This section describes the approaches the department will use to increase musical knowledge through common terminology, lower and higher order thinking skill activities, and the class structure used to maximize the daily learning opportunities for students in the instrumental music program.

The three areas include:

1.   Method of Teaching the Five Major Categories - the areas of tone, intonation, rhythm, technique, and interpretation are perpetual aspects of the sequence in learning.  It is expected that students will achieve success at every step of the program by playing age-appropriate literature with quality in all five areas.

2.   Musical Concepts and the Taxonomy of Learning - the same concepts addressed throughout the program can be taught and learned through the various levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning, taking into account the student’s experience with a concept and challenging them to become more involved with and aware of the concept and its relation to their musical progress.

3.   Rehearsal format - a basic structure employed throughout the instrumental music courses to reinforce to students the basic rules of the classroom, including timeliness, proper warm-up skills, tone and technique exercises, covering new and refining familiar musical material.

These sample strategies are designed to provide some insight on how the areas of learning are implemented with regularity and progression throughout a student’s instrumental music education.