In this high school jazz band, all the participating students are already fairly skilled at playing their instruments, having studied in other music contexts, such as middle school band or orchestra. Yet even with that prior experience, each student come to the class with different levels of ability and knowledge in playing jazz itself.

The teacher, Mr. Roberts, starts this particular lesson by having band members form a circle to play the B-flat concert scale, something that they practiced a few days before. Newer students to the jazz band are becoming familiar with jazz scales, rhythms, and sequences for the first time in these lessons. They will need additional practice to form a solid sense of how these aspects of jazz function through both listening to the music and through playing it. When it comes time for them to perform in the concert at the end of the semester, it will be important for them to have a good understanding of them in order to play well together. The goal for the band this week is for all members to learn to play a composition on a B-flat concert scale.

To begin, Mr. Roberts stands in the middle of a circle of students with their instruments ready for the purpose of directing and monitoring their playing. He has asked his class to play in a circle for two main reasons: so that he can have equal access to all of the students (to instruct, assess, and generally communicate) and to convey the idea to band members that they are all equal. Mr. Roberts appreciates that in this formation, there is no first chair player or a last chair player; every student is equally important.

At Mr. Roberts’ direction, the students begin playing the scale. In this exercise, they practice and demonstrate their basic knowledge. From his vantage point standing in the middle of the circle, Mr. Roberts is able to observe each student and assess his or her playing. When he notices students exhibiting trouble playing the scale, he easily walks over to them and gives brief, individual instruction, such as naming the notes that they need to play or helping them move their fingers to the correct position on the instrument. In this way, Mr. Roberts can quickly determine and respond to the difference between what each student currently knows and can do and what he or she needs to know or do next. As such, he gets a sense of their knowledge gaps relative to the Learning Goal and can respond to them in the moment.

Based on this brief warm-up activity, Mr. Roberts then breaks the band members up into two groups – beginning and advanced – for some direct instruction. He asks the advanced players to position themselves near the back of the ensemble and the beginning players to sit in the front. He then asks the advanced group to play a whole composition while the beginning students listen to the progression of the scales. While the composition is being played, Mr. Roberts points out aspects of the scale to the students to help increase their awareness of the bassline, in particular. He makes comments such as: “Can you hear how the bassline switches here? And then it goes back to the way it was before?” At the conclusion he points out, “Can you hear at the very end, it goes from one chorus and turns around to another? That’s called a turn around.”

The next stage of the lesson is for students to practice recognizing where the bassline appears in the composition when it is played live. This is another opportunity for Mr. Roberts to assess students’ abilities with this skill, especially the beginning members. The task he constructs for this purpose is a game.

Mr. Roberts tells the students, “It is really important for the rhythm section to know where the soloists are by listening to the bassline. So a bass player is going to play that walking bassline in a measure different from Measure 1. I want you to listen, and I want you to clap when you think he is back on Measure 1. You do not all have to clap at the same time. I want you to clap when you think he is back on Measure 1. Now, here is what I do not want you to do: look around and wait for someone else to clap.”

Mr. Roberts role-plays sitting around looking nervous and then claps. The students laugh. “I would rather have you clap really loud at the wrong spot. Now we are going to start listening. Can you analyze the music as you are listening?” he asks. The students nod and say that they will try. Mr. Roberts lets the bass player choose where he wants to start, then walks to the back of the room to listen and observe.

The bass player plays for several seconds, then many students clap at once. When that happens, the bass player stops playing, and Mr. Roberts excitedly asks, “Okay, how did you know when to clap?” Students volunteer to share how they noticed the patterns of the music. A brief discussion ensues as students talk about the pattern they noticed. Mr. Roberts then asks students to reflect on how the patterns and scales in this composition match those from a composition the band played a few weeks ago.

Building on this activity, Mr. Roberts then plays different measures and scales himself, and the students follow, playing their own instruments. Although this task is designed to increase student confidence in their jazz vocabulary, it also serves as a formative assessment (as did the other parts of the lesson) to see how the students are able to perform at their current levels of understanding and skill relative to the desired task. At the end of this 5-minute activity, Mr. Roberts debriefs with the class.

He tells them, “I put some licks in there, the ‘do-det-da do-det-da,’ and I noticed that you guys did not exactly match my articulation. That is why I put in that lick more than once, because I was ‘do-det-da, do-det-da’ and you guys were ‘det-det-det, det-det-det, det-det-det.’ So I realized that the timing needs to be worked out. The repeated eighth notes are the hardest things to get stylistically. We are going to work on these things the next time with this swing tune.” This activity allowed for both the teaching and the learning activities to be modified to promote learning and success for all the students.

For the last class activity in the lesson, Mr. Roberts singles out the beginning students and has them perform a 12 bar solo. He asks the advanced students to listen and provide feedback at the end of each student’s solos. Mr. Roberts asks the students to think through all the different things they have learned to add interest, variety, personality, feeling, and emotion to their solos. The students quickly share techniques that they have learned, saying, “articulation,” “rhythm,” “dynamics,” “direction,” and “range.”

After all the students finished playing, Mr. Roberts notices that some of the students seem a bit confused or concerned with their performance. He assures them that they will understand their journey at the end through learning the scales, listening and analyzing the patterns in the music, and practicing. “With my older students,” he says, “I always call it ‘wandering around until we reach the promise land.’ We are going to eventually reach the promised land. If you have a direction of where your solos are going, it is going to make a lot more sense. Keep all those things in mind. But in the end, just play!”

For homework, in addition to practicing scales and the composition, Mr. Roberts asks students to write reflections in their journals on how the class went for them. Reviewing the journals later allows Mr. Roberts and the students themselves to see how their jazz knowledge and abilities are progressing from the beginning of the year and how their level of comfort and direction increases.

One student commented: “The small group is really effective. Usually in a larger group you feel a little bit of pressure to get it right because you do not want to make everyone stutter at the beginning of the song because you messed something up. But with the small group it feels like it’s a group of friends just sitting around, messing around with the music. It does not matter if you make a mistake, and everyone just laughs at it and moves on.”

Adapted from Iowa Core Curriculum Video