Over the past two years, I have worked in numerous ways and settings to help bridge the NEC communities, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes deliberately. For this internship, I found a unique way to serve the NEC student population: start a chess club!

What makes this different from other clubs? My chess club has ulterior motives. I’m interested in interdisciplinary connections, drawing inspiration for musical events from other structures. Specifically, I’m setting out to compose music inspired by and informed by the game of chess. As a composer, I want musicians to understand the game, in order to enrich their experience playing the music.

Moreover, having an “army of chess-playing musicians” gives me the ability to write new music that draws its compositional structure directly out of the game: I can use the board as a kind of improvised graphic score! Thus, by teaching musicians the game of chess, I am simultaneously preparing them to play my music.

Over the semester, I hope to put on three performances. The first will be on the Music-In-Education Department Concert (which I am curating), to take place on March 7th. This will be a “small piece,” examining just a small microcosm of the chess universe. The second performance will (hopefully, curator permitting) be on Jordan Hall stage on April 9th, as part of the “Beckett Play” concert (put on by the Contemporary Improvisation Dept.). That piece would be a little bit bigger, and also relate to the writing of Samuel Beckett (especially “Endgame”). Finally, I hope to stage the largest version of the piece—the full-blown game of chess—on my recital: April 28th, in Brown Hall. This would require thirty-two musicians, all of whom play chess relatively well, so I hope people show up to the club!

Right now the club is in “stage one”: building critical mass. So far there’s been a steady crowd of musicians each week, and the cast usually has a mixture of rotating players and steady regulars. On our first day, there were thirteen people! The challenge each week is to find ways to teach each person on an individual basis, while simultaneously introducing concepts that will be relevant in my compositions.

Starting in the next couple weeks or so, I plan to introduce my first piece in the club, teaching about that.

Editor’s Note: We welcome back Lauren Flaherty for her 2nd MIE Guided Internship! Lauren is a Master’s student in voice and also works in NEC’s Financial Aid office.

I returned to my voice lessons at Club Passim around the start of NEC’s fall semester. I am in the process of teaching two back-to-back six week sessions to accommodate the upcoming holidays and possible snow cancellations. (Not what anyone wants to think about while we’ve been enjoying an Indian Summer!)

This semester I will be teaching four students, including three brand new students and one returning student. Most of my students sing and play and about half of them enjoy performing in the area. One suffers from a lack of confidence. Another is extremely new to music and requires more ear training than vocal coaching. It is difficult to control my expectations when their abilities differ so wildly, but I remind myself that I am there to teach, not to act as a judge.

Aside from helping my students grow at their own pace, I am focused on trying to create more of a formula for my teaching, specifically geared around our six week semesters. I have begun creating my own exercises that I think will help them warm-up and drill correct techniques into muscle memory. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for awhile that will hopefully reflect everything I’ve learned since I began teaching several years ago and during my past internship at Passim.

Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce you to Shannon Kelly, a master’s voice student working towards a MIE Concentration. This is her internship proposal for the Fall 2011 semester; you can view follow-up posts to this one here. 

I am writing to propose as my guided internship for the Fall 2012 semester my Teaching Assistantship for the NEC undergraduate course titled Voice Class for Non-Majors. For this class, I will teach a section of approximately 9 students each week in lecture format; in addition, I will provide one-on-one voice lessons to each student in the class for either 30 minutes or one hour each week.

My goals for the internship are as follows:

• Gain experience and comfort teaching in a classroom setting, including preparing lessons, setting expectations, measuring student progress, and setting appropriate benchmarks for evaluating and grading student performance.
• Evaluate and refine my classroom teaching style as observed through documentation and data collection.
• Acquire a greater level of comfort and competence as a studio instructor.
• Improve student engagement and learning as a result of techniques studied through MIE coursework.

My previous vocal teaching experience consists of one-on-one studio voice lessons and this individual experience is limited to a handful of private students. This will be my first real experience teaching regularly in a classroom setting. Therefore this internship is an important component of my development as an Artist-Teacher-Scholar.

I am enrolled in two MIE core courses in the Fall 2011 semester (Models for Teaching and Learning for MIE and Introduction to MIE) and also took the MIE Seminar in Spring 2011. I hope to use the internship as a testing ground for several techniques I studied during that course, including specific classroom teaching strategies and approaches to vocal technique and training gleaned from readings about developing talent.

