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.
It’s been a few weeks since we’ve posted any new reflections or videos about our violin program… but not to worry, many new developments have occurred, and we have just been a little backlogged with all the new material to report. Since the new year began, we have made several improvements to our weekly violin sessions at Atrium.
We are now meeting in smaller sections of 30 minutes per session; about 4-6 students per section rather than 8-10. This improves each class because we are able to give each student more individual attention, and the students receive more teaching time per capita. It also makes our collaborative learning activities more manageable.
Each week we are now ‘theme-ing’ our classes using a Word of the Week. The idea came because we wanted to encapsulate each week’s lesson with one word, giving students the ability to define those words experientially.
This week’s word is “deliberately,” which Tyler defined as “doing something with purpose,” and how Beatrice defined as “being careful.” In violin class, this means that everything we do is decisive and with purposeful intent. When putting our bows on the string and preparing to play, we do so with exemplary posture (bunny ears holding the ‘carrot’, feet in the right position, etc.) and without making a single sound.
Our continued emphasis on reflection has resulted in multiple venues and opportunities for students to reflect. In addition to informal verbal reflection throughout the class session, we challenge students to express themselves in written and artistic forms. As described in these two previous blog posts (11/11/09 and 11/3/09), our unit and lesson plans are organized around the ‘Five Learning Processes’ framework (a.k.a. LQCPR—Listen, Question, Create, Perform, and Reflect). Though most of our previous written reflections have fallen into the last category, we are now starting to propagate the other sections too. In fact, we filed this week’s reflection activity under the Questions & Explorations section in student portfolios because of the explorative questions it poses:
We have also started building time for our written reflection activities into our sessions. Part of this is more possible because our classes are now being taught in the Library. There’s an alcove that we use for the instructional portions of class, and then the students move to a large study table to write their reflections.
In addition to using animals (zoo, monkey, buffalo, alligator) and Indian rhythms (cha, taki, gamela, takidimi), violin students are finding connections between Violin students are using their school project heroes (e.g. Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, etc.) to explore the connection between word prosody and rhythms. More on this to come.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series documenting the Atrium School M+MI Program’s Violin Project. Documentation efforts, including this post, are being led by NewsBlog moderator Randy Wong.
In addition to learning the basics of being a violinist (like knowing what the parts are called on a violin, and how to hold the thing), a key component of the Atrium School violin project comes in the integration of the students’ regular music curricula with violin instruction.
For the past two years, Atrium students have received innovative ‘music plus music integration’ (”M+MI”) curricula designed by the Music-In-Education National Consortium, and implemented by a Music Learning Leadership team consisting of music teachers, teaching artists, and guided interns trained by the Center for Music-In-Education. Understanding symbol and coordinate systems are among other music literacy skills the Atrium M+MI curricula stresses; it is through the use of music-math matrices that said skills are taught.
Therefore, integrating and adapting music-math matrices for the violin program is a total no-brainer! In the video below, students are taking the first steps towards adapting their knowledge of music-math matrices to violin playing. Their violin teachers (Beatrice Affron and Helen Liu) chose simple matrix operations (e.g. identifying and singing pitches “Re” and “La”) to match with their new motor skills (i.e. plucking the open D and open A strings, respectively) on their instruments. The video below shows this in action, and also acts as a reference for Atrium parents who may be helping their children practice.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series documenting the Atrium School M+MI Program’s Violin Project. Documentation efforts, including this post are being led by NewsBlog moderator Randy Wong.
Students at the Atrium School (Watertown, MA) are the newest cohort to pilot the MIENC’s ‘Music Plus Music Integration” Program Violin Project. (Last summer, students from across Mankato, MN received M+MI violin instruction for ten weeks). The videos below show a glimpse of what the first day of instruction looked like.
I found it exhilarating to experience how excited the students were when they received their instruments for the first time. The buzz in the air was definitely electric.
Yet for all the energy in the room, the students were able to contain and focus it on learning. Among the first activities was learning how to stand in Rest Position.
Also: How to hold the violin securely with one’s chin.
