Meet Teaching Artist, Christopher Clarke, Reporting from LAUSD Classroom Residencies!

A man for all seasons, Christopher Clarke first found Guitars and Ukes in the Classroom when he was the principal in Los Angeles Unified School District's Lankershim Elementary, located in North Hollywood. A champion of diverse, economically challenged, devoted, and resourceful families, he was determined to pour more musical learning opportunities into the lives of their children by giving GITC training to his faculty members. As we say, "Train a teacher and inspire a generation!" Mr. Clarke got the majority of his faculty members involved, and Lankershim became the host site for teacher training from educators all over the San Fernando Valley! In his role as principal, he visited every classroom with his own ukulele, supporting and accompanying the teachers and students while they learned. He set the GITC bar for cool administrators. In addition to hosting and supporting teacher training, Mr. Clarke launched after school uke clubs, and got kids performing not just for their families, but for the school district! If you are reading this, perhaps you are one of the amazing educators who has embraced making and teaching through music, changing the lives of your students. Thank you so much! We are so thankful you and Mr. Clarke have become part of the GITC family.

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After many fruitful years of service at Lankershim, Mr. Clarke answered the call to serve as the principal at Canterbury Elementary in Arleta (also in LAUSD), and found himself surrounded by a wildly enthusiastic group of teachers who embraced our developmental teaching method and began teaching through the power of song within a very short time. GITC teaching artist Kristen Lynn Herbert lit the flame in the hearts of these teachers, and Mr. Clarke fanned those flames daily. The school became alight with music through GITC's capacity building co-teaching artist residencies. ​
​Each GITC capacity-building residency gives highly engaged teachers the chance to learn to teach through music with their own students, while receiving techniques, strategies, modeling, support, and coaching from a highly qualified GITC teaching artist, personally chosen for them and their students. We ask that teachers take at least our Total Beginner Uke course before requesting a residency so they have foundational musical skills when they start. You can learn about GITC capacity building classroom residencies are structured right here. 

​Collaborative student songwriting plays a major role. In our work teaching Math Through Music, we've seen the need for focused songwriting in multiplication rise. Pairing math with literacy building leads to the memorization of the times tables using a heightened awareness of sounds (phonological awareness), letter blends, rich vocabulary, and rhyming. Here are some lyrics generated by the whole 4th grade class. They are pretty clever - please have a look!

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Fast forward, Mr. Clarke retired a few years later, and decided to make GITC his retirement career! Since that time he has joined our board, and our teaching artist faculty, and is now an exceptionally popular teaching artist in LA. This year he has already been serving in classrooms at San Fernando Elementary and Canterbury Elementary, both during the school day, and in after school Strummers Clubs. This winter will take him to Chase Elementary, Glenwood Elementary, and more. This week he is teaching uke with GITC to middle schoolers during LAUSD's Winter Academy.

I invited Mr. Clarke to share some highlights about what his teachers and students have been learning through music this fall. Here is his report.​

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San Fernando Elementary was established in 1885, making it the oldest school in the San Fernando Valley. It has a dual-language program (English and Spanish) and a high percentage of students identified as English Learners. I’m working with four classrooms - a first grade, a second grade, and two fourth grade rooms. In the primary grade rooms we’ve been working on phonemic awareness, blending, and short vowel sounds (which do not appear in the students’ primary language). The fourth grade teachers identified lack of mathematical foundational skills as an impediment to progress, so we used the anchor song “Down in the Valley” to have students work in groups to write verses based on a provided math fact, and incorporate an important school rule in the verse. Many of the verses they wrote mentioned the importance of regular, punctual attendance - a major LAUSD focus. The teachers and I agree that having students memorize times tables in the context of identifying important rules to follow is a very powerful lesson. A bigger success story, though, is when I walked down the school hallway last week and saw a teacher who had participated last year  in an 8-week Professional Development, playing the ukulele for his Kindergarteners, and having them independently write verses to an anchor song he had taught them.

At Canterbury Elementary/Gifted Magnet, I’m working with a teacher whose practice has been rated as “Highly Effective” on the Teaching and Learning Framework, and every visit is pure joy. Once a week the students put down their Mesoamerican pyramid projects, or whatever they’re currently working on, and pick up their ukuleles. Many of the students come with ukulele experience, having been with a prior teacher already trained in GITC, so they are musically very strong. In addition to learning more complex chords and strumming patterns, when they return from Winter Break they’ll be using their songwriting skills to demonstrate thematic understanding of the book they’re reading - “Adventures of Don Quixote” - a retelling of Don Quixote de La Mancha. This is an ideal application of high-order thinking skills, where students go far beyond recalling basic facts and instead demonstrate their learning in creative and innovative ways.

The ukulele may be a diminutive instrument, but its use as a teaching and learning tool is enormous, as evidenced by the students and educators I have the pleasure to work with."

Thank you, Mr. Clarke for your immeasurable service to GITC in so many roles and seasons of your life as an educator!

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