NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the seventh of a series written by CMIE Research Fellow Anthony Green, as part of the documentation for Green’s CMIE Research Internship. See other posts in this series here.  

Throughout this process of observing the Solfege for Singers class at New England Conservatory, it has become clear that solfege is simply not just a way for people to sight-sing melodies without words. Solfege transcends many musical processes in that it can be applied to other musical and non-musical aspects of one’s life. Musically, it can be used to solidify pitch relationships, develop a sense of perfect pitch, analyze music in a deep, clear fashion, sharpen intonation either in the voice or on instruments where applicable, fortify one’s music theory skills, provide a foundation in score reading, and much more that I am probably forgetting or have mentioned in previous blogs. Outside of music, it can enhance one’s articulation and pronunciation, enhance one’s development of pattern recognition, quicken translation processes if applicable, sharpen internalization skills, and much more that I am most likely forgetting or have mentioned in previous blogs.

Another non-musical element of solfege that perhaps is overlooked by most students is how solfege can be used to build one’s musical confidence, which will ultimately result in the confidence building of other elements in one’s life. Musical confidence is definitely necessary in every aspect of a musician’s life. When performing, if not confident above everything else, then uncertainty will lead to mistakes. As a composer, if one is not confident about the composed material, then that discomfort will show in the design of the piece, and will most likely result in a poor design and a minimal expression of what the composer originally intended. Lack of confidence as a conductor can ruin the sense of ensemble amongst a group, and create a sense of anxiety that will ultimately lead to a poor performance. In essence, confidence is a crucial element to being a musician.

With solfege, if studied enough, a student gains a sense of pitch confidence. When sight-singing with a group of people – perhaps a motet or a Bach chorale – the sense of pitch confidence leads to a sense of being a crucial, important element of a larger community. This feeling of being needed can easily translate into a desire to be confident in other aspects of life. But it also allows the singer to listen to others, discover relationships within the piece being sight-read, tune to other pitches, work together as a group, and listen to the music as MUSIC! With this idea in mind, extreme concentration while sight-singing in fact is a sign of pitch unconfidence. Extreme concentration leads to a singer not listening to anyone else but him or herself, not tuning to others, and only hearing one part of the music. Yes, concentration is a good thing, but the confidence must be had initially in order for the correct kind of concentration to be had.

The confidence gained from solfege also translates into the confidence needed as a teacher. In the final projects of the class, the students had to choose works from their repertoire or other sources to teach to the class. In doing so, the student had to seriously think about how to teach the musical material to the class using solfege. What methods should be used? What should be worked on first? How does one know when to put the whole piece together? What is the analysis of the piece, and how can that be communicated to the students? Where can contextual conducting be applied in the music? These and more questions should have been examined by the students before presenting their final projects.

While most of these questions transcend the basic idea of solfege, the underlying reason for these questions comes from solfege. If adequately thought out, answering these questions builds an extreme amount of confidence, enough to stand up in front of your classmates and teach them what you have discovered. These projects are directly congruent to matters of confidence in performance, composing, and definitely conducting, and ultimately in job interviews, public speaking, and teaching. Out of this list, one element is bound to relate to one’s own personal goals. But one must ask the question for him or herself: how can I use solfege to gain confidence? In answering the question, one must study solfege in the way that Scripp suggests, and perhaps even develop methods of teaching for oneself based on personal knowledge of what works and what does not.

Professor Scripp has briefly gone over this use of solfege with his students, and articulated it to me in an interview. Throughout the semester, there were students who did have a drastic increase of confidence in solfege ability, and it was pleasant to observe life changing for the better in this fashion.

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the fourth of a series written by CMIE Research Fellow Anthony Green, as part of the documentation for Green’s CMIE Research Internship. See other posts in this series here.

NEC is constantly blessed to have such people of note come visit our school as Renée Fleming, Fred Firth, and Steve Reich. Recently, Gustavo Dudamel was one of the esteemed guest, and he presented information about El Sistema, the youth orchestra in Venezuela that has been changing lives and gaining worldwide recognition. The presentation was so highly regarded by Professor Scripp that he cancelled class in order to allow his students to attend the seminars and the performances. More teachers at NEC should adopt such a caring attitude towards their students when such guests arrive. 

