CI5333 Module 4 Analysis-

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Designing a Motivational Curriculum: Curricular Analysis and Modification Jennifer Kaprielian Curriculum and Instruction, American College of Education CI5333: Student Engagement Professor Therese Kanai, PhD September 17 th , 2023

Designing a Motivational Curriculum: Curricular Analysis and Modification The following analysis will examine a unit of study within a high school jazz band course and will use John Keller’s ARCS Model of Motivation (Banas, 2021a). First, an overview of the objectives, strengths, and weaknesses of the unit will be evaluated, followed by an evaluation of each pillar of the ARCS model and its implications for this unit. Adjustments to this unit will reflect curricular planning as well as attitudes and behaviors of the teacher within and outside of the classroom. Modifications will be suggested in order to increase overall alignment of the unit with the ARCS model. Unit of Study Overview The unit of study being evaluated is called Jazz Improvisation and is an eight-week unit for a high school jazz band that meets once weekly for two hours. Students may be in any grade at the high school level, but must audition to be in this class. Because the group is auditioned, the students tend to be musically more advanced than their peers in the concert band. This unit is taught in the spring and requires that students use knowledge of basic jazz harmonies, the blues scale, and the 12-bar blues to create and improvise a solo over a piece of jazz music in the spring concert. Unit Goals The goals of this unit of study are to provide students with a variety of tools that will enable them to analyze, create, and perform improvised solos in the jazz genre. Certain notes and patterns will sound better within certain key signatures and against chords selected by the composer. If students have no knowledge of how to identify the chords in the music, attempts at performing a solo over harmonic progression will feel random and unclear. Famous jazz musician and author Jamey Aebersold stated that “teaching young musicians how to improvise

and play jazz gives them independence and promotes self-worth. Jazz teaches the importance of mastering scales, chords, articulation, and theory. It also stirs up one’s imagination and opens channels of creativity” (Williams, 2023, as cited in Webb, 2008). Once students gain an understanding of how to read and write jazz chords, modes, and the blues scale pattern, and are provided with multiple opportunities to grapple with and perform these musical concepts, they should have the ability to plug these tools in and apply them to the creation of improvised solos. Unit Strengths One of the major strengths of this unit is that my teaching style is oriented towards a mastery goal structure, as determined in a self-assessment utilizing the PALS manual criteria (Midgley et al., 2000). The majority of my students start the year feeling extremely nervous about learning to improvise a solo in front of their peers. However, I impress upon them repeatedly that improvisation is one of the foundations of jazz music (Williams, 2023), that everyone is in a different place musically, and that failure is expected and even encouraged. By the final spring concert, the majority of my students are comfortable attempting a solo. The mastery approach I use in my teaching encourages progress over achievement and discourages peer comparison. Banas (2021c) states that when students are focused on their own performance, it “makes students less likely to have distracting, self-defeating thoughts…when the student is more concerned with being the best or getting passed by others…distracting thoughts are more likely to diminish cognitive capacity and engagement” [1:41]. Unit Weaknesses One of the main weaknesses in this unit is that I often fail to build in time for individual assessment and feedback. While I do provide lots of feedback to students, it is usually with the entire group. I would like to adjust to have individual conferencing with each student, and I

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would like to include student input in the process more than I have in the past. Providing students with a choice in their learning goals, tasks and assessment are proven to increase effort, motivation, and learning (Banas, 2021a, Merrill & Gonser, 2021). This ties into another weakness that became apparent when I evaluated this unit through the lens of the TARGET model (Banas, 2021b). The summative assessment of this unit requires students to improvise a jazz solo over a piece of music in the spring concert, providing the teacher total control over the method of assessment and the timeline. Analyzing this unit through the TARGET model lens, I realized that not all of my students might feel completely comfortable performing a solo for a large audience. Additionally, the concert timeline might not fit each student’s needs. I would like to move away treating the entire group the same way and instead towards creating an individualized plan with each student for how they want to be assessed in this unit, and with what mutually agreed upon deadline. Applying a Motivational Framework The following will be an analysis of the Jazz Improvisation unit through the lens of the ARCS model (Banas, 2021a). The ARCS Model of Motivation by John Keller is an instructional framework that encompasses the following four pillars: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction. “Attention” refers to methods a teacher uses to get students curious, “Relevance” refers to the connection teachers can make between a concept and student interests, “ Confidence” refers to students believing that “they have a distinct possibility of success and can complete learning tasks” (Li, 2022) and “Satisfaction” refers to the intrinsic or extrinsic motivating factors that lead students to decide a task is worthwhile. The ARCS model places a special emphasis on expectancy value theory, meaning that students must both value the task and believe that they can accomplish it in order to fully engage in it (Banas, 2021a).