Students also learned the “body parts” of the violin, thanks to a song that Helen made up in which each part of the violin corresponds to a scale degree. The first lyric, “This is the scroll” begins at the bottom of the scale. As the scale ascends, the students learn each successive part of the violin; for example, “These are the tuning pegs” is sung on scale degree 2. While I was confused at first why Helen started at with the scroll—I always visualized the scroll as the “top” of the instrument—after thinking about it, I realized her rationale has to do with the pitch range of the strings! “Open” strings (meaning: unfingered) have the lowest pitches on the instrument. As one lays fingers down on the finger board, the pitches get higher. Thus, even from what-could-be a simple song, she’s laying down the framework for teaching students about pitch and intonation. Very clever.
Hello MIE Blog community! I am doing an internship this semester (along with fellow intern Joanna Mattrey) as a participant and documentation specialist for a class titled “The Percussive Parent”. The class is held at the Gentle Dragon Preschool in Medford, Massachusetts under the direction of Warren Senders, a current MIE instructor at NEC. Twelve adults and their children are enrolled in the course which meets every Wednesday afternoon for ten weeks. The class involves, among many things, counting and number games, handclapping activities, instrument-making, the use of found objects converted into instruments, producing music with drums and percussion, simple movement activities, along with methods and techniques for parents to incorporate what they have learned into the time they spend with their children outside of class. Warren’s goal is that, by the end of the ten week period, “group members will be able to direct multigenerational rhythm groups on their own, using traditional, self-made and spontaneously created instruments.” He explains that the course is not for children and their parents, but rather for parents and their children so that the children can learn (if they want to) from their active parents while the parents learn musical methods for teaching their children.
For my guided internship this semester, I plan on using Warren Senders’ class “The Percussive Parent” as a way of investigating the ways in which children learn from and imitate their parents, the experience and growth of a child in a creative musical environment, and also how to develop and organize a community course directed towards a specific audience in a free-thinking learning environment. Through this, I will be able to document and experience the organization hands-on while also playing a role in the teaching and learning process of building instruments, experiencing and applying rhythmic games and tools, and utilizing mundane or found objects to create a musical learning experience.
This internship will serve as an application of previous work that I have done with Warren Senders. In addition to completing his two MIE courses (Cross Cultural Approaches to MIE and Improvisation in General Music), I completed an internship as a documentation specialist for his Cross Cultural Approaches to MIE course last semester. In this course, and through my internship, we investigated, among many things, different cultural methods of education, specifics and speculation on the nature of memory, instrument building, intrinsic knowledge, music in education, and more. This internship will follow on the heels of the previous as a hands-on application of techniques and topics discussed with Warren Senders throughout his courses.
An interesting hypothesis that Warren shared before the start of the course, was that “our kids will be much more likely to make music together if they see us making music together. We will be modeling music-making behavior for our kids…and, of course, making music ourselves.” It is an exciting and fascinating premise, that by being an active learner as a parent and teacher, our children and students will most frequently follow our example through imitation and/or a desire to be like their adult role model. I will continue to investigate and document such patterns throughout the course of the class, and share insights with you as we go along. Joanna and I will also be collaborating on information and musings in order to give you a wider ranging perspective on the progress made throughout the ten weeks of the course.
A few weeks ago, I completed the second major assignment for MHST 537 (Teaching Music History): Substitute teach (or “guest lecture”) for another professor at NEC; videotape your teaching and analyze it. I had the good fortune to substitute for Larry Scripp; he had to travel out of town for the latter half of his MIE 501 (Intro to MIE), so I stepped in.
The agenda I set forth for my teaching was based on an assignment Larry wanted me to give to the class: to get his students familiarized with the CMIE NewsBlog, as readers and potential writers. I worked backwards from his assignment to plan what basic learning outcomes I hoped my students would achieve—an understanding for what makes NewsBlog writers’ postings different from the “rants” that are commonly associated with blogging; a rationale for organizing the kinds of ideas and documentation that get shared on the NewsBlog; and a sense of direction—where, beyond the NewsBlog or MIE program, does this kind of documentation and writing have use and purpose?
Although I am not able to post my video of teaching here, due to length and filesize, any readers of the NewsBlog who are interested should read the transcription file (posted as a PDF here). In fact, anyone who reads the transcription file will notice that parts of it are highlighted and color-coded; this is a technique for analysis that we encourage MIE students to undertake.