In a class prior to his arrival, Professor Scripp presented an anecdote to the class about when he and one of his former students met Gustavo Dudamel. According to the professor, his student was so enthusiastic about solfege that he still remembered (and this is the key word to this whole anecdote) some of the exercises that he worked on with Scripp. I do not remember if Scripp also solfeged for Dudamel, but the highlight of the anecdote is when Dudamel himself waxes poetically about solfege and orally presents his own results of diligent study to his adoring fans: he starts to solfege a fast movement from a Tchaikovsky symphony (I believe it is number 4, the scherzo movement). Amazingly, his syllables were perfect, his pitch was also to be admired – it was obvious that he was a successful student of solfege, and that this technique has shaped his development as a musician.

Gustavo Dudamel story - audio

But something about this charming monologue left a sour taste in my mouth. I had never thought about the real difference between sight-singing and solfege until now. In my undergrad at Boston University, I learned solfege in a “stight-singing” course. We were expected, more or less, to sight-sing. With this in mind, it was strange that Professor Scripp’s former student had learned some of these exercises so well that he remembered them after being away from them for quite a while. I felt the same about Dudamel’s breathtaking impromptu performance. Obviously, these pieces were not sight-read. They were memorized.

It brings up two very important questions pertinent to this course:

Before delving into these issues more, in that very same class, the students were going over an exercise that contained a quick passage: mi! mi-re-do-si-la-do-si-la-mi! re! do-mi-do-la-mi - - mi - - la! By the end of the class, I heard the melody so much that I could sing it without ever having seen the notated music. I cannot even mention where the exercise is from and who composed it! This experience is akin to listening to a snippet of a pop-song on someone else’s iPod, and remembering it because the snippet contained one motive repeated many times. I raised the issue in class; if I remembered this and executed the exercise as well as the students in class, yet I did not see the music at all, then what method of teaching is more important? Furthermore, if the only goal desired in the end is to be able to execute the exercise, then what should stop a student from simply applying pure memorization to the exercises, thus inhibiting sight-singing ability?

Additionally, other comments were made about velocity. One of the students expressed concerns about not being able to solfege a certain group of syllables fast enough. Professor Scripp then proceeded to teach the students how to practice learning how to increase solfege velocity. His method, which is based on grouping and specific syllable emphasis, is a method of practice that corroborates directly with the process of memorization. While the technique is successful, the process of how to instantly recognize groups while sight-singing was never once even mentioned, yet alone taught.

When I brought up such concerns, Scripp gave me an answer quickly: this is a way of involving the students in the language of solfege.

Such an answer is great. I strongly feel that learning solfege is similar to learning a new language. The difference between learning a new language and learning solfege, however, is that no one asks you to read in your new language as fast as you can (although, such exercises should be done, as it would greatly improve conversation skills). Furthermore, it is rare to be asked to communicate in solfege, although Professor Scripp did make the students improvise musical questions and answers in solfege. More of these exercises could have been mandatory, however the fault of these exercises lies within the ability (or lack thereof) of the student to improvise a melody.

Other ways of exposing solfege as a language to students is to force the students to sing scales and arpeggios in solfege at the beginning of each class. Such a traditionally boring approach was hinted at, and I am sure that Scripp strongly advocated such exercises to be done daily by the students on their own. Additionally, the students were advised to create “themes” in each key (see the November 20^th blog “Near-perfect pitch” for details). Another process may be to sing a snippet of one’s favorite pop-song and transpose it to each key, and in the opposite mode (major goes to minor, and vice versa). Modal shifts were rare in this class (but they were done!).

So, what role does sight-singing play in this class? A LARGE ONE! Many classes throughout the semester were sight-singing classes. The students were asked to bring in works and “teach” them to the class using solfege. Often, Professor Scripp would hold classes of reading Bach Chorales, Palestrina, Victoria, and more. The students were exposed greatly to sight-singing. Not officially having to take the final examination or to put together a portfolio, I do wonder what the faculty expects from the students in this class outside of what was made clear.

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: This post is the third of a series written by CMIE Research Fellow Anthony Green, as part of the documentation for Green’s CMIE Research Internship. See other posts in this series here.

