing lots of writing along with our music making, there is always room to enjoy the process of writing and there is always space to make the writing their own.

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What is Genius Hour? An Overview of Genius Hour and 20% Time in the Classroom

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This article discusses a myriad of purposes for writing, such as to inform, to persuade, or to entertain. For each purpose, the author discusses ways you can incorporate this specific purpose in the music room. I loved this article in particular because when we think about writing, especially in the music classroom, most teachers jump to the middle or high school worlds. However, as a K-8 teacher, I cannot just leave out my elementary kiddos! This article included lots of ideas for the elementary music teacher to engage their students in writing for a variety of purposes.

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The scene: All the teachers are sitting in the same school professional development session where the principal or curriculum coach is describing the new district focus for the year. Writing across the curriculum. All teachers are to include writing in their lessons. Have you been there? I have! How are we music teachers to do this when we only see students for a short time each week? Read on for some easy ways to incorporate writing into your music classes.
Group Collaborative Writing

When I pressed the issue of limited time with administration, I discovered that everybody doesn't always have to write! We could collaborate on our writing as a whole group or in small groups or pairs and it was fine to mix it up. This was freeing! We could work on a description of our music activity or a report on a field trip as a group.

I used this strategy at the beginning, as I was developing procedures for our writing time. These group collaborative writings also served as demonstrations to teach the students how to write on their own. I would be the one to take notes and display them with the projector or with a document camera so the students could add on or edit. I'll share more specific ideas below.

Writing for Different Purposes

In the beginning, I admit that I was envisioning many paragraphs and editing and dictionaries (which I don't have in my class), and whew! That was too much! Then I learned that the English Language Arts standards included writing for different purposes. This could be the answer!

TO INFORM - share facts and other information.

Composers or Music History topics fit in here.

One quick possibility is to present your lesson, then have each student write one thing they remember on a sticky note. Gather the sticky notes and rearrange them into a paragraph. Students will call out any missing facts to complete your class report!

For a longer project, allow students to research a composer, genre, or musician and write a report with guidelines that you provide.

TO EXPLAIN - to tell what, how, and why about a topic.

Explain how to play a recorder, ukulele, or other classroom instruments.

Explain how to do a folk dance.

Explain a new music vocabulary term.

Play a piece of music and let them write instruments, tempo, dynamics they hear, identify (or guess) the genre, give a possible use for the music. Many music educators call this SQUILT - Super Quiet Un-Interrupted Listening Time.

TO NARRATE - to tell a story.

The story can be made up or truthful. The story can be long or short.

Write a simple story to cover the beginning, middle, and end. For younger students, this story could consist of 3 sentences! For older students, the story could be 3 paragraphs and include more details.

Add instruments or songs to the story to create a mini-performance.

TO PERSUADE - state an opinion or goal and support it with reasons and supporting details in order to convince the reader to agree, take action, or both.

Write school newsletter announcements for upcoming programs.

Persuade classmates to join the choir or other performing groups.

Persuade others to listen to a new genre of music.

ENTERTAIN - to engage the reader using techniques such as humor, adventure, or suspense.

Play music and have students write or draw what they picture. Create a great story to go along with the music!

Give students an opportunity to present their drawings or writing and explain them to the class.

As an extension, write a brief explanation of the picture. This would make a great bulletin board display.

EXPRESS - to share thoughts or feelings.

Write about their feelings when they were performing on stage.

How does this music make you feel? Why? Use music vocabulary to support your ideas.

Writing poetry that could be set to music is a great option.

As a preliminary step to poetry writing, give students a word and ask the class to write as many rhyming words as they can think of.

EVALUATE - describe the positive and negative aspects and present evidence for support.

Book, music, or concert reviews fit this category.

Evaluating music and music performances is a part of state and national music standards.

Begin with short reviews of video performances. Include music vocabulary and evidence from the video to support the evaluation.

Reflect on school concerts. My students always love to see themselves in a video! Check out how I use this type of writing following every concert here.

Helpful Resources

Writing prompt templates help me organize my plans for writing in the music room, especially last year when we were switching between virtual and in-person classes. The writing prompt templates are just the size to write a question or prompt to guide student writing.

For a quick write, consider using sticky notes, whiteboards, sentence strips, or exit tickets. These blank exit tickets are great for short questions or statements about what students learned in class.

For longer projects, journals or special writing paper are more appropriate. Those special writing papers really make a nice bulletin board showing off student work! Nutcracker Notetaking includes a graphic organizer which I use as a space for students to take notes while we are reading the story of the ballet. Then, the completed organizer serves as the pre-writing for a report on our field trip to the ballet.

Another example of a special writing paper comes in this Pirate Writing Paper set. This was perfect for my first graders to use following a trip to see the musical, How I Became a Pirate.

How do you incorporate writing into your music lessons? Let me know in the comments!

