It’s hard to believe my Schweitzer Fellowship year has come to a close. While I am still working with Susan Bailis for another few weeks, I have effectively completed my service commitment and am now working to tie up loose ends with the project (such as creating a sustainability plan for next year and meeting with site and faculty mentors about my experience).

Looking back, I think that all things considered the project has been successful. I have learned a big lesson about limits, and I understand that I have a point of diminishing returns when I commit to too many projects and activities at one time. That said, I have really enjoyed my work with the residents at Susan Bailis.

I think the best learning experience has been the Friday morning music appreciation and history workshop. I wrote on my last blog about the challenges of preparation with this activity, which has continued to be present for me. At the same time I have clued into a concept introduced to me by Eric Booth in The Music Teaching Artist’s Bible, which I read in the fall semester of 2011, which is that of the entry point. An entry point for a music educator is simply the identification of what excites and interests me about the topics I am presenting. I think I have done this instinctually anyway, but on days when I feel especially engaged with an idea or line of questioning, I get even more positive feedback from the residents.

Further, I feel like this is such an important takeway for me for this project because I feel that the successes I have encountered with this fellowship have given me extra confidence to really share more of myself as a teacher. I feel like I have been a lot more vulnerable and openly curious with this fellowship as well as in my other teaching work, and it seems to have opened up a dialogue between students and myself that wasn’t there before. I’m still working on finding the right balance in certain situations, but regardless that has been a huge learning point for me.

In my final reflections for the Schweitzer Fellowship organization, I also commented on the value of just showing up. Having committed to a significant number of service hours at the beginning of the year, I didn’t have a choice about quitting even when I felt things weren’t going well. I’m glad I just kept showing up  and trying new things until something worked. It made the concept of failure feel less scary. Again I think I gained some confidence in my ability to learn and adjust. I realized I don’t have to know everything, I just need to be open to the learning dialogue that is taking place between myself and my students (or residents, or audience).

Thanks for reading my blog. I hope you found something interesting to take away!

Now that my internship is done, I realize that it is definitely not over.  The work that I have put into improving and expanding my teaching this semester has been deeply beneficial to my students and has been exceptionally invigorating and inspiring to me.

Over the course of the internship, I had to adjust some of my goals to fit the reality of my teaching situation.  While using vocal modeling wasn’t as practical to pursue, I found that using the voice as a resource became an amazingly useful tool, even for students that don’t feel particularly comfortable singing.

By consciously adding new approaches and assessing those approaches, I’ve not only grown as a teacher but feel like my teaching is more grounded in ideals that I believe are important to become a more complete musician.  Now, I have even more strength behind my teaching because of setting specific goals, assessing the impact that my teaching has on my students and creating an environment that encourages feedback and reflection in my students.  By incorporating concepts from the Contemporary Improvisation Department, String Pedagogy and Music-In-Education, I am building on my intuitive teaching experiences with a more informed musical, pedagogical and reflective approach.

I’ve collected surveys from my students regarding the new concepts I’ve introduced during and have collected reflections, videos, observations and documents on the studio transformation process.  You can view it all in my MIE portfolio here.  Take a look and let me know what you think!

My internship is wrapping up and it has been a truly amazing experience! I wanted to transform aspects of my private lesson studio so that it utilizes the new resources that I have as a teacher and expand on the ideals that I believe are important for training students to be more aware and complete musicians (regardless of their level of  ability, experience, and commitment.)
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The Practice Technique Toolbox assignment has been going well and the exercise of articulating what passages are obstacles, how to approach those obstacles and what the results are of using different practice strategies has been eye-opening.  I think it is helpful for my students to have a vehicle to really look at how they practice and to collect data for themselves to see what works and doesn’t.  It seems to be leading my students towards developing the ability to better judge what is accurate in their playing and what isn’t.  It seems like it is encouraging a level of awareness in my students that will be a great resource to them as they develop as musicians.

I’ve been using the triple entry journal format for my students to document their practice technique assignment and reflect on their data.  Below is an example of how I modified the existing MIE TEJ Template to make it represent the questions I was asking my students.

I’ve mostly being making handwritten charts for my students which look a little more like this:

Here is a list of practice techniques that one of my student’s has been using.

This process of documentation and reflection has been the catalyst for many of my students to look at what is/isn’t working when they practice and I’m noticing that they are starting to have questions that are now guiding what and how I am teaching them.  I had a student ask me why they noticed improvement in cleaning up their sound during a passage but still couldn’t consistently play it without hitting neighboring strings.  Rather than telling a student to move their bow away from the fingerboard to stop hitting neighboring strings because it is the “correct” thing to do, I had an opportunity to reinforce a challenging technique for this student as a solution to a problem that they articulated.  I think there is real power in teaching that can provide an answer to a question the student discovers.  My next step with this student would be ask them to find the answer  to these kinds of questions when their cello knowledge is a little more substantial.
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One of my goals was to incorporate Multiple Resources for my students.  Rather than just using the same books/exercise I usually use, I wanted to expand my materials in order to address my students’ needs from many different angles.  I focused on using Viva Vibrato! by G. Fischbach and R. Frost as a supplement to the traditional vibrato exercises that I learned from my teachers.

