Aaron Price

4280/4290

Dr. Johnston

09-05-17

Colleen Conway begins her article, Curriculum Writing in Music, with a

description of the current state of music curriculum in her personal experience. Conway

uses this opening paragraph as a way to state the importance of having a fully written

out music curriculum document from which to teach in the classroom. Conway then

goes on the plain what curriculum is, why it should be implemented in the modern

classroom, and how to implement curriculum. She explains curriculum as a combination

of many different parts or elements, which she then goes on to explain. Grade level if

the most important aspect to consider when writing curriculum, and should be written

and taught sequentially in order to achieve the goals set out by the teacher. Objective

based curriculum is basically the concept of writing learning tasks (Objectives) for the

student to perform in order to learn or show their knowledge about a certain subject.

Conway then describes the difference between writing lessons from standards and

writing lessons from literature, and explains the pros and cons of each. This is followed

by an explanation of skill based assessments and knowledge based assessments.

Conway states that a healthy curriculum with contain each of these. Conway spends the

next paragraph attempting to make a clear distinction between standards and

curriculum. She tells the story of a principal who claims to evaluate her band director

based on how appropriately she followed the curriculum, but when asked if the school
had an instrumental music curriculum, she claimed that the standards were basically the

same thing. This seems to be the situation that Conway is attempting to avoid by writing

this article. She states that she would like to encourage music educators to get together

and work on district curricula together in order to avoid these situations. She states the

importance of teachers writing these documents together in a communal way, and the

importance of teachers being compensated for this work.