Reflection: Choir Rehearsal

          The other week, I was fortunate to participate in a mock choir rehearsal for my Methods class. Though I did not actually take part in leading the rehearsal, it was clear what worked and what did not work as I watched several of my colleagues take the reigns.

          First and foremost, it is imperative to have confidence over the rehearsal, and to let your students witness that confidence control the classroom atmosphere. That needs to be consistent and established as soon as possible. Students will follow your lead if you give them a reason to, but if the educator seems unsure or (in Charlie Brown terms,) "wishy-washy" in their methods, then it is difficult to express all the knowledge you have acquired with the constant loom of students second-guessing you over your head.

          The notes Prof. Schneider gave us in terms of keeping time with "snaps" or though hand-conducting were extremely helpful, as I was able to clearly hear the difference in articulation from the choir. Snapping the beat subconsciously caused us to put a heavy accent on the beginnings of our solfege syllables, while hand-conducting made us naturally sing with even intonation and much more legato. The exercises we did with our hands as we sang were also useful, along the same principles - expressing the contour with more elaborate and "three-dimensional" hand motions had a notable impact on opening our voices and "singing out," resulting in a more sustained tone.

          In all, I would definitely say there is more than meets the eye when it comes to employing choir methods. There was certainly a lot that I never thought about on the subconscious level - subtle tactics that contribute on a much larger scale when it comes to getting the sound you want out of your ensemble. I hope to apply these principles in my own teaching, not only with choir but to instrumental ensembles as well.

A New Way For A New World: Why Music Educators Must Embrace Technology

                Taking into account all of my students in both private and public settings, most of them are between the ages of eight and thirteen – born directly into what scholars are currently referring to as, “The Information Age.” As far as most of them are concerned, the internet has always been there, no different from the sun and the moon, a household utility that is no more foreign than turning on a faucet or opening a refrigerator. I remember life without the internet or cell phones. I remember going to school without those things, where in music class, the best we could do in an elementary setting was sing around the music teacher’s piano and participate in the occasional school play. If we wanted to learn an instrument, we needed to take private lessons at home – there was nothing for us at the school due to a lack of resources… and of course, a lack of technology.

                It is hard to imagine a lack of technology in the classroom today, yet my “prehistoric” elementary education still exists, to a degree, in many classrooms across the country. Technology is certainly a game-changer, distinguishing the quality of education from school to school. You can argue that the genesis of its merger with public music education was Bob Moog’s development of the Mini-Moog synthesizer in 1970 – a portable music-making machine with a built-in piano keyboard. This portable device could only sound one key at a time, but its mass manufacturing opened the door for more and more companies to produce their own built-in keyboard models. Note velocity was implemented in 1975, and a few short years later, 5-voice polyphony. These keyboards became more and more like a miniature piano, and more accessible for a younger generation.

Today, an ideal general music classroom in a public setting would allow an electronic midi keyboard for each student to work on. “Technology allows us to teach students with very little musical background by having them create music and compose music,” says Barbara Freedman, the music director at Greenwich High School in Greenwich, CT. “It allows us to take them through the process of understanding music and what goes into creating music – like harmony, melody, and rhythm. It’s applied learning. They apply themselves to the practice by actually composing.” Indeed, in today’s world, we must start to abandon the aesthetic approach championed by Bennett Reimer and move closer towards David Elliott’s praxial philosophy, which states that the process of learning music must involve hands-on experience. We need not only for students to read about music, but actually, physically, do what musicians do – practice and perform. Implementing technology, such as having a keyboard for each student, allows us as educators to better realize this mission.

But technology in the eyes of the students means something much different than keyboards, or for that matter, discovering a more potent educational method. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, Pinterest… what is it about these mediums that appeal to us? What is the one common thread that they all have in common?

They allow us to share.

We share pictures and videos. We share our feelings, and our fears, and our opinions. And on all of these websites, we have the ability to share music. It seems all too simple now: we’re teaching a unit on Indonesian gamelan, of course our students need to hear how this sounds! And so we type it into Google, click on one of hundreds of video links, pick the highest quality sample, and play it loudly for the class, and all of that just took less than 11 seconds. This was not possible a few measly decades ago, and what an advantage this is for us today! A world of information, a few keystrokes away… so why do we still have music educators in this very country – in this very state! – that resent this technology? I understand old-school methods, and I understand the phrase, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” But 40 years ago, if music educators were given the opportunity to make anything they want happen in a classroom happen, with little to no effort, wouldn’t they jump onto that opportunity? In other words, if the technology existed at the time, they would have used it. There’s just no way they wouldn’t – it would be a clear disservice to deny students an obvious advantage to learning the subject.

Music educators today must be on board with technology. We must embrace it fully, and we must embrace the aspect that pulls our students in in the first place – the ability to share music. Have students write and share their compositions. Have students share music relevant to that day’s lesson. Have students write about the music they hear on blogs, and share their posts with their class to get feedback. Have students record their auditions, and concerts, and recitals on video and post them so that we may all see, hear, and offer our own contributions in order to build progress within ourselves. I could go on. There’s such a plethora of opportunity to take advantage of, and a few short decades from now, those opportunities could double, triple, quadruple even. Technology may grow exponentially, and so we must always adapt and utilize whatever is available to us, so that our future generations of students may truly receive the best education they could possible receive.

