North Primary teachers collaborate for Black History Month lessons

It all started with a conversation in the hallway, said Joe Scheller, a music teacher at North Primary School in the Kiski Area School District.

Shelley O’Malley and Rochelle Bires, both fourth-grade teachers, were struggling to engage their students in their lessons on the poetry of Langston Hughes, which they were teaching in celebration of Black History Month. They were annotating and trying to analyze each stanza and line, but it wasn’t clicking with the students.

“Kids just don’t have a context for the kind of music that influenced that,” Scheller said.

He said they don’t know about scat and jazz music in New Orleans, Chicago and St. Louis. They have no way of grasping the culture of New York City’s Harlem neighborhood where Hughes composed his writing.

The conversation led to a collaboration among the entire fourth grade, working with Scheller to teach students about the music of the era and tie it into their lessons about civil rights.

Throughout the month of February, after studying the poetry with their teachers, students would visit music class to learn about jazz in the 1950s and ’60s.

“One of the big parts was talking about jazz as being central to the identity of the civil rights movement and an identifying piece of culture,” Scheller said.

In music class, Scheller had students perform stanzas of poetry to a drum beat, as spoken word, the way they were originally written. It helped them connect the music lesson to what they’re learning in English language lessons, he said.

“That is a very difficult text for a 9- or 10-year-old to understand,” Bires said. “The language, the way the stanzas are set up, the language, the verbage. Without Mr. Scheller, I don’t think they would have truly understood what the words meant.”

Teachers also talked extensively about Martin Luther King Jr., reading “My Brother Martin” by Christine King Farris, sister to the civil rights leader. Bires said students watched video of King’s speeches. It helped them understand the passion behind his words and reflect on their own dreams and goals to see the performance firsthand, she said.

Teachers at North Primary and other schools in the Kiski Area district make it a point to collaborate across subject matter, O’Malley said. Teachers meet every morning to design lessons and combine resources.

“When my kids come back from music class, they’re just so excited that they had learned something in reading class that had just continued in music,” O’Malley said. “They just thought it was really neat that their teachers were trying to work together.”

Scheller said the collaboration is especially important when it comes to commemorating large-scale events like Black History Month.

“Where we live and teach, there’s not really access to this kind of cultural context for our students,” Scheller said. “We can’t go to Harlem or New Orleans. The civil rights movement is really disconnected from their day-to-day experiences. And to make it relevant and real, that really gives them an insight to it that is maybe lasting and deeper.”