Instruction Blog

This material is presented in blog form. That is, the most recent entries are at the top of the page.

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1/31/08 - The Process as the Product

Philosophy:
The changes that occur in the brain because of music training are base level changes that do not occur as a result of more thorough understanding.  They are changes that result from a large volume of experiences.  Those experiences "fine tune" the brain in ways that we can predict and anticipate.  With this increased level of understanding, we can structure programs to target and enhance the effect.  (See the most recent research.)

Application:
Students can "experience" music reading and performance years before they are able to understand it.  We can begin "fine tuning" their autonomic brain functions almost as soon as they can speak.  By simulating music reading and performance, students begin to make connections with sound and experience without their understanding of why or how.

At the base level, performing music at sight is:

1. Perceive images and the representation of their relative timing.
2. Interpret those images and their relative timing.
3. Perform the verbal/musical representation of the images in time.

We can simulate this process with the youngest students in our educational settings.  Knowing the fundamental changes that this process can make in human beings and their ability to perceive and respond to language and every aspect of their environment, teachers should repeat this process as frequently as possible with every student under our charge.

1/29/08 - What makes kids smarter?

Philosophy:
The human being is greatly changed by music.  The precise change is a subject of much debate and research.  We are getting closer to determining both the precise cause and the precise object of that change.

The brain stem is that part of the brain that is sometimes considered the primitive brain.  That is, it manages and manipulates those base level functions that are responsible for survival itself.  The brain stem regulates breathing, heart beat, and dozens of other human functions that happen without our consciousness or our willing them to be.  The most recent research indicates that the brain stem is altered through music study.   It is far more active than would be expected during music performance, and trained musicians have capabilities of perception that are not present in their untrained peers.
Application:
Knowing that the brain stem functions as the regulator of autonomic activities, we can assume that trained musicians fine tune the brain stem to more readily accept tasks that are not the vital life-sustaining activities that we thought to be the only fuction of the brain stem.

As music educators, it is important that we teach to automaticity, as Madeline Hunter might say.  That is, we must be sure that each student develops skill levels that are clearly beyond the level that can be attained by conscious activity.  Only then can we be assured that music training is actually changing the nature of the brain's functioning.

The straight line between Point A and Point B is rhythm training. 

1/8/08 - What makes kids smarter?

Philosophy:
There is a particular musical element or combination of musical elements that account for the phenomenon known as "The Mozart Effect."  Should we determine that source of intellectual improvement, we could concentrate our efforts on that source, though the whole of music must always be part of each student's education.

Research will one day point directly to the source of "the Mozart Effect," which was discovered by Gordon Shaw and Frances Rauscher in the last decade of the twentieth century.  As experienced and described by Shaw and Rauscher, the effect is far less certain and "magical" than was later claimed by others.  So research continues, particularly, for this writing, to a 2003 project by  Dr. Rauscher.  (See the 11/26/06 entry below.)  She has attempted to acquire funding for further study on that topic, but those requests have not been granted. But some underlying facts behind the original study are interesting.

I recently contacted Dr. Rauscher and learned that the rhythm study in that project was under the direction of a particular teacher, whom I was also able to contact.  (Her name is not shared here out of respect for her privacy.)  Upon contacting the teacher, I learned that she was also the teacher of the singing class.  We were able to discuss the curriculum of both classes.

I learned that the curricular material was the same in both classes.  They played the same games, sang the same songs, and were identically structured except for the types of correction made by the teacher.  In the singing class, the teacher addressed inaccuracies of pitch and other musical elements that are critical to proper singing.  She did not correct rhythm performance.  In the rhythm class, the teacher corrected rhythm inaccuracies consistently while purposefully ignoring other issues.

By way of reminder, students received one 15 minute lesson per week in the specific area for two years of their enrollment in a Head Start Program.  Lessons were not continued in Grade 1, then the students were tested in Grade 2.  All music students had made gains, but the students who studied rhythm had spatial temporal reasoning understanding and abilities that actually exceeded that of their middle class counterparts.  As you surely know, such music study making so permanent a change in intellectual development is rare.

More contact with both Dr. Rauscher and the teacher is forthcoming.  But the early returns seem to indicate that rhythm may be one of the musical elements with the strongest possibility of making long term intellectual changes in very young students.

12/6/07 - Can instruction model the digital circuit?

Philosophy:
Students are often trapped in an instructional situation that is inappropriate for them.  The material is too demanding to have relevance - or it is too simple to hold their interest. It may be possible to develop instructional situations which allows any number of students to determine their own instructional need and find their own path through the circuitry.

Application:
We have often thought of the computer as a "super brain" that is modeled after the human brain.  Perhaps we are considering that situation exactly backwards from the thought process that would be most helpful to teaching and learning. What if we used a digital circuit as the model for teaching and learning.