The process I have engaged myself in—of videotaping my teaching, watching it, transcribing it, coding it for objectivity, and finally analyzing and reflecting on it is one that I have observed as being useful for emerging and experienced teachers alike. It is a method that we showcased and published in the Journal for Music-In-Education (Scripp, Keppel, Wong, eds.), and that we encourage throughout the MIE department. Its value lies in the fact that words do not lie, and it is often easier to quickly see the ‘big picture’ when scanning transcripts than from sitting and watching a videotape. The benefits of watching the videotape, and doing one’s own transcription from that tape, are obvious: Body language, tone of voice, eye contact, movement, and other physicalities of teaching are easily recognizable. From watching my own tape, I was surprised to learn that my teaching voice was not as loud or enunciable as I thought it had been. I suppose that is something to continue to work on. I didn’t do an ‘exact word’ transcript here, but what I learned from the tape is that there were multiple times that I had to re-phrase questions, transitions, and other verbiage. I already knew from past experiences that off-the-cuff presentation is not my strong suit; the introductory Ten-Minute Presentation we did at the beginning of Teaching Music History is testament to that (I scripted that presentation and practically read it). Because of the limited amount of time I had to prepare this teaching session, scripting nor rehearsing were barely possible, but I did have to time to make a short Powerpoint presentation that I used as an outline of sorts.
Although the class session I taught is not a Music History course, I believe that many of the same principles that we have been studying in Anne Hallmark’s MHST 537 Teaching Music History course still apply. The past several weeks have seen discussions in class based on readings that articulate how college classrooms are run; the pitfalls and mistakes of ‘wet behind the ears’ teachers; ways to engage students in discussion; and organizational tips for lecturers, among other things. These readings are balanced with seminar-style class sessions moderated by Hallmark, which in and of themselves serve as models for successful teaching in a graduate setting.
As is evident in my coded transcription, I tried to incorporate some of the techniques that Hallmark and others are suggesting as worthwhile ways to engage students in discussion and classroom learning. Granted, there was less discussion than I would have liked, and the majority of communication was responsorial, but I think a good effort was made.
The teaching session was also an opportunity for me to go into a situation not as well rehearsed or prepared as I usually would be. There is, as Warren Senders or Larry might say, a certain amount of improvisation that that is a part of any teaching experience, and that a seasoned teacher would need to be comfortable with; things hardly ever go ‘as planned.’
Finally, I did make it to the end-point Larry projected for me: A MIE NewsBlog blogging assignment that students would need to complete, and connect, to the knowledge they’ve so far acquired on documentation, for inclusion in their process portfolios.
Download PDF:
Many of us can remember having to take the SAT. Since 1934 when James Conant, the president of Harvard at the time began administering the test to scholarship applicants, taking the test has become increasingly standard procedure for a person moving from high school to college. But what does the Scholastic Aptitude Test really measure?
We discussed this question in class and came up with the following: LANGUAGE AND NUMBERS.
Effective? Comprehensive? Fair? We didn’t think so either. All the test tells me is that if I score between a certain range I can balance my checkbook correctly and read a newspaper article really quickly. Lyle Davidson shared that it’s really nothing more than a test to see who will pass their first year of college. I sure wish it had been presented as such instead of a test to see “who’s smartest.” I would’ve spent a lot less time worrying.
Unfortunately, because the SAT is still the standard measuring tool we are led to believe that the educators who have the last word must believe that the wisdom of priests and rabbis, the intuition of psychologists and the sheer genius of Mozart are not examples of intelligence.
In the 1980s a man by the name of Howard Gardner came forward with some new ideas on what “intelligence” really is. He presented the concept of “Multiple Intelligences,” saying that different areas of the brain support different types of expression, cultural differences and necessary awareness. For example, different cultures require individual and acute behavioral skills to survive in a specific location and environment.
We brainstormed what these “multiple intelligences” might be.
Here is the list we came up with:
We decided that the list could be titled “Spatial Intelligences”.
As can be expected when you have a group of future educators talking about education there were many unsatisfied voices. Their statements could be passed off as hopeless complaints, but I think that would be a huge mistake. In the simplest of terms, it’s important that more of the focus in education be placed on spatial intelligences. NEC has already made the change to not requiring applicants to submit an SAT score. In my opinion, that was a smart move.
I’ll leave you with this:
Because we are individuals whose intelligences are clearly made up of more than just languages and numbers, should we not be approached as such by our educators?