This internship is relevant to my future plans as an Artist-Teacher-Scholar in that I hope to teach both individually and in a classroom/group setting, but have limited experience in either setting. Further, I find that teaching helps me develop as artist by solidifying my own technique and improving creative interpretation and expression in my own performances.

Concerning my best personal traits as a learner, I believe my two greatest assets are my curiosity and my willingness to learn. I subscribe wholeheartedly to the “growth mindset” in learning and I am eager to apply this concept as a teacher. I also feel that my willingness to learn is important in creating an enthusiasm for subject matter among the students I teach. I am eager to apply this concept and to refine techniques for keeping students engaged and enthusiastic about the learning process.

Internship Inquiry Questions

• How do I need to adapt my teaching techniques (in group and private settings) to create active learning and growth for the students in this class?
• How will teaching this course contribute to my development as an artist and a scholar as well as a teacher?

Documentation Strategy

• Video recordings: I will record at least three classes and at least three private lessons with two different students over the course of the semester to try and track my learning process.
• Student work: I have included several writing assignments that require students to reflect and comment on singing and the classical vocal repertoire as an art form. I feel that students’ reactions to performances, while varied, may reflect my effectiveness in creating an enthusiasm (or at least appreciation) for the art form.
• Student Tests: Students’ performance on tests will also be a helpful feedback tool. Students’ improvement over the course of the semester will be the most important measure of teaching effectiveness.
• Student performances: Students will also perform live for a jury as their final exam. I hope to use these performances as a marker of my effectiveness as a studio teacher, not simply in terms of students’ vocal technique but their confidence, engagement, and interpretation of the songs.
• Student Evaluations: Student evaluations will be a critical tool for comparing student’s perceptions of the value of this course with my own perceptions about student engagement and learning. I will use these evaluations to refine both content and technique in the classroom and studio setting.

In my final semester at New England Conservatory, I’m interning as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Scripp’s Teaching Seminar, one of the core courses in the Music-In-Education curriculum. I took the course a full year ago and really enjoyed the exposure to new concepts and the multiple perspectives from which we viewed the art of teaching and learning. Of course, year-to-year this particular course can change significantly; the topics explored are, to a certain degree, based on the interests of current class members as well as the latest literature with implications on teaching and learning.

One of the pieces of literature we’ve been reading as a class is Matthew Syed’s new book Bounce. In the spirit of Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, Syed explores the “science of success” by illuminating the hidden opportunities that have existed to create some of the most accomplished musicians, athletes and intellectuals on the planet. Syed challenges the notion of talent, a concept ingrained in the American psyche and romanticized by many, and points to concepts like the 10,000 hours theory of practice, domain expertise and what he calls a trajectory of development.

What helps to make Syed’s arguments so authentic is that he himself is a former elite athlete, an Olympian who became Britain’s no. 1 ranked table tennis player in 1995. Syed writes candidly about hidden opportunities that existed for him, such as the tournament-specification table tennis table that his parents bought and housed in their garage, on which Syed and his brother would duel for hours on end at a young age, creating for himself a trajectory of development that made it virtually impossible for thousands of other aspiring players to match. Another hidden opportunity existed in the fact that one of the nation’s top table tennis coaches taught at the primary school Syed attended, spotting Syed’s enhanced ability at the game and inviting him to join Omega, one of the elite table tennis clubs in the country. Syed states “… I had powerful advantages not available to hundreds of thousands of youngsters. I was, in effect, the best of a very small bunch. Or, to put it another way, I was the best of a very big bunch, only a tiny fraction of whom had my opportunities.”

Syed also explores the 10,ooo hours theory of practice, a recent theory of cognitive science that asserts it takes about 10,000 hours of purposeful practice for the human brain to assimilate all of the neural traces required for world-class expertise in anything. Syed cites a 1991 study by Florida State University psychologist Anders Ericsson, in which he and two colleagues conducted extensive interviews with violinists at the renowned Music Academy of Berlin. The violinists were categorized into three groups- the most outstanding performers, the very good performers, and the least able players who were studying to become music teachers.

Syed sums up, “By the age of twenty, the best violinists had practiced an average of ten thousand hours, more than two thousand hours more than the good violinists and more than six thousand hours more than the violinists hoping to become music teachers. These differences are not just statistically significant; they are extraordinary. Top performers had devoted thousands of additional hours to the task of becoming master perfomers. But that’s not all. Ericsson also found that there were no exceptions to this pattern: nobody who had reached the elite group without copious amounts of practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel. Purposeful practice was the only factor distinguishing the best from the rest.”