It is truly extraordinary how conducting encompasses a vast range of approaches, techniques, and styles not only from what certain musics and instrumentations need and do not need, but also from people’s personal preferences, interpretations, and biases. For example, a conductor should not approach orchestral conducting in the same way one approaches choral conducting or big band conducting. Because of the different instrumentations and the needs that these ensembles imply, one will usually find different conducting courses for these ensembles (Intro to Orchestral Conducting, Wind Ensemble Conducting Techniques, Choral Conducting II: emphasizing the ictus, etc…) Furthermore, one person’s style of conducting a Beethoven symphony can completely differ from another’s. This is one good reason why there is not one definitive recording of each symphony. In my opinion (as well as others), the ensemble is the conductor’s instrument.

But can the same be said about contextual conducting as it is used with solfege? As stated in a previous post, contextual conducting is a method in which the conductor chooses hand gestures and specific subdivisions that best represent the music. To further elaborate on this idea, contextual conducting prompts the “energy” of subdivisions (energy is a term of Professor Scripp). For example, if one is conducting a sight-singing exercise in a 3/4 time signature, and encounters a beat one containing a dotted-eighth rest and a sixteenth note, if the conducting before this measure only required a normal pattern of quarter notes, then the pattern will change to include the eighth-note subdivision for the beat one of this particular measure. Additionally, whenever the music implies a need for a foundation from which a new energy should spring, one should change the pattern to reflect this energy. In essence, the conducting pattern changes to reflect the diverse contexts that the music implies. Hence, contextual conducting.

Professor Scripp emphasizes the importance of not only conducting while sight-singing, but also utilizing contextual conducting to further understand the placement of notes that may be slightly irregular (quick notes coming from a tie, syncopated, etc…). Also partly acting as a student, I have had the opportunity to try out the methods that Professor Scripp advocates and uses himself. Of course he has had much more experience than his students as he has been working in this realm for a while. He also teaches solfege, which is a great way of strengthening any knowledge that you already posses. I am amazed at his use of contextual conducting because, after trying it, I realize how difficult it is! It is hard enough to conduct in regular patterns and sight-sing simultaneously, but applying the changing patterns of contextual conducting along with sight-singing is a circus act to me!

For the sake of establishing a better context, most Americans do not grow up with solfege syllables as notes, and when Americans do, they usually learn a moveable-do system with “ti” instead of “si” for the note B. Therefore, when solfege is studied in American institutions, not only are the students required to learn a most-likely unfamiliar system, but also they are expected to become fluid and adept in this system while conducting. To perform an adequate sight-singing session, the student’s mind is required to sing with good pitch (which is rather difficult if you are not a singer, and do not have a good vocal range, and do not have good vocal technique), sing with correct syllables (which becomes tricky with key modulations, accidentals, transpositions, unfamiliar clefs, and of course quick notes), sing with correct rhythm, and conduct at the same time. The mind must be applied to four different processes simultaneously! Without contextual conducting, this process is hard enough. The idea behind conducting is that eventually one is supposed to know the patterns well enough to not think about them. The pattern serves as a metronome. However, when contextual conducting is applied, then the conducting and the rhythmic element of the sight-singing should become one entity.

What happens for me, however, is that I cannot apply all four elements simultaneously – pitch, syllables, and rhythm while singing, along with contextual conducting. It is difficult for me sometimes to concentrate on the syllables alone, let alone concentrating on the additional elements. Before continuing, I must admit that I do not actively practice these techniques. While I participate in the classes, I am officially not a student of this class, and am not required to keep a journal, take a final exam, practice the exercises, sing in class, and do other student tasks. Therefore, from my perspective, it is difficult for me to see how contextual conducting aids in the sight-singing process.

Sight-singing, by definition, is something that should not be “practiced” per se. Sight-singing is like sight-reading; the musician should be able to more or less reproduce certain notated musical ideas instantaneously. Like anything, sight-singing, as well as sight-reading, should be developed via hard work and study. However, the main goal should be to see a piece of music and play or sing it, nothing more, nothing less. Working on this goal leads to forward-motion on the paths towards other goals as well. But working on sight-singing should mean that the student wants to become better at instantaneous music production on his or her main instrument.

