I love music. I have no discernible talent for playing music, but I have a soundtrack for life that can be taken to a moment or emotion with the right song. This is why I use music in English class whenever I can!
Play a Nirvana song and I’m a teen in my Doc Martens and oversized flannel shirt hanging out with friends on the floor in a high school hallway. I was probably skipping class at the time too!
Any Johnny Cash song and I’m instantly recalling a memory of my father.
Play Single Ladies by Beyoncé and I’m at a concert with girlfriends singing along with the Queen herself!
For a long time, I had a record player in my classroom and we’d listen to records new and old before the bell rang for the start of classes. The music selections weren’t always related to what we covered in class, often they were a pick-me-up or tone-setter on any given day, plus they were an education of another sort from Al Green to Led Zeppelin! One fond memory was doing a free-write with students and letting them know they couldn’t stop writing until the song ended. The song? Stairway to Heaven!
While my record player may not be used as it once was, I still incorporate music into lessons in a variety of ways. Here are three ways I use music in my high school English Classroom:
Reflection and Feedback Tool
To kick off the school year, reset during the school year, and even wrap up the school year, reflecting on bigger moments through musical connections is an engaging, fun, and informative activity.
Have students describe themselves in three songs with a few sentences to make the connection clear.
Have students summarize their year so far in academics or personally with 3-5 songs and a brief write-up.
Have students indicate a soundtrack of their lives with songs that reflect how they feel about their progress and where they think they need to focus their attention to achieve success.
These little unexpected infusions of music are great for collecting data about your students and building relationships too. The bonus to all of this is that the songs you ‘collect’ from students can lead to a class soundtrack to be used as background music in class (assuming school-safe lyrics).
One way to make a classroom playlist is to make rotating Spotify playlists to share with different classes or to play when appropriate.
Check out this ready-made playlist reflection lesson that can work for back-to-school, during the year, or as an end-of-year round-up.
Use it for back-to-school to get to know your students a bit better.
Use it during the school year to tie it to your novel study.
Use it at the end of the school year to reflect on the year that was in terms of academics and personal life!
Poetry Exploration
The tried-and-true classic is to use music as poetry for analysis in your lessons. Make this student-driven by having them bring in the lyrics to a song they love. Students can then practice identifying figurative language devices, imagery, tone or mood, or really anything in between that figures into the song.
Another option with song lyrics is to use a section of a song without the title to have students pick their own title and provide a rationale for it based on the lyrics that have been provided.
A final option would be to pair music with poetry. You can check out this post and this one for more ideas on this topic.
Creating Soundtracks for Texts
In recent years for some units of study, I have shifted away from longer writing assignments as evaluations. Sure we still write essays but activities with short written components or even without, have taken centre stage. Instead, the focus is on shorter assignments that focus on making connections and providing opportunities for creativity and differentiation for the students in class.
In this way, I like to have students create soundtracks. It’s another tried-and-true method to get students to connect songs they know to the text they’ve been studying. And while this is common for fiction, consider using it for nonfiction too such as memoirs, news articles, or other informational texts.
Having students create a soundtrack of songs connected to a particular text is a great option to explore their knowledge and understanding in a way that moves beyond simple reading comprehension.
If you’re not already using music in English class, think about ways you can use it in your classroom asap! The inclusion of music can help with building relationships. It can be an assignment option. It can be a text for study. It can even be a mood booster that is much needed at various points in the school year!
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