Hi blog readers! The video below documents some activities and conversations in the 2/3/10 meeting ‘Improvisation in Music Education,” and a clip from a lesson I taught on 2/4/10. I’ve had a lot of fun applying these ideas to my teaching and my music this past week! Enjoy the video by clicking on the link below.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve posted any new reflections or videos about our violin program… but not to worry, many new developments have occurred, and we have just been a little backlogged with all the new material to report. Since the new year began, we have made several improvements to our weekly violin sessions at Atrium.
We are now meeting in smaller sections of 30 minutes per session; about 4-6 students per section rather than 8-10. This improves each class because we are able to give each student more individual attention, and the students receive more teaching time per capita. It also makes our collaborative learning activities more manageable.
Each week we are now ‘theme-ing’ our classes using a Word of the Week. The idea came because we wanted to encapsulate each week’s lesson with one word, giving students the ability to define those words experientially.
This week’s word is “deliberately,” which Tyler defined as “doing something with purpose,” and how Beatrice defined as “being careful.” In violin class, this means that everything we do is decisive and with purposeful intent. When putting our bows on the string and preparing to play, we do so with exemplary posture (bunny ears holding the ‘carrot’, feet in the right position, etc.) and without making a single sound.
Our continued emphasis on reflection has resulted in multiple venues and opportunities for students to reflect. In addition to informal verbal reflection throughout the class session, we challenge students to express themselves in written and artistic forms. As described in these two previous blog posts (11/11/09 and 11/3/09), our unit and lesson plans are organized around the ‘Five Learning Processes’ framework (a.k.a. LQCPR—Listen, Question, Create, Perform, and Reflect). Though most of our previous written reflections have fallen into the last category, we are now starting to propagate the other sections too. In fact, we filed this week’s reflection activity under the Questions & Explorations section in student portfolios because of the explorative questions it poses:
We have also started building time for our written reflection activities into our sessions. Part of this is more possible because our classes are now being taught in the Library. There’s an alcove that we use for the instructional portions of class, and then the students move to a large study table to write their reflections.
In addition to using animals (zoo, monkey, buffalo, alligator) and Indian rhythms (cha, taki, gamela, takidimi), violin students are finding connections between Violin students are using their school project heroes (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, etc.) to explore the connection between word prosody and rhythms. More on this to come.
Hi! My name is Justin Stanley, and while I am not new to the MIE at NEC News Blog, I am beginning a new role. As a documentation specialist, I plan to inquire into my own persona as an artist-teacher-scholar and what role documentation has in developing persona.
I want to see how documentation can affect me as artist (by carefully examining my practice and my lessons for French horn), a teacher (through examination of my work at Josiah Quincy Upper School), and as a scholar (through documentation of the Teaching Seminar and Warren Sender’s Improvisation in Music Education) as I build my portfolio.
The Music-in-Education Teaching Seminar at NEC, taught by Dr. Larry Scripp, met for the first time last Tuesday. The class is a little smaller this year than the first time I took the class in the spring of 09. Last year, the class seemed like a continuation of Intro to Music-in-Education, a class offered in the Fall by Professor Scripp. This time around, however, only two of the members of the Teaching Seminar – myself included – were members of the Intro class. Therefore, I feel like I saw the differences in the curriculum more clearly right from the start.
We spent most of the class talking, in one way or another, about ourselves as artists. Larry posed this simple question to all of us: “What is your persona as an artist?” Responses were surprisingly varied, ranging from being a vessel for a composer or character in performance to breaking down barriers in various cultural settings. One student found that his role as an artist changes from performing to composing to teaching. Later, a student that assists Professor Scripp in teaching his graduate solfége class explained his role and the responsibilities that come with that role as a teaching assistant. The following video presents parts of these discussions.
I predict that we’ll be diving into the artist-teacher-scholar framework very soon in this class, discussing our readings, teaching, and plans for teaching. This class brought up some interesting ideas for me. As a documentation specialist, I try to keep a very analytical eye toward what’s going on. As a horn player, I look for simplicity. As an artist, I try to constantly expand my horizons. As a teacher, I look to help others expand their horizons or develop their own personas. I wonder how valuable it is to be able to separate and put together one’s own roles in life. This is a topic I look forward to exploring as the semester continues.
This was a good day. Everything went as smoothly as planned (thanks to Beatrice who was a great model in the dress rehearsal) and there were many great moments which I will share and reflect on.
I don’t know if it’s because of the holiday spirit or the emotions that come with the “end of the year,” but I am truly grateful for each person on our Music Plus Music Integration Team at Atrium: Beatrice, Randy, Michael, Linda, Susan, and Larry. When we arrived at Atrium in the morning, I was relieved to find all the student violins lined up in order. This made my job easier to tune and put the shoulder sponges on each of them, which did take about 20 minutes. Randy worked on the PA system and setting up the two video cameras, one floor and one roaming. Michael made sure the each child has a foot chart and place on the risers.