If instruction were engaging enough to hold every student's interest, it might be possible to offer a variety of instructional circuits through which each student's brain might navigate. In such a model, the student must be able and willing to provide the power that operates the circuitry and that is the primary criterion for this sort of instructional process. Without that, the circuitry is worthless because there is no "voltage" moving through it.

But assuming engagement, multi-faceted instruction may provide for every possible instructional need in a single lesson, instructional experience, or process that engages students for indefinite periods of time. In such instruction, several criterion are required:

1. Teachers must assume the role of power provider.  As such, the teacher abdicates the long held position of information provider and becomes the motivator, encourager, and even cheerleader.
2. It must be impossible for a student to get lost or irretrieveably seperated from the instructional sequence that the entire class experiences.
3. Each instructional unit must include incremental development of the knowledge base and continuous review. These must occur simultaneously and continuously. 
4. Teachers and students must be aware of positive and negative events within each student's performance that "closes circuits" that are too complex and "opens circuits" that are appropriate to the learning level.
5. It must be possible for any student to move freely among several levels of circuitry.
6. • Remediation - Students must be able to begin learning at any time that they become involved and enthusiastically engaged
   • • Students must have unlimited opportunities to experience the process that is likely to result in mastery attainment
   • Reinforcement - Students must be able to review and practice newly learned skills.
   • Advancement - Students must be able to move into a new level of learning when mastery of previous learning occurs.
   •  Enrichment - Students must be able to deepen the learning experience at any time mastery and engagement encourage them to do that.
   • Self-selection - From subconscious selection of practice as the current need to the purposeful attempt of something new, students must be able to move among the many levels of learning without action, announcement, or notice by anyone else.

10/20/07 - Visual vs. Aural - is there a conflict?

Philosophy:
Marching band performance draws out an interesting instructional dichotomy. The ensemble is spread so far across the field that they can't hear everyone else. That fact causes directors to say many or all of the following:

"Don't depend on your ears, depend on your eyes."

"Don't listen, watch the Drum Majors."

"Watch - don't listen!"

The result is that there are many marching band performances in which the concept of ensemble is absent. The students perform exactly as instructed, but the music suffers. The tuning, precision, and consistency of style do not demonstrate the skills that these students possess and would naturally use in the rehearsal hall. There must be an alternative set of instructions that would result in a better performance.

Application:

It is equally important to use ensemble skills in marching band and concert performance. The difference is that the spacing of the ensemble emphasizes the importance of visual tempo cues. Nevertheless, ensemble skills must be taught by the marching band director, and those skills must be used by the students if the band is to have a unified sound. So how do we explain what we want the students to do?

"Watch for tempo!"  (That is the only way we can stay together when we are spread from 20 to 20.)

"Listen for ensemble!"  (We must still play in tune, play the same style, and lock in the precision.)

"If there is a choice to be made, play confidently and insistently with the Drum Majors."  (That will alert those around you that they must watch for tempo as well. As soon as the tempo is re-established and in agreement with the Drum Majors, return to listening to those near you as you watch to be sure you stay with the Drum Majors.)

The result is a balance between the two, but the balance shifts many times in the course of a rehearsal, and sometimes in a performance. The ideal is for every player to watch all the time so that no one is ever out of time with that tempo authority. While doing so, every player is also listening to everyone they can hear to ensure balance and blend, stylistic consistency, accurate tuning, and the highest level of precision.

It is only when the ensemble - or part of an ensemble - is not with the Drum Majors that the balance shifts toward watching as the urgent and most important task. Making that point clear would clarify obvious misunderstanding about how to make beautiful music in marching band performance.

10/18/07 - Arts Integration

Philosophy:
Surely the natural process by which we learn to walk and talk is among the best models available to educators. That process is simple and straight forward. There is little or no technical analysis or computation of the physics involved. Nor is there extensive instruction. We have a model or many models from which to learn, and then we simply try as many times as it takes for us to learn the required skill.

We would even think it silly if someone were to suggest a lock step process of learning to walk, or a "by-the-book" curriculum for learning our native language. Those in a position to teach us adopt a very simple and time-tested fail-safe instructional method. They expose the student to the demand and encourage every attempt until the student learns to walk and talk.

As far as possible, we should mimic that means in teaching critical skills to our students.

Application:

What a wonderful formula for learning. Try until you succeed. The unspoken understanding is that we even get encouragement every time we fall down. Someone who is much larger patiently sets us aright and gives another tender push to propel us toward the next calamity.

How long do we get to fail before it is assumed that we will never learn? Except for the profoundly disabled, every parent of every child assumes that the toddler will fall as many times as it takes to learn to stay upright. The result is that almost everyone on the planet learns to walk. The formula must be magic. And so it is.

