When Does Planning Become Over Planning?

Long term planning, medium term planning, short term planning, revision of planning, review of planning, replan the planning.  Lesson planning is never ending...

Day Seven on the SF Orff Level One Course and we spent a morning session going over approaches to long, medium and short term planning.  When doing this we considered all the information that we have been looking at over the past week and a half and were shocked when we were told that the part of the pedagogy that everyone assumes is the "Orff way" actually only makes up about 10% of the curriculum at the San Francisco School!  We were then shown ways that we can plan a course and the different methods that can be effectively used in deciding what to cover within this.   So far, so normal, but it was the planning of the individual lessons where things started to get interesting.

While developing long term and medium term planning for the topics, concepts and songs to be covered, the beauty of using the Orff Pedagogy is to encourage the students to experiment and develop their own solutions in every lesson.  This could be in performance (performing as part of the Orff Instrumentarium, playing the recorder, experimenting with vocal sounds), movement (coming up with movement solutions to a given stimuli, reacting to music etc.) or art (as a reaction to music or as a starting point to a piece).  Giving the students enough time and space to be creative is not an easy thing for a teacher to do, especially when in the back of their mind there is also the issue of how do you assess work created in this manner.

The solutions we discussed were beautiful in their simplicity:

1. Once a theme for the lesson has been decided on, activities using the basic ideas of the piece are chosen - our tutor basically has a folder of all the activities that she has seen being used or has devised herself and chooses them as she sees fit.  The same activity might be used with several year groups who are on different topics, and with slight adaptations to the resources used can provide completely different outcomes.  This also means that the activities chosen for each class in a year might be different, depending on their skill set and what they need to work on (In other words streamed differentiation).
2. Each project, while being content rich, only lasts for 3-4 lessons with the teaching of skills being more important that covering set topics.  It is also important to remember that one song taught in a thoughtful way can provide the music for an entire lesson (e.g. teach the rhythms, then the words, then the melodies, then perform the melodies, then devise the accompaniments etc.)
3. With performance it is important to remember that the instrumentarium is solely intended to accompany singing and not for attaining concert performance standard
4. Social and interpersonal skills are built into the activities depending on what the teacher perceives a class needs to work on (sharing/ moving in a line etc.  Especially effective as part of the games activities used)
5. The starter activities and a rough scheme of how the work is going to develop (i.e onto recorders, or the instrumentarium, or is it using voices, or movement?) is planned, but once the main part of the lesson commences, the ideas developed by the students dictate where the lesson goes (do the ideas work in canon, or do the ideas need ostinato accompaniments?  How can we use the voice or movements?  Is this whole class work, or would it benefit from small group work?)
6. Assessment importantly should not be set in stone, but should be for each student, i.e. they are assessed on how much they have improved personally rather than against some arbitrary benchmark set for an entire class.

It was a lot to take in, but with a little practice and a little less nervousness in having space in the planning for the students work to emerge I believe that in a school such as the one I am in presently, this might turn at to be a highly successful model to follow.