Attention Currently, this unit contains no measures to surprise or capture the attention of students. A modification that may assist with this is to begin the unit by playing an audio example of one or more professional jazz solos in order to impress and interest students. Certain jazz charts may evoke strong emotions in students, and this is an additional source of interest. Additionally, a jazz chart with no written solo could be provided and students required to problem solve possible musical ideas utilizing tools they have studied previously, such as the 12-bar blues progression or the blues scale. This would tap into the inquiry arousal of students (Banas, 2021a) by requiring them to think about what tools they have to come up with an answer. Finally, a suggestion that could be implemented at the start of the unit would be to have the teacher perform a jazz solo for students over a backing track, as music teachers have the unique skills to do so. Seeing a teacher perform in this manner provides a novelty and surprise, which taps into students’ perceptual arousal (Banas, 2021a) and can spark stronger interest in the content as it is delivered following this. Relevance A challenge with teaching jazz music is that it is very difficult to create interest in a genre of music that few of my students have any familiarity to, even one that spans such a rich history across generations. Banas (2021a) discusses how building familiarity is one aspect of increasing relevance for students, and that this can be done by connecting the concepts to pop music or current events. Many well-known modern songs incorporate jazz harmonic progressions, such Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” (Ragusea, 2015), and it would not be difficult to introduce those examples to students. Furthermore, encouraging a mastery goal orientation

throughout the unit will provide strong reassurance to students, help them to not worry about peer competition (Willard, 1998), and enable them to personally connect more with the content. Confidence Confidence is one of the larger challenges in this unit, as performing music in front of peers can be difficult at any age. It demands risk-taking and self-efficacy in a genre that many of my students are not very familiar with. Starting with small, achievable goals that are within students’ range of abilities, such as creating a rhythm pattern with only one note, is one strategy I can incorporate into this unit as a means to increase student confidence (Banas, 2021c). Once students have succeeded, they will slowly believe that they may continue to succeed with some effort. Iconic jazz musician and educator Wynton Marsalis mentions one additional factor in facilitating student self-efficacy in jazz—the quality and confidence of the teacher (Jenkins, 1998). He stated, “a lot of general music educators are not taught jazz at all, so consequently they don’t feel comfortable teaching jazz” (para. 7). This means that I as the instructor need to incorporate more education, training, and even jazz workshops before teaching this unit. Satisfaction One form of satisfaction for many students occurs they accomplish a solo in front of a crowd at one of our concerts. Additionally, many of them are pleased when they perform successfully in front of each other in our rehearsals. However, when evaluating this unit through the TARGET framework lens (Banas, 2021b), I realized that this may not be a motivator for some students, and that both alternative methods of assessment and alternative sources of satisfaction should be provided to students. A modification I suggest to this unit would be collaboration between the teacher and individual students to determine both preferred evaluation methods and sources of internal motivation. Additionally, I believe more specific guidance on

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appropriate goal setting would enhance student satisfaction. Li (2022) states that in the ARCS model, satisfaction is heavily connected to cognitive evaluation, meaning that students experience satisfaction if they experience results that align with their expectations, and dissatisfaction if they achieve lower results than expected. Assisting my students with their goal setting during individual meetings will ensure that they select goals appropriate for their abilities. In conclusion, this Jazz Improvisation unit viewed through the ARCS model would benefit greatly from adding professional recordings and even teacher modeling as a method of gaining students’ attention at the start of the unit (Banas, 2021a). Professional recordings of jazz solos paired with well-planned discussion questions can evoke student curiosity and interest, as well as evoke powerful emotions. Li (2022) states that “an excellent emotional experience will stimulate learning motivation when learners think they have a role in the learning process” (para. 7). Another improvement this unit would benefit from is the teacher seeking additional training in the content in order to enable increased confidence in all students. Additionally, this unit should be modified to have the teacher provide more assistance to students with their personal goal setting and to ensure students are provided with small manageable tasks that are achievable in order to increase their self-efficacy and to enable them to accurately connect their efforts with their expectations for success (Banas, 2021c). Finally, incorporating student input on assessment styles and learning outcomes, as well as more individualized collaboration between the teacher and students will enhance this unit under the framework of the ARCS model. While not all students are motivated by the same rewards, working to find what motivates each child will lead to higher satisfaction (Banas, 2021 ARCS) and higher overall engagement in the unit.

References Banas, J. (Feb 2021a). ARCS. Lecture. American College of Education . Banas, J. (Feb 2021b). TARGET. Lecture. American College of Education . Banas, J. (Feb 2021c). Views on motivation. Lecture. American College of Education . Jenkins, Willard. (October 1998). Wynton Marsalis on what’s right and wrong with jazz education. Jazz Times . https://wyntonmarsalis.org/news/entry/wynton-marsalis-on-whats- right-and-wrong-with-jazz-education Li, Dong. (June 2022). Psychological emotion and behavior analysis in music teaching based on the attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction motivation model. Frontiers Psychology , 13 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.917476 Merrill, S. & Gonser, S. (September 2021). The importance of student choice across all grade levels. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/importance-student-choice-across-all- grade-levels Midgley, C., Maehr, M. L., Hruda, L. Z., Anderman, E. M., Anderman, L. H., Freeman, K. E., Urdan, T. et al. (2000). Manual for the patterns of adaptive learning scales (PALS). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Ragusea, A. (December 2015). All I want for Christmas is diminished chords: Why Mariah Carey’s immortal holiday classic sounds so darn Christmassy. Slate. https://slate.com/culture/2015/12/mariah-careys-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-a- musicological-explanation-of-why-the-song-sounds-so-christmassy.html Webb, N. (2008, June 24). Why teach jazz? National Association for Music Education. https://nafme.org/why-teach-jazz-2/

Williams, S. (2023). Easing into jazz improvisation with the blues. Journal of General Music Education, 36(3), 19–25. https://doi.org/10.1177/27527646231154542

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CI5333 Module 4 Analysis-

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