Excellent post by Doug Butchy over at Confessions of a Band Director. Cruise on over and have a look…this is how third-stream music educators build personal, lifelong connections between students and their music. Congratulations, Doug, on a major victory!
1 comment December 17th, 2009
We, the teachers, cannot curse in school. We may not swear at students. We cannot curse at the students despite our own frustrations. We may not curse, not even if a student’s poor performance deserves it. There are good reasons for this, including professional propriety, teacherly love and support, setting an example of positive coping strategies, and simple fear of repercussions. No matter what: we may not swear at either poor behavior or poor academic performance.
But what about the student at the other end of the spectrum? Have you ever been tempted to drop a naughty word into a congratulations speech for the purpose of making your students understand just how unnaturally pleased you are with their performance? Have you ever had a student be so extremely modest that a little shakeup might actually boost their self-esteem? Have your students ever earned the “hell yeah” or “damn fine job” or “so fucking proud of you” that didn’t slip past the filter of your professional code of conduct?
1 comment December 3rd, 2009
After my second day of parent conferences, the Practice Tips for Parents has earned a permanent place in my parent communication toolbox. Parents expressed high interest in its information, relief at gaining usable strategies for their students, amazement that musical strategies might apply to everything else in life, and overall satisfaction with the conference. For my own part, I felt that having the “script” streamlined my presentation, and in many cases finished individual conferences in shorter time (I am notorious both for talking too much and for blowing schedules by giving too much personal attention to my clients).
Please note that the Practice Tips are still a little generic. I did not hit every point with every family. I added other material to the sheet for some students, and handed the sheet out without directly commenting on it for others. Like all tools, it is only as good as its match to the job at hand.
In any case, conferences went well with the Practice Tips handout, and I will make it a permanent addition to parent conferences. Now to phase two: refining the language for spring conferences. What will you change when you adapt it to your own purposes?
Add comment November 8th, 2009
I created a quick sheet of tips for improved practicing for use at parent conferences this week. Quality of at-home practice is a big idea in middle-level musicians (even many of the college freshman music majors I knew). Teaching students how to solve problems and teach themselves are two of the most important extramusical benefits of music study, and is the rocket fuel of bringing your performing ensembles to top-level musicianship. So far, this handout seems to be making a difference. Maybe it’s because I talk to so many parents about practice strategies for their children. Maybe it’s because parents feel satisfied when they have a piece of paper to take home. Either way, I wanted to pass it along for your use.
PRACTICE DOESN’T MAKE PERFECT
….perfect practice makes perfect. Practicing badly just reinforces playing badly. Encourage your student to follow these helpful guidelines to get the most improvement out of the least practice time.
1. Practice more often. Psychology experiments have shown that practicing more often (i.e.) is better than big practice sessions (i.e. fifteen minutes each day for six days is better than an hour and a half once a week).
2. Focus on the goals. Practicing for fifteen minutes (or twenty, or thirty) is not the important thing. It is the sound of the music that you make that is important. Practice until the music sounds good, not until some amount of minutes is gone.
3. Focus on the goals. You wouldn’t drive your car without knowing where you want to go; you wouldn’t pay a tailor to make clothes without knowing what kind of clothes you wanted. When you know exactly what you want to accomplish, then practicing is more productive…and more fun!
4. Break it down. Break big tasks (like a song) into smaller, easier pieces (like one measure at a time, or just the fingerings).
5. Listen and adjust. As you drive your car, you constantly look where you are on the road and steer back into your lane. As your student plays their instrument, they should be listening and constantly steering back towards their best sound quality, correct notes, steady beat, etc. You cannot play music without listening and adjusting.
PERFECT PRACTICE STRATEGIES
Athletes get stronger, companies make millions, and armies win wars when they have a good strategy. Get more improvement in less time with these helpful strategies:
Sing and finger – to reinforce or accelerate pitches
Clap and count – to decipher or solidify rhythms
Chunking – do a small piece, then add another small piece
Go slow – slow and steady wins the race
Use a metronome – to check your steady beat
Repetition – over and over again to train your fingers
Check the fingering chart – if you don’t know the fingering
Make it a game – take a challenge and make it fun
Flash cards – you can even practice without your instrument
Take a break – and come back to it after two minutes
Play for an audience – when you think you’re ready for the concert
8 comments November 5th, 2009
Students often don’t know how to practice music. Many band students who underachieve in music do so because they don’t have specific practice strategies in their toolbox.
Continue Reading Add comment October 29th, 2009
I was recently asked to contribute to the music education portion of the Jemsite blog. Important excerpts are copied below, but I encourage you to read the full post here. You can even purchase guitars and accessories from the site.
