Third-Stream Music Education

Music Scheduling, Part Two

I love this school. Did I mention that yet?

We have the best problem, ever: our class sizes are too small. Thanks to superior funding and real emphasis on student learning from our school board, our school has achieved something in the neighborhood of 9-1 student-teacher ratio. The average class size in the elementary school is (by my very unofficial count) something like 15 students per teacher in grades 1-5; in the high school, advanced courses like IB and AP can have as few as two students and still garner a dedicated teacher, classroom and period. As is predictable from the plethora of class-size research - which is not within the scope of this blog, so I hope you’ll excuse me for avoiding the task of separating the wheat from the chaff - our school excels at boosting student achievement through student-teacher interaction. Our ESL students get dedicated subject help, our small special-needs population gets a specialist-staffed resource center as well as timely and professional status review meetings consistent with the best districts anywhere in the U.S., and behavior issues typically involve academic dishonesty or cursing. Tobacco, alcohol and drugs are simply not an issue on campus (despite the easy availability of just about anything in our host country). I have yet to hear the word ‘fight’ without ‘global warming’.

Who in their sane mind could have a problem with small class sizes?

Well, the music ensemble directors could. Especially when it means that the advanced, performing ensembles (Concert Band, or the newly formed Middle School Choir) are split between four separate periods. Each.

Having a class size of seven students appears to make middle school language arts teachers very happy. However, the middle school music faculty are finding it quite difficult to build rehearsal energy, group sonority, ensemble phrasing and matching interpretation in this setting. The Middle School Concert Band, for example, meets in sections of 19, 11, 7 and 7 students, the first two being eighth grade and the second two being in seventh grade. The seven-student sections of Concert Band each have three flutes, one clarinet, one trumpet, one alto saxophone and one trombone. This is a red-alert according to our ‘peers on like instrument’ measure; but in a performing ensemble the situation adds additional alarm, being that it strips the ‘ensemble’ out of the ensemble class. The music doesn’t make sense to the students as they rehearse it, and they cannot learn how to blend or tune with a group who isn’t there. The band director expends unnecessary energy and concentration singing the missing parts (which, in my case, may qualify as child abuse!) Ergo, in this case, we are asking to be given larger class sizes, especially for the advanced performing groups.

We have been round and round the schedule issue with our Middle School Principal - who, I must say, is the most honestly supportive most willing to listen administrator for whom I have ever worked (and I have worked with some excellent administrators) - but cannot find a fix within the current middle school timetable. Which brings us to the impetus for this post (and its predecessor, ‘Part One’): the Middle School Principal has asked the music department to come up with some suggestions for next year’s music class scheduling.

Join me again next week for Part Three, in which I will (really, this time) include the full text of our submitted document.

Add comment February 27th, 2010

Music Scheduling, Part One

I love this school.

My colleagues and I have been asked by the middle school principal to write out schedule suggestions for next year’s middle school band and choir classes.  There is no promise that we’ll get what we want, but WOW what a refreshing way to do business! This week my colleagues and I have been hammering out multiple plans based on mixed grades, separate grades, mixed instrumentation, separate instrumentation. . . you name it. . . and crunching the related numbers.

I am most proud of our data-driven metrics. We tried to represent our concerns in a systematic way, using data to show the dramatic effect that class makeup has on the classroom environment. Currently having small band classes split into two periods (i.e., fourteen 7th-grade Intermediate Band students scheduled into two sections of seven and seven, with a mixed bag of instruments in each) for the sake of PE and ESL scheduling, we are very concerned with class groupings.

The most important data metric we will rely on in our campaign for music-centric scheduling is “peers on like instrument”, or the number of students in any given class period on a given instrument. For example, in the aforementioned 7th-grade Intermediate Band, which is taught by one of my colleagues, one period has five flutes and the other period has four flutes. The “peers on like instrument” for this situation is essentially an average: n = (5+4) /2 = 4.5 peers on like instrument. The ensemble has two euphonium players, neither of which had ever heard the other until days before the December concert, as they are in opposing periods. Therefore, the 7th-grade Intermediate Band has a “peers on like instrument” score of ‘one’: n = (1+1) /2 = 1 peers on like instrument. It is not surprising that the flute players in this situation feel less exposed and a little more willing to take little risks (go for the high note, go for the 16th notes, etc.) Since the “1″ is not a buddy sitting next to him,  the term “peers” is probably poorly chosen, but it nevertheless gets to the point. In all, the “peers on like instrument” score for our 7th-grade Intermediate Band is currently 1.75. If the two periods were joined (they are the same course, after all) the “peers on like instrument” score would be exactly double, or 3.5.

The “peers on like instrument” is not rocket science, nor will it change the world. My colleagues and I are certainly not statisticians. The “peers” concept is only valid as a comparison, and probably only within one school. It would not help us to compare our 153-student school’s “peers” numbers to those of a AAAAA Texas school (at least not without additional calculation to take the overall enrollment into account). It also doesn’t make me want to add four additional bari saxes to the ensemble out of concern for the existing bari sax player’s feelings. But it does help us get an idea of how an adolescent might feel in one situation versus the other. Remember, after all, that the brain grows wildly in the hypothalamus, or social-emotional area, and largely static (some middle school teachers might even say completely dormant?) in the neocortex, the center of intellectual thought, during the adolescent years. It would be foolish not to take the students’ social experience into account, and the (albeit poor) metric for that would seem to be “peers on like instrument”.

Tune in later this week for Part Two, including the full text of the proposal we sent to admin.

2 comments February 9th, 2010