In the world of education, there are numerous methods and styles of teaching. Those involved with the Music-in-Education department here at New England Conservatory believe that music can be used to heighten a student’s learning of other subjects, such as mathematics and language arts. We call this method integration.

In Larry Scripp’s Graduate Music in Education Seminar last week, one student presented her idea of a lesson plan combining music and literature. Shanshan’s lesson plan involved reading a children’s story along with music, while recording the students’ reactions. Then, reading the same story without music, and comparing those reactions to reactions from the first. Keep in mind that the narrator had never seen the story before.

The first time through, Shanshan played clarinet in duet with Vito’s narration. As music students, it was obvious to us that some, if not all, of the music was taken from preexistent sources. Professor Scripp then introduced the class to an amazing method of observation called “Descriptive Review.” The first step in “descriptive review” is to only take note of what you see, without attaching a judgment to it. This step was very difficult for the class, since we were not allowed to follow one train of thought through to the end. However, it did provide us with unbiased observations, which in the end can prove to be of more use.

The next step is to ask all of the questions of which you would like to know the answers. In the same vein as the first step, we were only allowed to ask questions and were not given the answers to them. This initially left us frustrated, but eventually led us to more creative questions once we got past the obvious ones.

The Descriptive Review experience was such an eye-opening one that I wanted to share it with you. Check out the video. . . Perhaps attempt your own Descriptive Review?

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.

During these past few weeks I’ve noticed an underlying theme in my MIE experiences. I didn’t recognize its significance at first, but I really think this might be a thread worth exploring. My first introduction to the idea came when I brought a piece from my repertoire to Larry’s Solfege for Singers class. The piece, Peter Maxwell Davies’s “Sea Eagle” for solo horn, is truly intimidating. Take a look at this excerpt from the first movement. How am I supposed to tackle this thing? Larry suggested all the standards; practice the syllables with no rhythm, practice the syllables in rhythm, and the like. Then he suggested that I practice singing it and then playing it with no accidentals. At first, I thought that was pretty pointless. Of course I could do it without accidentals! It’s the accidentals that make it so hard. Wouldn’t that eliminate the whole context, the point of the piece?

But then, Larry went on a related tangent in our MIE Intro class of 11/7. Paraphrasing, he said that if you can improvise in the context or style of a piece of music you will have a greater knowledge of that piece. If not, perhaps you have only a didactic understanding, such that any performance is either right or wrong, follows the rules or doesn’t. But instead, consider other pathways of inquiry that can give dimension to a performance. And indeed, in Solfege we recently improvised in the style of Palestrina, finding that it actually made singing Palestrina easier. How fascinating, that changing something and intentionally performing it wrong, altering the decisions the composer made, could make the written piece easier!

And in fact, we spent the entirety of today’s Intro to MIE class proving that point. One of our recent assignments was to learn Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music.” (Score excerpted here.) We were charged with recording it twice, once as written and once with a different technique. Some people played the piece on pitched water glasses, other people sang the parts with two voices sounding a third apart, and so on. These multiple representations of the same piece colored our understanding of the piece. Today we broke it down even farther, performing it with two drum circles and solo gong. One circle played only beat 1 of each grouping, the other circle played beat 2, and the gong player intoned the only beat 3 in the measure. It was really difficult to stay together, especially then when one group or the other moved to the second measure and the parts were no longer in sync. But this greater understanding of the piece made it easier then when the drum circles played the parts as written, moving forward measure by measure and switching parts within each measure on command. Each new representation of the piece, each variation gave the class a greater understanding of the piece, such that our performance and our interpretation were much more convincing and informed.

I asked Larry after class about how this all relates to my Peter Maxwell Davies piece, and his comment was that we need to make our unplayable pieces playable quickly to begin working on them. Whatever route takes you to that point is a good one. So whether it be an exercise to make an unplayable piece easier so that some day I might perform it as written, or to make a tricky piece harder in practice so the performance is improved, consider this path of education in your own music. What we do can have so much more life than right or wrong.

-Kristen

Kristen Dirmeier is a graduate horn performance major. She has served as a  Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Introduction to Music-in-Education” course, and currently works in the MIE Research Center as a Documentation Specialist and Portfolio Archivst-Analyst.

It became apparent to me the first day of class here at NEC that everything I have learned up until now is directly linked to what lies ahead in my career. I was sitting in Lyle Davidson’s class on the brain, and I realized that my life path is completely up to me. I came to understand that the only boundaries are the ones I set, myself. Therefore, anything is possible! Now that I have been in the brain class for a number of weeks, I really see the connection between what I strive to accomplish everyday, and what parts of my brain are helping me to do so. There is a very real correlation between mind, body, and spirit that I feel has become a bit cliche in the media. When one looks deep within themselves, they can honestly realize that it is essential to keep these three elements of life healthy.