The added element of contextual conducting creates uncertainties for me. Firstly, in class, Professor Scripp has mentioned that there are different ways to execute contextual conducting. The method is not standardized, which creates one element of confusion. Secondly, even after practicing the contextual conducting, most of the students in the class still have not fully understood this concept. Thirdly, the students in this class practice their exercises to the point where their “sight-singing” coupled with contextual conducting is at a high-level. However, how much is memory involved in these “sight-singing” performances? Can the student produce an equally great performance of a difficult “sight-singing” passage without practicing it? Most of these concerns will be examined deeper in other blogs.

On the other hand, almost everything in music is possible if practiced long enough and correctly. Contextual conducting solidifies rhythm by placing difficult rhythms in an easier context. Imagine a piece of graphing paper with a complex line running horizontally across. The smaller the boxes are on the graph paper, the less complex the line becomes. Contextual conducting is a musical way of reducing the “size of the boxes.” Furthermore, contextual conducting strengthens normal conducting by adding an extra-musical element to an otherwise repetitious, emotionless pattern-beating routine. When Professor Scripp demonstrates his understanding and application of contextual conducting, he shows the students variations on how the different “energies” can be represented in the pattern. He also shows how they can be represented in other ways which corroborate with the expressive elements of music in general (for example, a breath, the widening of the eye, a sigh, a twist of the hand, etc…) The students consequently improve as singers, sight-singers, and conductors in the end; they improve as all-around musicians.

Another wonderful element to contextual conducting, which has not been examined at length in the classes that I have observed, is it can be used to change one’s rhythmic perception. For example, if difficult rhythms of a sight-singing exercise are mostly found in the second half of the measure, assuming the exercise is in 4/4, then the student may find it easier to imagine the exercise in a combined meter of 2/4 plus 1/4 plus 1/4. This altered rhythmic perception not only makes the contextual conducting easier, but it does not change the result for the listener. In fact, it will strengthen the accuracy of rhythm, and ultimately the execution of the exercise. Such a skill is just another version of reducing the “size of the boxes”, and it can be applied to any piece of music. This skill will prove helpful for vocalists singing Crumb, Berg, Ligeti, for pianists playing Carter, Boulez, Stockhausen, Ives, Nancarrow, and for any other musician performing works with complex rhythmic elements that are not found in most music before the 20^th century.

In the end, what can be done about contextual conducting? Standardize it and teach it one way? This will not prove useful. Conducting itself is not standardized, so contextual conducting cannot be either. Completely eliminate it from the curriculum? That would prove detrimental to the sight-singing program at New England Conservatory, to Professor Scripp’s work (as well as other professors), and the students who have adopted this technique into their practice. Perhaps contextual conducting should be taught in a manner that provides students with an option to use it. Therefore, the student will gain what the student can gain from it without having it affect his or her grade if this technique is not fully internalized.

While helping New England Conservatory’s Music-in-Education students to prepare and propose Guided Internships, I have begun to realize the extent of complexity —but also, opportunity— involved in teacher education and the creation of teaching artists programs that serve schools and other learning communities. As MIE Program Coordinator, I am faced with the challenge of ensuring that student-proposed Guided Internships be productive experiences for both the interns involved (usually as teaching artists) and for the host organization (i.e, a community program or school) they are conducting their internship at.

Students who propose internship ideas come with a wide variety of prior teaching experiences, and the goals/expectations they set for their internships vary just as much. Most students, even freshmen, have some cursory teaching experience from high school; for example, being a mentor for younger high school peers. Others have already taught college-level courses, led summer programs, or consider themselves lifelong teachers. The MIE Guided Internship Program is designed, however, as a set of individualized/independent projects, and it is usually the approach to pre-planning and documenting the internship (and not the actual teaching component) that poses the most challenges. It is during these phases (internship pre-planning and documentation) that Guided Interns receive hefty doses of mentorship from MIE faculty and MIE Research Center staff.

To what extent can a research center, like the MIE Research Center, play in the planning of guided internships?

Respected educational policy researcher and teacher education advocate Gail Burnaford, of Florida Atlantic University (and formerly, Northwestern University), suggests that by taking a stance in “teacher action research,” teachers can reach new levels of understanding student learning, as well as reform their own understandings of personal learning processes. [Note: Incidentally, I’ve found Burnaford’s article to be very useful, and refer to it often, throughout my own work.] Burnaford writes,

Professional development [Guided Internships] that assumes an action research stance . . . means taking small slices of music, small slices of classroom episodes or video vignettes, and with teachers and artists, asking, ‘What’s going on here? What is happening? What do we see?’ The process involves interviewing children and young people about the experience . . . Developing research questions that are valuable to both teachers and artists can promote dialogue and enrich the actual teaching that occurs when artists visit classrooms.

