Technical Competency 10 -- Differentiating Instruction,
Presentations, or Experiences with Digital Media Content:
PowerPoint presentation, including audio file, images, and text
Lesson plan, including Context, Aim, Lesson Content, Materials,
Lesson Sequence, and Differentiation Summary
Slide 3
This lesson plan incorporates both music and images to present
to students an example of jazz expression, to give more context and
insight into a work of literature.
Slide 4
Blues for Alice
Slide 5
Charlie Bird Parker (1920-1955) Influential alto saxophonist,
one of the originators of Bebop, a jazz style that rejected much of
traditional jazz improvisation.
Slide 6
MelodyA sequence of tones, usually in the same key, that
produces a rhythmic whole; the tune HarmonyA combination of two or
more tones working together in a pleasing, orderly whole; the
accompaniment RhythmA regular recurrence of accented tones and
stresses; the beat VerseThe main part of the song that usually
introduces and carries the melody ChorusThe part of the song that
repeats SoloA section of the song where the main instrumentalist
plays alone, improvising or ad-libbing
Slide 7
LESSON PLAN FOR FENCES CONTEXT The goal of this lesson plan is
to increase students familiarity with and knowledge of the nuances
of the unit plans essential questions and enduring understandings.
In this lesson, I hope to help support students understanding of
how jazz influenced the dialogue in August Wilsons play, Fences, by
exploring a few musical analysis terms and applying them two
specific moments from the first act of the play. This unit plan
will be given to 11th-grade students at Brooklyn Collegiate high
school in Brooklyn, New York. The class consists of about 27
multicultural students, predominantly African American and Muslims.
The essential questions I have designed for the unit are: How can
we honor our parents legacy while recognizing we do not want to
repeat their mistakes? How does the legacy of racism affect family
relationships? What is African American theater? Is there such a
thing as an African American play? My enduring understandings are:
It takes great courage to change directions in the face of familial
and racial legacies. You cant outrun death, but you dont have to
let the idea of death haunt your life.
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AIM This lesson plan is to be given to students early on in the
unit, just the fourth class in the first week of a four week unit.
It attempts to offer some foundational knowledge that may help
students as they begin to read the play, as well as an important
technique they can use throughout their literary journeys. This
lesson focuses on applying external concepts, in this case musical
idioms brought to life through jazz, to a literary text, and seeing
how that application adds richness to our comprehension. It uses
jazz music as the lens through which we can view this particular
text. This is an invaluable technique for literary understanding,
and has incredibly flexible and far-reaching applications. In other
units, I can image students learning how to apply a Marxist or a
Feminist lens to a text. The lens might change but the technique,
learned here, remains the same. LESSON CONTENT AND SKILL GOALS The
goals of this specific lesson are to help students know how
dialogue (one of a playwrights main tools, along with conflict and
setting) creates characters, and in the context of this play,
identify ways in which jazz music influenced Wilsons dialogue.
During the lesson, students will listen to a jazz tune and begin to
define what they hear. They will view a PowerPoint presentation
introducing and explaining musical analytical terms. They will
speak selected speeches and lines of dialogue from the play and
reapply these musical terms to the speeches. They will analyze this
piece of writing, and decode or translate it by applying these
musical analytical terms to the dialogue. The students will then
see how, if at all, musical ideas can help describe or illuminate
literary ideas, how music potentially shapes Wilsons dialogue in
this play, and how jazz builds fictional characters. The student
will write down what they think in a worksheet exercise during the
later part of the class.
Slide 9
MATERIALS The lesson will use music, images, and text,
supported by a presentation and a worksheet, to support the content
and skill goals. The music will be a recording of a 1951
composition by Charlie Parker called Blues for Alice, notable for
its sweet melody and harmonic complexity. The music will be
accompanied by an image of Parker, plus content offering a bio and
short definitions of various musical terms the students can use to
both understand the tune and the musicality of the dialogue in
August Wilsons play.
Slide 10
LESSON SEQUENCE--1 ANTICIPATORY SET Do Now (5 mins) Students
will listen to Blues for Alice, a jazz tune featuring saxophonist
Charlie Parker, and try to put into words what Parker is putting
into music. The students will be asked to write one sentence
answers to these three questions: How does the song make you feel?
Does Parkers saxophone have a voice? What is the story of this
song? Share (3 mins) Students will share what they wrote and the
class will discuss how music can have different voices, how it can
actually carry on a dialogue, and how it can tell a story. MAIN
ACTIVITIES Mini Lesson (10 mins) This mini lesson will offer
students a few terms they can use to help describe how jazz, and
music in general, tells stories. It will provide loose definitions
of terms such as melody, solo, chorus, and rhythm. The mini lesson
will also include a short Charlie Parker biography and attempt to
situate jazz music within the context of American musical hegemony
and American culture, to show students what these influences and
connections mean for the character of Troy, the world of the play,
and August Wilsons writing.
Slide 11
LESSON SEQUENCE--2 Guided Practice (10 mins) The teacher will
ask the students to read out loud a section of dialogue from the
beginning of the play between the characters Troy, Rose, and Bono.
The teacher then will then apply the musical analytical terms the
class has just discussed to the feelings and words in this bit of
dialogue. The goal is to see how Wilson uses jazz elements to shape
his speeches. My hope through this exercise is that students will
be able to see jazz, via these terms, as a lens through which to
view and hear Wilsons dialogue. ASSESSMENT Group Work (8 mins)
Students work in groups of two or three to apply these same musical
analysis terms to a section of dialogue that follows directly on
the one the whole class just focused on during the guided practice.
Students are encouraged to read these speeches out loud to grasp
the musicality of the words. They then underline selected parts of
speeches and write down what terms they feel apply and why. CLOSURE
Sharing (5 mins) Students will share their work to the class. The
teacher will see how specific they were in making their
connections. Did they underline individual lines of dialogue? Can
they support their conclusions with analysis based on the mini
lesson? Did the groups, in general, reach the same conclusions? The
teacher will then bring the discussion back to the larger idea
using lenses to view and explore not just an individual work of
literature but the entire world.
Slide 12
DIFFERNTIATION SUMMARY The lesson incorporates whole class,
group, and individual work. It asks that students listen, speak,
and write. Working individually during the Do Now, students are
encouraged to listen closely to a beautiful piece of music and
express what they hear and feel in words. As a whole class, the
students view a brief PowerPoint presentation, and also read out
loud selected lines of dialogue from the play featuring both male
and female characters. In small groups, they read out loud
additional pieces of dialogue and discuss with each other how the
music analytic terms they have just learned apply to these
speeches. The teacher can pair up stronger and weaker readers, and
stronger and weaker speakers. The students can help each other
grasp these concepts, and practice, within their groups, reading,
analyzing, and writing skills. They can also help each other learn
and collaborate on the worksheet. This lesson also focuses on jazz,
a uniquely African American art form, and features the work of
Charlie Parker, one of jazzs great figures. Jazz connects both to
Wilsons style of dialogue and to a character in the play who,
though not appearing in the scene we examine, is a fledgling jazz
musician.