Sounding the Alarm | Instructional Design

01 — The course

Sounding the Alarm: Music and Social Engagement with the Environment is a Quest 1 Gen-Ed humanities course exploring the essential question, "Who are we in relation to the natural world?" It uses listening as an ethical practice to introduce students to ecomusicology — the study of music's relationship to the environment.

As Teaching Assistant, I was responsible for designing and leading weekly breakout-section activities under primary instructor Dr. Laura Dallman — translating each week's lecture themes into hands-on, learner-centered experiences, and building the assessments that measured them.

02 — My design framework

Objective → Activity → Assessment

For every breakout section I designed, I worked backward from a learning objective, built a hands-on activity to practice it, then chose an assessment method matched to the activity's purpose — complete/incomplete for skill-building rehearsal, rubric-based evaluation for major deliverables.

Design principle

Practice, then apply. Where possible, I sequenced a low-stakes group activity before an independent, graded assignment — modeling a skill together before asking students to demonstrate it alone.

03 — Unit: Soundscapes & Soundwalks

Weeks 5–6 introduced students to "deep listening" and soundwalk theory (Westerkamp, Carras), building toward the course's largest experiential assignment — the Nature Walk. I designed two linked activities to scaffold that outcome.

Activity 1 — Guided practice soundwalk (Sept 26)

Objective

Give students hands-on practice with focused, intentional listening outdoors before attempting the graded Nature Walk independently.

Activity

Small groups walked to different parts of campus to engage in sustained listening and observation, with the TA present to model the practice.

Assessment

Complete/incomplete participation grade — appropriate for a rehearsal activity focused on skill-building, not output quality.

Activity 2 — The Nature Walk assignment (17% of grade)

Students take an independent nature walk or extended observation, then reflect on the sounds they experienced. I designed this assignment with built-in modality choice and quality scaffolding rather than a single rigid format:

Written Paper

500+ words — for strong writers

Video Recording

5+ min — for strong speakers

Audio Recording

5+ min — speaking, no visual

Narrated Slides

5+ min — visuals support speaking

Every format is evaluated against the same criteria — primarily the use of descriptive language to convey the listening experience, not just completion. Before the walk, students receive a prep resource and explicit style guidance (sentence variety, vocabulary range, first- vs. third-person voice), so quality expectations are never left implicit.

Step 1

Group practice

Low-stakes campus soundwalk, participation-graded, TA-modeled.

→

Step 2

Independent application

Multi-modal Nature Walk assignment, rubric-assessed.

04 — Unit: Inter-Species Music Studies

Bird Songs, Calls & Composition

Week 12 paired readings on birdsong and bioacoustics with a hands-on breakout activity: groups recorded a bird call with Merlin Bird ID, then used AI music generation (Suno) to extend it — requiring careful, deliberate prompt language to shape the result within a 120-character limit.

1Record a bird call (Merlin Bird ID)

2Upload & extend (Suno, instrumental)

3Write a style prompt (120-char limit)

4Iterate & select the best result

5Submit & document the exact prompt used

Why this design choice mattered

Requiring the exact prompt text as part of the submission built in reflection: students had to notice how their word choice shaped the machine-generated output, not just produce a track. That single design decision is also what made the activity usable as research data later on.

05 — Evaluation & improvement

Watching groups work through the bird song activity in real time, a pattern emerged: students had clear creative intent but struggled to translate it into effective, specific prompt language. Rather than leave that as an anecdotal impression, I treated it as a design question — analyzing all 21 group submissions against a five-dimension coding schema to find exactly where the language broke down.

That analysis directly informed resong, a prompt-scaffolding tool I designed and built to close the gap — grounded in real student data rather than assumption.

Full research & design case study

The complete data analysis, three user archetypes that emerged from the coding, and the finding-by-finding design response are documented in the resong case study. View the resong case study →

06 — Reflection

Designing this course taught me that good instructional design is mostly a sequencing problem: deciding what students should practice together before they're asked to do it alone, and building enough choice into an assignment that format never gets in the way of demonstrating real understanding.

It also taught me that evaluation shouldn't stop at "did the activity work" — the bird song assignment worked exactly as designed, and that success is what surfaced a more specific, addressable gap. Treating that gap as data rather than a shrug is what turned one classroom activity into a second, evidence-based design project.

What I'd apply next

In a training or workplace-learning context, I'd bring the same instinct: build in low-stakes practice before high-stakes assessment, design for more than one way to demonstrate a skill, and treat learner performance data as an ongoing input to the next design cycle rather than a one-time grade.