I surprised myself a little bit with the honesty with which I answered the last question. Read it through, and see what you think.
Q: You currently teach Beginning Guitar classes in school. What do you teach exactly, especially considering you say you only have a repertoire of about 6 major chords?
A: My guitar repertoire may be larger than six chords, but I am still not a guitarist. Neither was the band director who started that class at that school. But she felt, as I do, that music is not a spectator sport and that every school should provide an inroads into music for every child.
The guitar curriculum for that class requires that by the end of one semester, every student will demonstrate that they can: hold and care for a guitar; tune a guitar; work correct left-hand technique; work both right-hand classical technique and use a pick; read pitches between the low E and high G; read rhythms including whole, half, quarter and eighth notes and rests; read basic tablature; play a melody alone and with a duet partner; play basic major chords alone and accompany a melody; play power chords; compose an original power chord riff; use simple multitrack recording software; and create an arrangement of a song using all of the tools in their toolbox.
Q: What’s the difference between “training” and “education?” Do you think teaching music education is more important than being an actual performer?
A: “Education” differs from “training” in a small but important aspect: process is more important than product. In a training scenario the student learns how to do one thing one way, whereas in an education scenario the student learns the concepts that operate that thing and therefore can apply the knowledge to new situations. A burger flipper in a fast food joint gets trained to toast the buns the same every time, but a chef in a Michelin-rated restaurant should educated in how flour combines with yeast and therefore can create new kinds of breads or adapt to different ovens. In a guitar lesson, a teacher can take one of two strategies: teach the E minor chord and the A minor chord so that the student knows two chords, or teach how minor chords are built so that the student knows every minor chord. Unfortunately, most guitar teachers in the world pander to the lowest common denominator, and teach the student how to play the song (for example, “Today we’re going to play ‘Foxy Lady’. Play this note, then play this note, then play this note…”) rather than teaching the student how to play guitar (for example, “Check out these crazy notes….they are called tri-tones. Here’s how they work, here’s why they sound strange, here’s how to make them yourself. Let’s practice some tri-tones in this song ‘Foxy Lady’.”)
“Music education” isn’t something a guitar teacher would teach. Rather, it is the philosophy with which the guitar teacher approaches the lesson. Surely every guitar student wants to be a performer. The question is, does the student want to perform a limited selection of songs in their bedroom, or does the student want to perform a wide variety of songs, including their own original tunes, on a stage in front of an audience?
Q: You direct the Wind Ensemble, Jazz Ensemble, Concert Band and Rock Band Workshop for an international school in Asia. How are guitar classes currently being integrated into school band/choir programs?
A: Most schools in the U.S. don’t offer guitar. With easy availability of guitar teachers and private guitar lessons outside of school, most districts feel no pressure to add the faculty or spend money on a class set of instruments. Schools that do offer guitar mostly offer it as a one-semester elective, with no opportunity for student to continue after the final exam. This scenario is better than the old-fashioned Music Appreciation class in which student memorized the birth and death dates of Mozart. Some schools with beginning guitar also have an advanced guitar ensemble class so that students can continue indefinitely, gaining more skill and becoming mentors to younger guitar students. Because most music classes in middle and high schools are Band and Choir classes, student who have studied guitar on their own find opportunities to participate in the school Jazz Band. Often these are students who are also singers or wind instrument players who play or sing classical music in the Band or Choir while taking guitar lessons after school.
Q: Do you believe the guitar is a worthwhile instrument amongst school musical performances? Why?
A: Any instrument, and any style of music, is worthy of school music concerts. The point of teaching music in schools is that music (1) is valuable just because it is music, (2) teaches personal and social skills that are critical to young peoples’ success in real life, (3) builds school spirit and community identity, and (4) is fun. Guitar meets these criteria just as well as clarinet, violin and voice do.
Q: Tell me about your Jazz Ensemble and Rock Band Workshops and how guitar comes into play there.
A: I usually have one or two guitar players plus a bass player every year in the Jazz Ensemble. These are typical numbers for a big band (think Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Gordon Goodwin). In fact, my Beginning Guitar class has been an important recruiting tool for the Jazz Band.
