PART 4 - Adaptive Music Class 101: Task Analysis

Once you figure out what to teach, you then need to figure out the best way to teach it to your students. Adaptive classes can often learn the same content as you are teaching in other classes, but the route they follow to get there may be much different. Enter “Task Analysis.” This article looks at how to assess and break down your activities to their core skills to help prepare students for the bigger picture.

Task Analysis

When working with adaptive classes, you might realize the pace and speed of the students progress is not what you are traditionally used to. You may be able to teach a new song and its accompanying game in one class period to your typical 2nd grade class, but with your adaptive class, that process may take much longer. As an adaptive music teacher, you will need to do a task analysis on the lessons and activities you want to do with your students and break down the activity into the core tasks and skills that make it up. For example, If you want to do a game where students pass an object on the beat around a circle you might first need to have the students simply pass an object back and forth to develop the skill of passing. Once that skill is mastered, you can add the beat in and have them pass back and forth to a beat. Finally you can introduce the circle and have students pass the object around the circle to the beat. This activity might take 2 minutes of explanation and demonstration in one of your classes, but in your adaptive class it may need to be slowly built up over the course of several meetings, only moving forward when the students have mastered each skill.

Task analysis is a skill that takes time to learn. Pay attention in your lessons for things that don’t go as well as you imagined. There may be an underlying skill or concept that needs to be addressed FIRST before the students can be successful with the activity you are doing.

In our next and final installment in this series we talk about collaboration with the special education team.