References

https://www.sadlier.com/school/ela-blog/teaching-students-the-many-purposes-of-writing

https://literacyideas.com/authors-purpose/

https://forms.hmhco.com/assets/pdf/journeys/Journeys_CC_Writing_Handbook_Gr6.pdf

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easy ways to help your music students write for different purposes

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sally's sea of songs: easy ways to help your music students write for different purposes

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Sally's Sea of Songs: Easy Ways to Help Your Music Students Write for Different Purposes

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How do I plan to implement writing in my classroom? 

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How do I plan to implement writing in my classroom? 

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In my middle school general music classes, my students already engage in some writing activities. However, these activities are often few and far between, and mostly about getting a grade rather than about conceptualizing their understanding. I plan to change this by implementing writing into every single lesson. When the students do write in my class, it is usually as a bellringer. I plan to use different writing activities as a bellringer each day; for example, a few days out of the week we may do a 60-second write to learn activity where they listen to a piece of music and write for 60 seconds with a set of questions to consider. Other days, students would participate in an activity such as Read - Write - Pair - Share, where we popcorn read an article about a genre or composer and students then respond to a set of prompts about the topic, discuss their responses with a partner, then engage in a class discussion. I also found the annotation strategy from 50 Strategies to be particularly interesting; as I read that chapter, I found myself thinking of ways I could tinker it to be helpful in a musical score. I will implement this writing strategy by having students annotate their scores, but instead of writing in musical markings (as annotating in music is usually done), they would respond to questions such as "What was the composer doing here? What do you think they were trying to convey with this phrase? What do these lyrics mean? What is this rhythm supposed to symbolize?".

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"After all, teachers should not be able to grade all of the writing students do. If they can, they aren’t inviting students to write enough." (Fisher & Frey, 2012)

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"After all, teachers should not be able to grade all of the writing students do. If they can, they aren’t inviting students to write enough." (Fisher & Frey, 2012)

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This quote from "Writing, Not Just in English Class" really got me. It made me realize that I was not allowing my students to engage in writing about music nearly enough. Throughout the module we have been given a multitude of strategies for implementing writing into our own individual content areas, and I never really considered that my students should be writing every day in my class and that it shouldn't always be about getting graded on it. This quote proved to me that writing should be for both the student and the teacher, but mostly for the student. It goes along with student-centered teaching, which is an approach that is very important to me.

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"Students think about the content while they are writing. In fact, students often report that they understand the content a bit better once they have written about it. We have had more than one student tell us, “I didn't know what I thought until I wrote it down.”"

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"Students think about the content while they are writing. In fact, students often report that they understand the content a bit better once they have written about it. We have had more than one student tell us, “I didn't know what I thought until I wrote it down.”"

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In "A Range of Writing Across the Content Areas", authors Fisher and Frey discuss how writing can convey student understanding in ways that speaking or showing cannot. This particular quote stood out to me because I can imagine one of my students saying this exact quote to me. This was another "AHA" moment for me during this module. I realized after reading this section of the article that writing in the classroom isn't just about the student showing that they understand, but it can really help the student to understand as well.

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1. Writing is beneficial for teachers and students alike.

2. Student writing conveys student thinking.

3. Writing doesn't have to turn Music class into English class.

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Take Away 1: Writing is beneficial for teachers and students alike. 

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Take Away 1: Writing is beneficial for teachers and students alike. 

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One of my biggest "AHA" moments in this module was realizing that writing can benefit both the student and the teacher. In "Writing, Not Just In English Class", authors Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey explain that student writing can be a great source of learning data for teachers. Analyzing student writing can help teachers reflect on how effective their teaching is, what they can change or keep for future years, and how to proceed with instruction. In terms of my own classroom, what I got from the article was this: if my students can listen to a piece of music and discuss the range in tempo using musical words and definitions, I know they have an adequate understanding of tempo. On the flip side, if my students have spent a week studying a composer in class, but they cannot write a paragraph summarizing key characteristics of their musical style, I as a teacher know that the students need additional instruction on that topic.

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Take Away 2: Student writing conveys student thinking. 

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Take Away 2: Student writing conveys student thinking. 

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Just as you would write your thoughts and feelings in a journal better than you might be able to explain them out loud, student writing is an influential way for students to show "what they have experienced, imagined, thought, and felt" (Common Core State Standards, 2010). In this module, my understanding of writing to learn changed; instead of writing to prove that a student understands, I learned that "writing is thinking" (Fisher & Frey).

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Take Away 3: Writing doesn't have to turn Music class into English class. 

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Take Away 3: Writing doesn't have to turn Music class into English class. 

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A big reason I (and a lot of music educators, I reckon) tend to stray from writing in the music classroom is because we do not want it to take away from the art of music making. In fact, the few times I have had students writing in my classroom, they often say something along the lines of, "I thought this was music class!"
But, the truth is, writing is extremely important for student understanding. And it doesn't have to be about writing essays all day, everyday; it can be something as small as writing for sixty seconds about a piece of music or a small article as a bellringer before the music making begins. Or, it could manifest as something like Read - Write - Pair - Share, where students read (or maybe listen), write briefly about it, pair with a stand partner or section mate, and share their thoughts. This helps students to read, write, and speak fluently about a musical topic. It's important for students to understand and be able to discuss the music they are creating, not just be able to make it sound nice.