So what are the implications of all of this for music, education and music-in-education? There are several. One implication on music performance is that this knowledge can help to nurture humble top performers. The knowledge that world-class expertise on an instrument is not the result of some innate talent but rather a product of countless hours of purposeful practice, often working in tandem with an early exposure to music that created a trajectory of development, can help to instill pride in top performers rather than a feeling of uniqueness. One of the most inspiring things I experience every so often is being in the presence of truly expert performers who are totally humble and unassuming in their personalities- this has a powerful musical effect as well.

Another implication is that we, as educators, should be able to teach complex skills (such as the learning of an instrument) more effectively now that we’re armed with the knowledge that it takes the brain about 10,000 hours to assimilate all of the necessary neural traces for expertise. It may be effective to explain to students the nature of how their brains create memory traces for the fine motor skills required to play an instrument, and that, with practice these traces become stronger and stronger, essentially becoming “wired” in them. Also, to be able to explain to students that expertise doesn’t happen overnight, and to reference the latest cognitive research on expertise, may help young students to gain a good perspective on things and avoid frustration when they expect to develop expertise more quickly than humanly possible.

Finally, an important implication for education in general is, in the words of Dr. Larry Scripp, “Teach every kid as if they’re talented.” In other words, don’t adjust expectations based on a preconceived notion of what students are and aren’t “talented,” because the latest science of expertise suggests that “talent” has far less to do with expertise than the aforementioned factors. Teach all students with the assumption that they will “get it,” because with enough determination, study and practice, chances are they will.

-Art Felluca

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.

Transforming Musical Objects

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.

Exploring Persona

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.

On October 13th, Michael Glicksman presented a video of a composition lesson with his 2nd grade students at the Atrium school in Watertown, MA to the Music-In-Education Introduction class at NEC. In the lesson, students listened to a poem written by a fellow student earlier that year and, with Michael’s guidance, were able to analyze the repetition of words or phrases within the poem. The students then composed a piece of music using various percussive and pitched instruments based on the poem. The video shown in MIE class documented the process of creating and performing music, from talking about the poem, picking instruments, deciding where an how to use instruments, all the way to the actual performance.

Before the video began, Michael and professor Larry Scripp asked a question of the class: “To what extent does studying music increase understanding of poetics, and vice versa, to what extend does studying music increase understanding of music?” Professor Scripp also reminded students to use Triple Entry Journals while they viewed the video. These three column journals are tools for learning and note-taking: the first column is reserved for objective information in the form of quotations, observations, etc. The second column is reserved for a subjective or personal response, and the third column is used to draw meaningful implications to Music-in-Education.

As the current documentation specialist for this class, I am most interested in researching how class participants are encouraged and inspired to use the key topics in class in their own learning and exploration of MIE. I feel that this presentation by Michael Glicksman was designed, at least partly to encourage students to inquire and to use the five learning processes (Listen, Question, Create, Perform, Reflect) of Music plus Music Integration. Inquiry, the question presented before the video, created a context for an educational activity. The use of triple entry journals provided structure for engagement in that inquiry.

An example of my own use of triple entry journals for Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning. I went through a process of finding a good way to organize my thoughts and research. The first column is objective information from a reading, the second contains connections to other readings and personal experience, and the third is my reflection on implications for a research paper and MIE in general.

It took me a while to look at triple entry notes critically. The idea was first presented to me a year ago, when I took Intro to MIE solely as a student. Since then, I’ve been involved in MIE in a number of ways, and triple entry journals have become vital to my learning. I find that, especially when I get overwhelmed with concepts, ideas, or just too much information, creating an inquiry question (setting context) and setting that MIE context in the third column of a triple entry journal focuses my attention completely on the task at hand. Suddenly, I’m able efficiently engage myself in a learning experience in which I’m always setting goals (converting objective experience in the other two columns) and getting feedback about my work.

I think Michael’s presentation, while a great opportunity for Michael to explore his own teaching and get feedback, became, at least for me, an opportunity to explore key MIE ideas about learning.

Please use the following links to view a clip of Michael’s inquiry question and part of a class discussion after Michael’s presentation:

Michael’s Inquiry

Class Discussion