Course Overview
Pre-AP Music emphasizes the ongoing process of making, interpreting, and refining music, alongside opportunities for polished performances and completed musical works. Assessments are designed to be relevant and accessible, evaluating a range of skills, habits, and/or dispositions that are central to music learning, including close listening, expressive decision making, collaboration, and reflection.
The Pre-AP approach to music instruction centers rehearsal as a space for experimentation and revision, giving students regular opportunities to shape interpretation and performance through purposeful musical choices. Lessons include recommendations for adapting instruction to a variety of contexts, making use of available resources already present in your school.
Arts Areas of Focus
The areas of focus are reasoning skills that provide vertical alignment within a discipline, giving students the opportunity to develop and strengthen these skills as they progress through subsequent Pre-AP courses and into advanced coursework.
- Analysis and interpretation
- Peer-to-peer dialogue
- Experimentation
- Reflective writing
Course Resources
Course Content
Pre-AP Music has three modules. Review their key topics and the recommended length for each module:
- Module 1: Sources (~25 class periods)
- Module 2: Structures (~25 class periods)
- Module 3: Iteration (~25 class periods)
These big ideas are integrated throughout all modules of each arts course:
- Observe and interpret
- Practice and experiment
- Research and make
- Reflect and evaluate
- Revise and share
Each module contains:
- Model lessons: Student and teacher resources that demonstrate how to translate the course framework, shared principles, and areas of focus into daily instruction.
- Performance-based assessments: Arising from authentic work students complete within a module of study, the assessments are designed to evaluate an entire range of abilities: technical skill development, purposeful refinement and revision, and the student’s ability to reflect upon and communicate about their work.
Pre-AP Course Audit
Before implementing a Pre-AP course, teachers need to complete Pre-AP Course Audit. This process is required to:
- Grant teachers access to Pre-AP Classroom, including instructional materials, professional learning, and assessment tools
- Authorize the school to use "Pre-AP" in its course names
- Include the school in Pre-AP Course Ledger