NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Jenny Giardina, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here. 

My generation has been part of the blog explosion, as I like to say.  After being a part of the common social networking sites (names I’m sure I don’t need to list) I am very pleased to now be a part of New England Conservatory’s MIE NewsBlog.  I recently entered into an MIE Guided Internship as a Documentation Specialist and will be providing updates and peeks into the learning going on in Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course.

So far we’ve done a great deal of studying the brain from a biologists viewpoint: the anatomy, neuronal activity, and the physicality of a learning brain.  With the aid of our current text, A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey, M.D, we are being encouraged to delve into our personal questions and curiosities regarding the learning process as relates to the brain, as well as the effects of music on the brain.

Along with this focus we’ve been given the question “what was my best learning experience and why?”  The more we work with this question and our personal answers the more I’m sure that all teachers need to think about personal experiences and be aware of all the possible approaches that could help a person learn in a more complete way.  We’ve all heard the old adage, “Some people learn best by reading, others by listening, and still others by seeing someone do it.”  We’re finding through our experiences in class, our reading and classmate comments that these standard approaches are only addressing the tip of the iceberg. 

My BEST Learning Experience

I spent a semester teaching in a private school last year.  I was the first music teacher they had and the teachers, parents, and most importantly students loved me.  I taught music once a week to all the students one grade at a time.  Not only was this the most rewarding experience of my life, but the most difficult. Throughout the semester I learned more than I ever thought I would from the preschoolers alone.  The challenge was working with such a wide range of age groups—Pre-K through 6th grade.  The most exciting moment was when I had the Kindergartners clapping rhythms from the board.  I first used circles to indicate a clap, and vertical lines for silence.  After a few times through I replaced the symbols with quarter notes and rests.  They couldn’t wait for it to be their turn to come up and put the notes and rests in the order of their choice.  Through this process I found that not only can the youngest students follow what I teach the oldest, but they are more involved, active, excited, and quick to learn the skill.  Looking back now and thinking about what I learned in music at that age I’m almost sure that the music curriculums are nowhere close to the level they can and should be.  These 5 year olds need more.  Much more.

As the Documentation Specialist for my current MIE class I’ve outlined some questions to focus on:

Goals for the Class

• To spark an interest in the class to uncover and experience as much as they possibly can to be part of the final product.
•  To carefully document accurately and thoroughly so that no one is cheated of the priceless opinions and comments of the teacher, students, and authors.
•  To collect and interpret these findings by the end of each week in a way that is easily transferable both in format and language to the CMIE NewsBlog.
•  To encourage my classmates to read and blog on the NewsBlog, both to experience what is being said about their class and to comment themselves.

Personal Goals for the Future

I’ve recently begun research into Music Therapy and find that every page I read convinces me more that I should pursue this field as a career.  My personal goal through this internship is to uncover more information regarding the techniques of this field.  I also hope to answer a few more specific questions:

• What are the proven methods for using music to positively influence the brain with learning disabilities, dementia, or other abnormalities?
• In this relatively new field, what are some of the methods still in the research stage not yet commonly practiced?
• What are the physical attributes of a brain that functions differently than my own?  
• How do these characteristics change during/after musical experiences (taking note of specifics)?
• With the help of my classmates’ individual curiosities, what discoveries will prove to be the most useful to my own inquiries and how can I apply them immediately?

I will be posting weekly with updates of class activities, discoveries and even pictures and hope you will check back to follow our progress. 

Your comments are encouraged, especially those about your favorite learning experience as they can only help us in our learning process.

| This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Guided Internships, MIE 526: Music, Brain Dev. & Learning, Reports from Documentation Specialists. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.