After everything was all set up, Randy asked Larry and I to say a few words on video, in anticipation of the event. We had a good time, doing different takes and speaking from different angles. We even got to interview a violin parent who was nervous but super excited about the performance.
The whole Atrium Winter Solstice Assembly program opened up with the Explorers class, and I could tell that they were really excited as we stood in line to enter the Hall. But when they got to their violins, they immediately sat down (they still need to work on their listening skills as we told them to stay standing). After a few minutes, they held their violins in rest position and started filing on the platforms. I was a little nervous for them because they had no idea was going to happen in the next few minutes. Larry, Randy, and I had made some changes to our performance because we wanted to show the PROCESS of what we are going to do. So Larry opened with vocal solfege warmup with scales and short call and response segments. The kids responded and sang very well (they have such sweet soft voices!) and to my surprise and delight, Larry took the assessment one step further: instead of having them imitate what he sang, he pointed to syllables on the matrix and they sang the melody back. Amazing. Next, I did my segment with the rhythm cups and explained to the parents the purpose of this. The culmination activity was to sing Re and La in different rhythms shown by the cups along with a recording of Pachelbel’s canon. It was a great 3 minute show and we ended with the parents singing along to a Re scale and ending with a ringing “Cha….” I loved their finishing choreography!
I think some cool ideas to expand on this would be to split the group into teams and have each one sing a different rhythm that ties in with the symmetry unit. Larry also suggested having them pluck Re-La but sing the scale to Pachelbel. I want them to march so their inner rhythm is strong. So many things to work on and so very exciting! Next year we will definitely tackle the bows.
This will be a compilation video made by Randy this week which will summarize and zoom in on the key points of the violin pilot program. I think it was a big hit with the school, teachers, and parents. We look forward to more violin-ing next year!
Beatrice was back and we reviewed everything we knew from violin posture to lion hold to singing the matrix up and down. We
also learned that the unit theme for math class was symmetry and asymmetry, and tried to integrate that idea into our violin lesson. First we discussed all the visual aspects of the violin — which parts were symmetrical and which weren’t? Then we talked about our feet and violin holding posture and what aspects of those are symmetrical or not. These kids were quick to observe the details and soon we learned that most things related to the violin are symmetrical.
Following the symmetrical theme, we introduced the idea of a symmetrical melody — a melody that sounds the same when sung both forwards and backwards. For homework we asked each student to create their own symmetrical and asymmetrical composition, which will be sung in class next Friday! Maybe all of them will end up on the hallway walls in school! It’s so exciting….
I asked the 7th graders to bring their interesting sounds again this week. We arranged the chairs in a circle and organized ourselves so that everyone with similar sounds was sitting together.
Without a clear idea of what was going to come of our improvisation, we began by doing an inventory of the sounds we had in the group and brainstormed ideas of what they might represent in a plot-based improvisation. With some clicking, lots of key rings, and the help of voices, we came up with a composition telling the story of a 20-car pile-up on a busy highway.
The high schoolers had a great time with the shapes game the 8th graders did last week. Speaking of the 8th graders, they began small group compositions. I gave each group the following paper:
Your group’s composition should include:
They got to work right away (something that usually takes a significant amount of coercion) and both their teacher and I were thrilled by their enthusiasm with the project. As usual, the bell rang too soon, so they’ll continue their work next week until they’re ready to perform.
This week, since Beatrice was out of town, Randy and I had the pleasure of engaging the kids in some eurythmic activities we think will help in their ensemble playing. We reviewed them on bunny ear bow holds, violin posture, and added a reflective discussion on their practicing over the past week. Some of my favorite comments were:
I really enjoyed the “crazy practice” because I could do something the wrong way and then fix it.
I liked doing the animal rhythms and marching the beat. It was fun.
We then asked them if they had any specific questions, and it was obvious that they had answers to everything! These kids are so smart! Next we had them talking about their drawings they made the week before about how playing the violin makes them feel. One boy said: “Playing the violin is like being sucked into a black hole. The black hole is actually music and whenever I play music, I feel like it’s powerful.” Wow, that’s all I have to say to that.
I know little kids love to do things with their bodies so we came up with the idea of marching the beat or pulse. We made sure to start at a slow tempo (speed) so that when the rhythms got more complicated, it was slow enough to understand and perform them. We mostly used animal rhythms: zoo, monkey, and alligator, and interchanged them with the African/Indian system: cha, taki, takadimi. The hardest part was marching the beat and clapping or singing the animal rhythm on top of the marching. It was tested their coordination skills but incorporating their bodies at the same time.