     The two exercises that I focused on from Viva Vibrato were the “Wave Duet” and the “Chicken Wing Vibrato” exercise.  The  ”Wave Duet” allows the student to focus specifically on the motion of the arm and a consistent and even movement without having to also maintain pitch.  This allows the student to concentrate on the elbow and arm motion of vibrato.  ”The Wave Duet” is also a great assessment exercise.  If a student could do the exercise successfully, I knew that they were ready to focus on other approaches to vibrato.  This is the first time I’ve ever used an exercise as an assessment tool rather than just a teaching tool!

Here is a video of my student, Anya, and I practicing a variation on the “Wave Duet”.

   For students who need more work on developing a good relationship to the general motion of vibrato, I used the “Chicken Wing Vibrato” exercise.  This exercise has students place their fingers on the front of their shoulder and make a vibrato-like motion (a combination of flapping and rotating) with their arm.   This exercise has been exceptionally effective for students new to vibrato.  By combining these exercises with exercises I was previously using I have the ability to better assess my students’ physical intuition
provide them with many different ways to approach learning a sometimes challenging physical concept.
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In order to collect Reflections from my students, I created a survey asking them about what they’ve experienced/noticed with the changes in my approach to teaching.  It has been exciting to get so much feedback and to have reflection be a larger part of my experience as a teacher and as a part of my students’ experience.  I look forward to sharing insights from those surveys in my internship portfolio.
Stay tuned for a link to my portfolio as the semester finishes.

As my internship is coming to a close, I am amazed at how my pedagogical ideas have been expanded these last three months. With my end goal of teaching in an informed, well-rounded method, my internship has opened my eyes to teaching with all aspects of life involved, encouraging the student to connect the dots, seeing how knowledge and skills overlap.

In my last entry, I wrote about how I had adjusted the matrix to introduce singing in my private violin lessons with my four-year-old student. I wrote that he couldn’t figure out how to make different notes with his voice, so all notes, no matter how we thought of them (scale-degree numbers, fingering on his instrument, solfege) was only one note…similar to speech. Well, the patience and persistence was worth the wait! In third to last lesson of the semester, he surprised me by suddenly joining in while I was singing fifths! I was teaching him about the strings on the violin and how we can easily play a G major scale, D major scale, and A major scale (with beginner finger patterns). He then asked why we hadn’t played C major scales as his brother has begun lessons on piano and started out with C major everything. I explained that if we played viola or cello, then we could easily play a C major scale since those instruments have a C string. After singing E, A, D, and G, he joined in, singing C with me perfectly – twice! He was caught into my excitement, so I explained that violin is unique and special since we have the E fifth that the cello and viola don’t have. He stood extra tall when he found out that advantage.

I believe all this happened during our lesson because I brought math into our lesson, taking advantage multiple representations as I’ve been learning to do through Larry Scripp’s Teaching Seminar, identifying with something my little four-year-old loves and does well in at school. He is infatuated with numbers – when his concentration isn’t fully in our lesson, I ask him what time it is on his watch and then (without my help) he quickly figures out how many minutes we have left in our 30-minute lesson. I found out that bringing in the idea of “fifths” captured his excitement with numbers in relation to music. Since then, each lesson he brings up some other kind of interval that he has figured out that week. He figured out an “eighth”…with 3 on the A string while playing an open D string which has immensely improved his intonation. He was excited to learn that he could call it an octave!

By pulling in ideas from different arenas that somehow have been compartmentalized into distinctive subjects, I think I’ve begun to tap into the option of making connections with music to other areas of focus, sparking student’s already formed knowledge. By teaching with multiple representations, I’m beginning to see that the student’s imagination has a broader base to run wild, exploring and creating on it’s on. I hope to continue growing this way of integrated teaching.

We are nearing the end of the year at MusicLaunch. There are many things I could mention here and I will give a more all-encompassing report after the final class.

Today I would like to talk about something very positive! In the past few class meetings, I have finally begun to come closer to my original goals of getting students to use their ears and not rely on the page. Although this has come about in some ways that I didn’t expect, I’m so excited that I can finally report this. When I first began at MusicLaunch, my plan to help students develop their ears had to be shelved for a little bit so that I could help them develop more fundamental skills on their instruments and on playing in time.

About half way through the semester, I periodically asked them to do a simple 4/4 call and response with clapping (while stomping out the 4/4 with their feet). This originally served the purpose of helping their time, but I realize that it helps their ears as well! Also around this time, I was given the opportunity to create a melody with Solfege blocks in our large ensemble and I introduced the students to the song “Lean on Me” by Bill Withers. Finally, last week while I was in charge of running the large groups, I gave students some rhythms to clap that were a little more challenging. This lead to me writing some of these rhythms out on the board, but from there, something else happened: I had them create their own 4/4 rhythms on the board. While this is not directly ear-related, it is still a chance for them to create their own little piece of music, which is a huge win in my book!

I wasn’t immediately able to categorize this stuff as creative success or ear-training success right away, but after thinking about it for a little bit, I definitely see it that way now. Besides giving me some encouragement, this definitely gives me some great ideas for the future.

Stay tuned for a complete report about my MusicLaunch experience in the next few days! It will cover tackling music fundamentals, maximizing productivity, dealing with behavior problems, and keeping students engaged, to name a few topics. Thanks for reading!

Tyler