The project description format

The best practices selected by Music at school are presented in a format conceived to render the design of the project, which is at the basis of these didactic activities, in an explicit, readable and replicable way, in order to make their core aspects graspable and transferable.

Each project is made up of five videos. The playlist structure is conceived to provide music teachers with a common framework which facilitates both comprehension and sharing.

The description of the didactic actions accounted for all the steps of the design process. Each best practice is accompanied by the playlist with five videos, and useful materials (finalised to teaching activities, evaluation, follow-ups, etc.)

Music competences framework

In order to facilitate teachers in their work of observation and development of specific music competences, starting from the objectives of the 2012 national guidelines we drew out a curriculum framework for the development of musical competences taking also into consideration the European models.

The framework is proposed as a useful tool to describe and evaluate the development of the three areas where, according to the national guidelines, the formation of musical competences takes place:

• Listening;
• Production;
• Writing and reading.

Design and Evaluation Programme

Once you have an idea of which target competency you wish to achieve, how should you go about organizing the teaching/learning project and, in particular, evaluate the results? The attached programme provides some guidance to address these two faces of the question.

Starting from the goals and the competency to be developed (2012 Italian National Guidelines), a design and evaluation column has been drawn up to foster development of the chosen skill sets, monitor them, and take the relevant educational action. This column has been designed horizontally to emphasize that the design phase is closely interwoven with the evaluation phase, and that the two phases are designed to control each other; the one influences the other, to the extent that the left-to-right reading direction can also become right-to-left when the evaluation forces us to review the design phase and recalibrate its parameters.

The programme is divided into two parts:

The DESIGN part:

• I choose Music Competency
• I identify what aspects to develop (as described in the educational framework) to be transformed into training objectives, contextualized skills, objectives relating to the learning task, and then introduced to my class.
• I describe the task
• I describe the process evaluation

The EVALUATION SCALE:

This has 4 proficiency levels for the different aspects of the competency, as defined by the DigComP 2.1 Framework; each further divided into two levels according to three indicators (COMPLEXITY OF TASKS, AUTONOMY, COGNITIVE DOMAIN)

• Foundation (LEVEL I – LEVEL II)
• Intermediate (LEVEL III – LEVEL IV)
• Advanced (LEVEL V – LEVEL VI)
• Highly specialized (Level VII – LEVEL VIII)