Rock Band Workshop is an open-door program, like open-mic afternoon. We have had between two and twelve guitarists show up to any given session. Anyone can come play, whether alone or with a group. We have had singer-guitarists cover Jack Johnson, and we have had six-piece rock bands play Iron Maiden. We even had a solo bassist perform just the bass part of a Slipknot song because she was new to our school and didn’t know any other musicians. At the Workshop that day, she met a metal band who was performing without a bassist. By the next workshop she was in that band, and by the following school year she was in the Jazz Band and the Wind Orchestra. At Workshop, each person/group plays their song and then gets feedback from the guest experts (our school has a shocking number of faculty with serious gig experience) on everything from how to play in time together to how to get the best sound out of their distortion pedal/amplifier combo.
Q: How important is music education in school in determining how a child does in other areas of learning?
A: Research on this question has been huge but inconclusive. We are sure that students who excel in music also excel in other subjects. However, researchers have not been able to show whether this relationship is a cause-effect situation or merely a coincidence caused by another factor. For every study that shows cause-effect, there is another that shows no cause-effect. However, wouldn’t you rather your own child have it than not?
Q: What is the future of music education?
A: The future of music education is in technology, student compositions, and self-directed learning. Guitar and piano will play an increasing role in school music classes as Web 2.0 tools become more commonplace in the classroom. Within the next 30 years, Band class as I know it will lose precedence in school curricula. Chamber music will be more common. The new music class will be more about students recording their own music (on any instrument—guitar, woodwind, brass or otherwise) and distributing it digitally than about large ensembles. Band, Choir and Orchestra will not be forgotten; their excitement, energy, inclusiveness and community ties (not to mention their relationship to sporting events) will keep them active in schools, but as extra-curricular activities rather than as graded classes. Students’ technical performance skills on their chosen instrument will be increasingly measured by computer, giving music teachers more tools for grading technique objectively and for coaching students to more fully create the emotional effects that make classical music so powerful. And finally, within the next 50 years, music will become mandatory in every year of school for every student as new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology will convince school administrators and politicians that music makes definite, measurable improvements in students’ ability to solve problems, mature emotionally, relate to others and generally be successful in life.
3 comments October 26th, 2009
Regardless of your political views (he used to work on Al Gore’s speechwriting team), I think you will find Dan Pink’s TED presentation about motivation to be quite applicable to planning the assessment (and accountability) side of your music program.
The short version: old-fashioned pay-for-performance systems of reward work well for mechanical tasks, but can actually sabotage success during challenges requiring even a smattering of creativity. Tasks requiring creativity, intuition or out-of-the-box thinking (sorry for the pun, it was unavoidable - watch the video) can only be rewarded by their intrinsic value.
What is the catch for conductors of scholastic ensembles? Half of it is simple: points-based evaluation of music performance can only apply to mechanical executions such as scale fingerings, rhythmic accuracy or metronomic measurements of agility. Grading student performances of holistic musical efforts - that is, a piece or excerpt of a piece - cannot be tied to points, grades, rubrics or percentages if the desired outcome includes emotive, artistic performance. This presents a challenge to music educators whom, as a group, are working hard to elaborate systems of musical measurement that can help quantify the unquantifiable for the purpose of report cards. At best, it gives us all permission to stop banging our heads against the brick wall of measuring what we all know to be immeasurable. At worst, it negates all of the psuedo-objective assessment tools we have written, traded with peers, and defended to parents over the last fifty years.
Perhaps the best solution is to go back to giving unapologetically subjective letter grades, given only at the end of the term; but then, how would you communicate (and document that you had communicated) unacceptable progress to students during the term so that they could adjust their efforts? More likely, it supports the current trend of text-based feedback (i.e. comments taking precedence over letter or number grades). Without a doubt, Dan’s data suggest frequent student self-evaluation - supported, I would add, by widespread use of audio- and video-recording technology in the music classroom.
Here, then, is the question of the day: How might a Third-Stream band, orchestra or choir conductor utilize Google-style “Twenty-Percent Time” within the performance-ensemble class?
Add comment October 24th, 2009
Every band, orchestra and choir director needs to be a music advocate. Music educators who are not activists within their community will quickly become ignored, marginalized……and possibly jobless.
Part of the advocacy platform for music in our schools includes “extramusical benefits”. In addition to the inherent, intrinsic and indubitable value of music for the sake of music, the personal and social development of the child is an equally weighty justification for spending those increasingly rare education dollars on oboes, cello cases and choir risers. I am fond of telling school parents (and anyone who will listen, really) that classes in math, science and humanities give young people the resume data to enter a career field after school. On the other hand, I preach, it is music class that gives our young people the real-life skills necessary to excel in their chosen field. In fact, there is significant research that suggests a powerful correlation between social/emotional skills and career success, and only a limited correlation between success and IQ or success and educational credentials. It is precisely these intra-personal and inter-personal skills which music ensembles develop in students that make music so valuable in schools - skills such as self-discipline, work ethic, self-confidence, goal-setting, strategic planning, critical analysis, resilience, teamwork, leadership, etc., etc., etc.