One of the initial steps we encourage students to take, when planning their Guided Internships, is the formulation of overarching inquiry or research questions. Even questions that seem simple at first (i.e., “What’s going on here? What do we see?”) may actually require quite a bit of planning to answer thoughtfully. Because the answers to these questions, and the questions themselves, are at the forefront of determining what kinds of artifacts are collected for the intern’s portfolio, it is important for interns to be very thorough as they plan the collection of said documentation.

Burnaford outlines some of the more common approaches to documentation:

The methods of teacher action research provide a number of ways to do this: collecting field notes, looking at video, doing a lot of listening to recordings—not of performances, but of student thinking, of children talking with each other about their art. These reflective methods (Wolf & Pistone, 1991) are intended to improve children’s performance and achievement; they are valuable as tools to contribute to evaluation of arts initiatives; they are also effective approaches to professional development for adults in schools.

Some interns, but not all, are able to see the immediate value of having these various artifact types in their internship portfolios, and are able to structure them into their lessons; for example, through class assignments, private lessons, conversations with mentor teachers or school/community center administrators, personal reflections, and MIE seminar work. For other interns (such as those less familiar with the portfolio process, or with less teaching experience), I direct them to the following passage from Burnaford’s article:

Gardner’s four roles for students who are engaged in the arts (Gardner, 1973) are useful frameworks for professional development of teaching artists, music teachers, and classroom teachers. The four roles, composer, audience member, critic, and performer give artists and teachers a frame or empty outline to use in order to ask the inquiry questions, ‘Why is the child doing this? What is she learning? What is he expressing? What did I as the teacher or artist do to help? What can I be doing next?’ . . . Teacher learning is the way in to student learning; teachers need to experience all four of those roles too.

I find Burnaford’s reminder (that Gardner’s four roles are also applicable to professional artists and educators) to be a refreshing and welcoming statement germane to the emergent workforce of artist-teacher-scholars: that the personae that result from the triangulation of Artistry, Teaching, and Scholarship truly incorporate all four of Gardner’s roles.

-Randy

Quotations used in this post are from “Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Higher Education in Professional Development with Arts Partnerships,” written by Gail Burnaford for the Journal for Learning Through Music (Summer 2003). Guided interns of all experience levels can benefit from readings found in the Journal for Music-in-Education and its previous incarnation, the Journal for Learning Through Music. Both journals are available for free, online at the MIE National Consortium’s website, www.music-in-education.org

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium.

The following is an adaptation from the Randy Wong’s article “Portfolio Documentation in Context,” to be published in the upcoming issue of The Journal for Music-in-Education. Reprinted by permission.

Through the creation of a specialized MIE Guided Internship, students with research interests in assessment methods can undertake positions in the MIE Research Center as MIE Portfolio Archivist-Analysts. Guided interns who choose this persona undertake the responsibility of acquainting themselves with our MIE Portfolio Library (which includes individual student, class, and cumulative Concentration portfolios from the inception of the MIE program in the late 1990s) and the portfolio process.

Portfolio Archivist-Analysts are also familiarized with similar portfolio work done in other Research Center and National Consortium projects; for example, that of the LLSN School Portfolio System. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts work hand-in-hand with Documentation Specialists to ensure that the appropriate types of documentation are being collected, and both roles help to inform their class peers, guided internship mentors, and teaching faculty of particular issues, concerns, or successes that the portfolio program may need to address.

At the end of the semester, MIE Documentation Specialists and Portfolio Archivist-Analysts meet to assemble class portfolios that will serve as an additional record of a particular course. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts collect incoming student class and internship portfolios and digitize them in accordance with the MIE Digital Portfolio System. Once students’ portfolios are digitized, MIE faculty members electronically annotate them with reflections, questions, feedback, and scores. And when students receive their hard-copy portfolios back, they also receive a copy of the digital, annotated version. At the same time, students can opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase Program, which serves as the repository for student work that we can use for publication on our website or in this Journal. Likewise, those portfolios are made available for other Conservatory students who are interested in learning from their peers’ work. Thus, all students who participate in the MIE Concentration program (and by default, the MIE portfolio process) become active members of the “wider gamut of individuals” that educational philosopher Howard Gardner suggests is necessary for a system like this to function. Additionally, Gardner’s own views on the regularity of reflection can help us to better understand how and why the MIE portfolio process is important to those that are active in it:

By asking students to keep and review process-folios regularly, we hope to involve them in constant reflection on their activities and to allow them the opportunity to monitor and to learn from their own growth and even their own setbacks. Ultimately, we hope that these process-folios can become rewards in themselves as well as a tangible record of an artistic apprenticeship.

