One of my internships for the Music-in-Education Concentration has been working for Larry Scripp as a TA. Last spring I was TA for the MIE511: Guided Internship Seminar and this year I’ve been a TA for his two solfege classes: Solfege for Singers in the fall and Advanced Solfege this spring. Under his guidance, one of the evolving roles that I have played has been to facilitate an ongoing discussion and reflection about the class materials outside of class time.

One of the core inquiry questions of MIE is “how does reflection enrich the learning process?” and so my inquiry has been “how can electronic communications media — a blog or an email list — promote and facilitate class engagement and reflection in between class sessions? how can I as TA use these mediums to keep the class engaged in reflective learning?”

It is my experience that for a given amount of “class material” (time spent in class), a given student can extract a wide range of learning from it depending on how much processing and reflection you do. My most compelling example of this comes from my experiences with trumpet lessons: Eric Berlin, my teacher at UMass-Amherst, recorded all of our lessons and gave us a CD of them. Many weeks I would listen back to the tape of the week and write reflectively in a journal I kept for just that purpose and I was always amazed at the clarity, direction, and insight that this practice gave me. I literally got more out of every lesson because I picked up on a lot of stuff that I completely missed the first time through.

So, as a TA, I have been working to try to promote this kind of reflective inquiry in between class sessions. It’s actually much more challenging this year with the solfege classes which meet three times a week (Mon-Wed-Fri) rather than the MIE class last year which met just once a week: Because the class already meets three times, there is a sense of the class discussion carrying forward without need for this reflective thinking.

In thinking about the barriers to this kind of reflection, I feel that creating the artifacts of class material is the biggest barrier for most people: Creating recordings, video tapes, or taking notes of what happened in class. But with today’s technology, many of these things have recently become significantly easier! Using an Edirol R-09 all-digital, flash-based MP3 recorder and Blogger.com’s blogging software, I have been posting recordings and reflective summaries of every class session. For example, When people miss a class session, they now have several options. A visit to the class blog will give them the chance to listen to the entire class, read my class summary, and see any comments or questions that their peers have posted. In general, this means being caught up-to-speed on what has been going on. (Certainly they miss out on visuals, but I believe that someday soon the technology will be in place for flash-based digital cameras to take hour-long movies and transfer them as files across a USB cable in a reasonable amount of time).

You can visit the blog to see this in action:
http://nec-advanced-solfege.blogspot.com

The blog has also be a very effective way to distribute class materials. While we still hand out materials to the class, having a scanned copy or digital original of whatever we’ve handed out available on the blog has been immensely helpful to those folks who have missed class on one day or another.

Unfortunately, it has been very hard to encourage the “lateral discussions” which these technologies provide for: Both email lists and blogs have the capacity to enable rich and wide-ranging reflective discussions between class members about the topics. Each blog post can be followed up by comments and each email can spawn an entire discussion which everyone can participate in, and the participation by the all members of class would contribute to everyone’s learning and understanding. Shy of making it a hard, fast, and graded assignment, however, I’ve been largely unsuccessful in launching this kind of culture of class reflection.

So, these are two uses for digital technologies (recordings, blogs, emails) to enhance the class discussion along the principles of MIE, but I wonder what other ways can our 21st century tools enable a classroom to extend beyond the traditional meeting form and become a more effective and enriched experience? And what kinds of “best practice” strategies exist that encourage and facilitate more peer discussions through these mediums? Lastly, if there is a balance between “class material” and “reflection of class material” wherein the amount of learning is a product of both (material times reflection), what ratio of material to reflection is optimal? At what point does tilting the relationship toward reflection and discussion start to diminish the amount of learning?

In the spirit of lateral discussion, I’m especially interested in what MIE Interns think about these inquires. I know that both Kristen & Brynn (my fellow MIE Documentation Specialists) have been involved in this kind of work — or I’d be really excited to hear student perspectives from someone in one of these classes.

-Fred

Fred Sienkiewicz is a graduate trumpet performance major, MIE Concentration student, and Research Assistant for the Music-in-Education National Consortium.

Larry Scripp’s Intro to Music-in-Education class is an obvious forum for exposing students to the various aspects of teaching, but a closer look shows that not only do we hear about these methods through Larry’s teaching, we also experience them in the way he teaches us, and we experiment with them by teaching our own lessons in front of the class.

In these past two weeks we have been using different colored plastic cups to represent either rhythm or pitch, and creating impromptu performances led by members of the class. Follow the link at the bottom of the article to see Alex Powell directing the class in a pitch exercise. He assigned a pitch to the first cup, and assigned the second scale degree to the second cup. When he pointed to the third, we deduced that it would mean to sing the third scale degree. The confusion came when he assigned scale degree 5 to the fourth cup, and then directed us to sing back down the row. We mistakenly sang scale degree 4 instead of 3 for the third cup. Alex made us aware of our mistake, and we corrected ourselves. In a later discussion, Larry showed how Alex might have corrected our confusion by starting from the first cup and ascending to verify the correct scale degree on the third cup. I think this was a most valuable lesson – that it’s better to allow students to correct their mistake by verification, rather than simply telling them they’re wrong or correcting the mistake for them.

-Kristen