Today I found Travis Norman’s interview with Stacey Marmolejo on the blog of the Institute of Production and Recording. Stacey is the proprietor of the Minnesota locations of the Paul Green School of Rock (the original “school of rock” upon which the Jack Black movie was based). In the interview, Stacey talks about the extramusical ways kids grow during music training. Bravo, Stacey, for delivering the message so eloquently!
A: Of course they’ll learn to become amazing musicians on whichever instrument they select but our program goes well beyond that. We teach kids to play in a band. That means they are learning teamwork, leadership, responsibility and accountability. We teach the kids to entertain people. I tell the kids that if people just want to hear great music they’ll listen to their iPod. People go to live concerts to be entertained. This skill set then translates to their academic life by giving them the confidence to stand in front of their class and give a speech. I frequently hear from parents and students that a teacher at their academic school is amazed at the poise and self confidence of a School of Rock student as compared with their classmates. We teach them how to market themselves. This may sound strange for kids but it’s a great skill set for them to learn. Whether they choose to be a professional musician or pursue any other career, they will have to sell themselves in job interviews, asking for a raise or a promotion or booking their own band’s gig. So we expect the kids to market their own concerts. And it is common for our concerts to draw 500-600 people. The icing on the cake is that great friendships are formed at School of Rock Music. Not only among the students but among the families. We have movie nights and open jams and other fun activities at the school which the kids love because it gives them a chance to just hang out with their friends from the school. And we also hear of families and parents getting together outside of school activities as well. We have a great community of families.
And Stacey’s music education venture is built entirely on powerchords….no Baroque counterpoint required, no graduate degree or professional teaching license needed. If just two fingers on a guitar can do this much for a young person, what can we do with ten fingers on a clarinet? What about four dozen fingers on a quintet of saxophones, or four hundred fingers in a symphonic band?
Every band, orchestra and choir director needs to be a music advocate. Music educators who are not activists within their community will quickly become ignored, marginalized……and possibly jobless. What have you done this week to spread the word about music in your community?
Add comment October 3rd, 2009
I am often the last to hear about hot new goings-on, so I imagine I’m the last to hear about the TED conventions. If you aren’t hip to it, then check out Sir Ken Robinson’s brilliant TED lecture before continuing.
On the one hand, he is right, and all music educators should embrace his message. In fact, each of us should make the video of Sir Robinson’s talk a main tool in our advocacy toolbox. Show a 2-minute snippet to your school board, to prospective Band parents, to every administrator whom you can make watch.
On the other hand, my question today is whether the modern school band (orchestra, choir) program kills creativity. Certainly we, Performing Arts teachers, have the greatest opportunity to develop creativity in students. But do we actually encourage creativity? Do young people harness creative energy while marking time in a 250-person marching block? Do young people feel encouraged to explore while tuning the 3rd of a minor chord in a rehearsal of a large concert choir? How would the typical orchestra conductor react to a second violinist improvising “variations on a theme of Kurt Cobain” during the adagio movement of a symphony?
Before you send hate mail, please recognize that I do promote and will continue to promote large ensembles as an irreplaceable part of the school music experience. But when do student get to explore and experiment? Sure, students must “learn the rules”; but how often do we actually give them opportunities to break the rules, even just for the purpose of finding out what that sounds like? Why would we, when every wasted moment during rehearsal just puts us one step further from winning that superior or sweepstakes rating at competition? The truth is that when the music teacher has no time for student experimentation, music becomes just another mandatory class: solve this equation, read this paragraph, run two laps, play this important musical work.
Therefore, I propose that we make a commitment to wasting some rehearsal time every month. Do your saxophones want to know why the tenors can’t just read the alto part? Let them find out the hard way! Do your trombones want to play “Bubba’s Boogie” repeatedly? Stick them in a practice room and let them repeat it until they start making up their own variations. Do your trumpets want to see how high they can play? Show them Maynard Ferguson, then show them the lung capacity machine and the Arban’s book. Let your beginning band learn “Iron Man” by ear, then have your advanced band write it out in parallel-fifth power chords; you’ll be the coolest teacher in school, and you’ll check off some of those hard-to-approach standards and benchmarks in the process. By letting your students ‘waste’ some time regularly, you will stick concepts in your students’ long-term memories while increasing student ownership of the process of creating music.
You might even have a student grow up to be a famous musician and give you all the credit. It could happen…
Add comment September 1st, 2008