Links to relevant articles:

https://thejournal.com/articles/2010/10/01/how-music-teachers-got-their-groove-back-music-instruction-goes-digital.aspx

http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA90832478&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=fulltext&issn=00274321&p=AONE&sw=w&authCount=1&isAnonymousEntry=true

http://www.mv.helsinki.fi/home/hruismak/julkaisut_files/The_new_horizonts_for_music_technology.pdf

Rubrics, Assessment, and The Art of Original Thought

            If we’re talking about grades and rubrics and assessment, let’s make one thing clear: there is no perfect setup for all of this. One may never even come to exist in any of our lifetimes. Unless we had a device that allowed us to peer into our students’ brains and see, in clear and precise terms, just how much critical thinking and motivation went into their assignments, and how much effort they honestly put into their work, and their desire to engage the topic at hand and learn more about it, and their passion for all learning, and their drive to succeed in the world, etcetera, etcetera, then a “perfect” result simply won’t happen. Period.

            And that’s because we’re always going to run into problems with assessing accurately what students really know. Most hard-working students who normally receive excellent marks in school serve only to please the opinions (and therefore, the rubrics and grading systems) of their teachers, and of course therein lies a crucial dilemma: if students are just “saying what we want to hear,” then how on Earth can we ever know for sure what their OWN opinions on our assignment was? Think about it like this: we can create an “assignment” telling a student to write how sorry they were that they punched another student in the face, and then we create a nice little rubric explaining what a “4” is (Insightful ideas! Impeccable grammar! Compelling prose!) and what a “2” is (Slightly generic! Missed a bunch of commas! Formatting needs work!) which is all neat and good. And maybe the student turns in a terrific 3-pager that earns him a nice “4” as well. And we take that “4” and mark it down and after we go home that day, our conclusion is that our student truly learned the error of his ways and that he was very sorry for punching Ted in the face.

            Wait a minute – do we really know for sure that he was sorry, or did we base that assumption over an assignment? But he got a “4” on it, didn’t he? How could he have gotten a “4” if he didn’t really learn anything? But then we think on it for a second and realize why this is so… haven’t we, in the past, achieved good grades on assignments from middle school, or high school, or even undergrad, when we know deep down that we didn’t really get anything out of the lesson? Weren’t there times (and be honest with yourselves!) that we went ahead and “phoned in” an assignment once or twice? Now, it doesn’t mean we didn’t give a true and conscious effort – we did every time – but we all know when we learned something and when we didn’t. I used to get all A’s in high school chemistry assignments, and I aced the midterm, and the final exam, and today I don’t know one thing about chemistry. Not one thing!

            And maybe you can argue that I simply forgot what I had learned, but that I had learned it in the first place at some point, so it counts. But if that’s the case, how do I still have all 50 states memorized in alphabetical order from learning that song in 1^st grade? And how can I rattle off all 23 helping verbs flawlessly 15 years after I initially learned them? We all know the answer – some things we really, truly learned, and others we threw in our short term memory bank (just long enough to spew an assortment of facts and tidbits out on the final exam) just to delete them shortly afterwards. No rubric in the world can accurately say for sure things we learned and will keep, and things we put in a big box to junk later.

            So is that really a problem, though? A good teacher would think so. After all, our job is to teach so that students learn, and when students learn, they can use the knowledge they learned in their lives effectively. They can keep our lessons forever, to help them grow, to make them smarter, to allow them to pass on this knowledge to future generations after we’re all dust. Isn’t that what this whole thing is about in the first place? Teachers teach things to pass them on to future generations – if no one is really learning this stuff, but merely pretending, then our descendants can potentially lose out on a lot of information! Thousands of years’ worth!

            I guess that’s a slight problem with Alfie Kohn’s article, a lot of which I admittedly agreed with – there is a problem with traditional grading and rubrics, after all. But the author’s entire article was nothing more than an elaborate complaint. It was a lot of buildup with no endgame – obviously it was written primarily to spark more curiosity over the subject, but nonetheless, I believe there were a great number of people who expected a more definitive answer to the critiques than we were given.

            ”Neither we nor our assessment strategies can be simultaneously devoted to helping all students improve and to sorting them into winners and losers.  That’s why we have to do more than reconsider rubrics.  We have to reassess the whole enterprise of assessment, the goal being to make sure it’s consistent with the reason we decided to go into teaching in the first place.” - Alfie Kohn

            So what’s the solution, then? We need to do more than fix our rubric system, and I agree with that, but if one has the wherewithal to compose such an argument, he or she in the very least should propose some sort of amendment, right? Kohn dances around giving us an idea, but for some reason avoids doing so. If one sees a problem with something in the world (social injustice, for example) then typically we immediately begin to work out a counter in our heads (the old, “Well, if I were in charge, boy let me tell you, things would change around here!” routine.)

            But on the other hand, I suppose it’s okay that Kohn could not offer up any proposition to fix our assessment problem, considering a solution does not exist right now. The fact that the author is so harshly critical of the system did imply that there may be some idea cooking, but the bottom line is this: aspects like intelligence, critical thinking, willingness, effort, passion, motivation, and inspiration were not meant to have a numerical value. You can’t give someone a 6 out of 11 on their individual drive to succeed, or a 92% on proper utilization of knowledge outside the classroom under no surveillance. And I don’t know what kind of assessment models I’d use in my classroom, either, because there are no current models I’m even satisfied with at the moment, precisely due to the numerous reasons Kohn gave in his article. They simply aren’t accurate, and I’m not going to just pick one to satisfy all the requirements of the assignment, either – after all, that would be me telling somebody else what they want to hear, rather than giving my own, honest opinion on the matter (a problem we are actively trying to solve!) And when traditional grading and rubrics dominate the overall mindset of the classroom, that is exactly what we’ll lose – the real voices of our students.

Link to Alfie Kohn's article: http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/trouble-rubrics/