With the creation of an ecosystem (affectionately referred to as the “M-i-Ecosystem”) the centerpiece of which is the student/guided intern and his/her portfolio, we are hoping that students may start to recognize that the partnership of teaching and learning is a lifelong endeavor, and that the skills that they hone while creating their portfolios are applicable whether or not they eventually choose to become teaching artists, researchers, or professional musicians.

Please note: We respect our students’ privacy and will not publish links to their portfolios on our website unless the student has chosen to opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase program.

The MIE Portfolio Showcase program posts excerpts of your portfolio (chosen at our discretion) on the MIE@NEC Website, and helps to make visible the terrific work that our students do. Participants in the MIE Portfolio Showcase receive no compensation for their participation, and we will conceal the identity of all portfolio authors before publishing portfolio excerpts. Participants may also opt-out of the MIE Portfolio Showcase at any future time. To opt-in to the Portfolio Showcase, please contact MIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong (617-585-1299) or email randy@mieatnec.org.

–Randy Wong

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium

Lyle Davidson has done something really remarkable this semester in structuring his “Music, Learning and the Brain” class (informally referred to around here as “the brain class”). For the first part of our class, we’ve been studying John Ratey’s lucid book “A User’s Guide to the Brain” (2001).

We took the first five class meetings to engage with this text in an in-depth way. Our class discussions focused on outlining and clairifying our understanding of this material, everything from flow charts about brain functions to creating clay models of the brain to build fluency with its contituant parts. The text is a terrific and engaging book which communicates the new picture we’re developing about the brain and how it works in non-jargon terms and with very approachable stories and metaphors. The most profound thing that I can state simply from our study is that viewing the brain in the old way, like a machine that simply works correctly or doesn’t, is very outdated and we would be more effective to look at the brain like a colony of organisms (neurons) that is growing, evolving, and reshaping itself in response to stimulus every single day of our lives, from conception to death. Therefore, in a very physical way, education is “changing our brains” and there are much fewer limits on what we can do with our brain than we usually imagine.

However, unlike most science-based course which I’ve participated in, we’re not going to continue in this detailed text-based course of study, and the semester’s learning will not be assessed by either in-line or end-of-semester examinations on the material. Instead, both the remainder of the class and the methods by which we are assessed will be something very different. We spent yesterday’s class brainstorming how we could create a new direction or new modality for the class. In this new mode we break off as individuals and small groups to do our own research, readings, projects, documentation, and learning in “applied topics” which connect what we have been studying to areas that we are excited about. These applied topics — which range from how the brain reacts to our diet to how to use a new understanding of our brains to re-think pedagogical topics to how we can understand the brain’s role in the social aspects of music — are chosen based on the direct personal interest and connection that each classmember has with them.

In structuring the course in this way — 1) An initial burst of intensive study and more traditional academic study with a common text and fast assimilation of new material, 2) a pivot node where the established learning strands come together in a brainstorming session, 3) and explosion of new, individualized veins of application and discussion which are based on our common reference of the text we’ve studied, and 4) a final culmination of our explorations in which our research, work, and portfolios are presented — Mr. Davidson has created at way to present a science-based topic in an engaging manner through it’s direct personal application.

I am thoroughly enjoying the course and I find the topic to be of immense interest. I’m excited to see how our brainstorming session results in a multi-threaded discussion in which topics that we are passionate about related to the material are explored and discussed.

This experience begs a natural inquiry question: We are familiar with some of the most standard academic classroom study/assessment arcs from having experienced them over and over. If this is an innovative model for structuring a class, what other innovative structures are there out there?

–Fred

Fred Sienkiewicz
(fred at sienkiewicz.org)