what would you teach without curriculum? and... how would you assess their learning?

If you were not limited by the demands of the national/regional curriculum, what would you say is the most important thing you would teach your students about your subject (in a CLIL context)? How would you assess their learning?

If I had the opportunity to do my classes without any curriculum the most important thing to teach for me it would be the importance of communication through language and through music as well.

The thing is that if we use CLIL in classes we need to evidence the importance of the communication and what useful it is for the society. In fact nowadays we live in a large network of relations between countries and we need to know different ways of communication so in my case, in a music class, I would try to teach English and music as a useful ways of communication.

Another reason why I would teach communication use as the most important thing to my pupils is because in Spain we hardly ever have English in our normal life and we forget what the true reason is when someone learn a foreign language. In my opinion, if we don’t let them see the usefulness of the language they are not going to learn a language as they should.

The same happens to music, we all think that we like music but most of the time we don’t really realize about what is music for and actually we need to know that music is a language as English or Spanish and we need to see it and use it as what it is: an instrument to communicate something (as English).

About how to assess their learning I would try to create real communicative situations and record them and I will do it with instruments and English, for example doing an instrumental improvisation where someone is the director and he or she tell them different rules in English to change the bit and then we would do a reflection in group.

In this example activity I would assess the utility of both (English and music) because they are saying something with the instrument and also communicating with the director and we can create a rubric and do a portfolio to promote self assessment.