As a performer and music maker, I feel that certain parts of my brain are working harder than they might in an accountant, or a lawyer. This got me thinking about what makes people happy. I know that a large part of my mental power goes to the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, since making music is a very emotional experience for me. But my question is, does the lawyer also receive emotional stimulation through his work? Does the accountant? It is hard for me to see the same emotional pleasure in these fields. So, then the question becomes, what do the accountant and the lawyer have in their lives to stimulate their emotional centers?

~Brynn

Brynn Rector is a first year graduate student studying trumpet performance. She is currently the Teaching Assistant for Larry Scripp’s “Graduate Seminar for Music-in-Education,” and is conducting a Guided Internship in the MIE Research Center on music and brain development.

I’m watching “Ice-T’s Rap School” on VH1 again. This time, the episode is putting its emphasis on the business/entrepreneurship aspects of being a hip-hop artist: show promoting, making business decisions, deciding what kind of music/rhymes are appropriate for a show, and also the social pressures that come with being an artist. Ice-T is confronting the students and trying to reinforce that he thinks that the quality of the music should reinforce how much effort the students put into their work.

I see Ice-T’s response as a real-world example of the need to look at student work from an objective point of view. In other words, if student work is at the center of the conversation, rather than the relationship the teacher has with the student or the context of the work (i.e. previous work the student has done), one can really pay attention to what the student is learning.

Harvard Project Zero researcher and Arts In Education program director Steve Seidel has done a lot of work in the area of how to evaluate student work, and in fact, we take a similar approach when evaluating MIE student portfolios. Seidel runs an occasional conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education known as ROUNDS, in which educators and researchers of different backgrounds come together to discuss student work and learn various conference protocols (the most “successful” of which is known as the Collaborative Assessment Conference) that Project Zero has developed to help facilitate reflective discussion.

Although Ice-T’s approach to evaluating his student’s work seems to be pretty effective, what I have noticed is that the show doesn’t really give the viewer much idea about what other students think about their peers performances or lyric writing. Because of the age of the students (middle school?), and the nature of the project (fairly informal), I suppose it might be awkward to show students engaging in lengthy reflective practices — though in the reality-cutaway sequences, we do see snippets of students reflecting on their work. We also see students practicing for their performances and engaging in both group and individual work. In a way, each episode ends up working as a mini-portfolio of Ice-T’s residency. [Note: Could this be a model for documenting internships? Perhaps... ] Anyways, this makes me wonder how a tool like Seidel’s Collaborative Assessment Conference could be used to help faciliate student reflection, and what effects it would have on student learning.

Finally, and on a separate note, I find myself raising the following questions (now that I’ve seen a couple episodes of the program):

Although ‘entertainment’ is probably what the main focus of Ice-T’s show is, I would urge other MIE advocates to look closely at the world that surrounds them, and see how they might find other environments or situations that could fit within the context of our world: though the field of music-in-education may seem specialized upon first glance, programs like “Ice-T’s Rap School” help to show how ubiquitous, and closely-connected, the world of interdisciplinary music education really is.

-Randy

The MIE Guided Internship Program at New England Conservatory is more than a resume-furthering, experience-garnering entry point into teaching. Through the MIE Research Center’s process for planning and evaluating student-initiated Guided Internships, Conservatory students find opportunities to explore the merits of action research, curriculum planning, data collection, and administrative responsibility.

In her article, “Crossing Boundaries: The Role of Higher Education in Professional Development with Arts Partnerships,” MIENC Site Director and educator Dr. Gail Burnaford writes:

We have found that 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 classrooms 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?” (Burnaford, 2003)

I would like to suggest that what Burnaford is describing is at the heart of MIE Guided Internships: that at any given point in time, Conservatory students conducting internships can pause from their work, and choose one of Gardner’s perspectives from which to analyze their work. That it’s in the synthesis of these types of roles, such as in the Artist-Teacher-Scholar model, from which the MIE Guided Internship takes form.

In my work (as MIE Program Coordinator) with current MIE students and recent alumni, I find myself explaining the merits of the Guided Internship Program from this very perspective. Even after students have completed their Internships, they can find ways of understanding their experience from x different role or persona, despite having focused their documentation (most often a process-portfolio) from the perspective of y. (This take-away is yet another reason why we, as MIE Faculty & Staff, are explicit about the importance of rich documentation in student work).

Burnaford goes on to write:

Teacher learning is the way in to student learning; teachers need to experience all four of those roles too. In a professional development context, teachers need to compose; teachers need to practice those roles — even music teachers, because they haven’t done that in the professiona setting all of the time.

Again, I wholeheartedly agree with Gail; and in fact, our MIE Guided Internship Program helps to support the point she is making. Larry Scripp sometimes refers to the Artist-Teacher-Scholar framework as being an entry-point into entrepreneurship, and the proof of this is in the Guided Internships that our students initiate. Some of our students’ more ambitious projects have included: Teaching Solfege via hip-hop beats; coaching (and arranging for) quartets of violin/viola/2 cellos; exploring connections between poetry and rhythms with kindergartens; and a whole host of students conducting various research projects in the MIE Research Center.

–Randy

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)