In teaching music, we provide instruction - usually in carefully stated detail - then ask for the performance. We don't expect immediate success. But neither do we have unlimited patience. Our sense of perfectionism requires that we assert that high standard very early. Students who reach perfection (or its near relative, excellence) on our schedule are those with whom we continue to work. We tailor future lessons to be sure they progress. We reach back to those who are nearing excellence, and perhaps we stretch a bit farther to catch a few students who are on the margins. But we soon lose the ability to allow for unlimited attempts. Those who don't succeed at the required level are discouraged from further bold attempts. If they can continue to try at a level of timidity that ensures their invisibility, we tolerate them. If they can't do so, we find ways to eliminate them from the ensemble completely - or at least from the sound of the ensemble. Many public school rehearsals are solely dedicated to that task.

The perfection of our instructional methods requires that we modify our techniques to allow each student the following prerogatives:

• Each student may...

• Each student must be encouraged to move among those instructional alternatives at will and even unconsciously from within the rehearsal (classroom) environment.

RhythmBee provides precisely that set of opportunities. While an ensemble or class is performing a RhythmBee unit, student levels of competence vary widely. Some are pushing ahead to develop advanced skills including leadership, some are practicing the most recently learned skill, some are participating at a minimal level while they seek to grasp the latest learning. And because no student can get lost, each participant gets to make hundreds of attempts in each class period.

Some students will perform consistently in only one of those stages of learning. Others will move freely among them many times in any given lesson. The result is that every student gets to try until they succeed, fail and try again, eventually arrive at a high level of achievement, and develop great confidence, leading to rhythmic fluency.

10/14/07 - Arts Integration

Philosophy:
The arts have a marvelous benefit for all involved. The teacher of the arts knows that the students benefit immeasurably, but it is increasingly difficult to prove the worth of arts education in a high stakes testing environment. Arts education must find another means of making itself worthy of respect.

Application:

Objective measures are the only respectable means of evaluating instructional effectiveness. In a high stakes testing environment, those measures are applied only to the traditional "core curriculum" subjects of language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science. Arts education will be evaluated on its ability to impact the assessment results in those subjects.

To claim proprietary territory in the high stakes testing neighborhood, arts education must prove itself invaluable. Many educators and legislators deem arts education helpful, encouraging, supportive, and reinforcing of the core, but only arts educators consider it invaluable. How would an arts education movement set about to purposefully make itself invaluable? The past and current efforts at supporting the core prove little. Although we claim to be important participants in the instructional partnership, the objective evidence is inconclusive at best because we focus on simultaneous support of the core.

To become invaluable to the process, we must anticipate the core curriculum through a practice that I shall call "Anticipatory Integration." With such a strategy, arts instruction will lead the core curriculum by taking responsibility for learning readiness in every possible area. That is, each arts discipline would teach arts objectives at grade level while introducing and providing practice at grade level plus one in every possible topic of the core curriculum.

The objective of Anticipatory Integration is for core teachers and all administrators to be surprised at the readiness and prior knowledge with which students enter each grade level. Because of that increased readiness, students would succeed at higher levels in the high stakes testing game. Knowing the reasons for the higher scores, core curriculum teachers would provide objective evidence about the value of arts education when organized as Anticipatory Integration.

Such results comprise the essential element that is heretofore absent from the list of advantages attributed to arts education. Until we stake out such proprietary territory, we can expect to be thought of as nice, but not essential.

1/1/07 - Multiple Learning Opportunities

Philosophy:
Every student deserves multiple opportunities to learn music. But in the common methods of teaching rhythm, many students hear and understand the instruction but get lost as soon as we start the ensemble rhythm practice. They hear the correct performance by the ensemble, but after the first note, they don't know what symbol on the page goes with the syllables they are hearing.

The rhythm drill and practice is successful to our ears because we hear the students who get it and assume that it is a full ensemble effort. We often don't know that the very students who need it most did not get it and are lost and hiding in the safety of the ensemble. The teacher must direct the drill and practice and cannot be in close proximity to students to realize that many are not participating. The instruction passes over the heads of many students, and they get sorted out of our programs.

In the final analysis, they had one chance to learn the material before performing it. They could not succeed, and we had no means of providing multiple learning opportunities.

Application:
The automated instruction of the RhythmBee program gives every student hundreds of opportunities to learn in each minute of instruction. Their eyes are guided through the drill and practice pieces while they hear the students around them performing accurately. The opportunities to correctly associate the syllables with the symbols are endless - and every student learns to count.

It is literally impossible for students to be lost for more than 1/2 beat.

11/28/06 - Performing with students in rehearsal
Philosophy:

Sometimes, we convince ourselves that the students are performing well because of conditions that do not involve the students:

1. Following a score too closely to listen carefully can convince us that the score is being performed well regardless of what is actually happening.
2. Performing with the students can convince us that the students are getting it and performing well, when we are really assessing our own effort and understanding and are not really hearing the students well at all.

Although it feels good to perform with the ensemble, and it may be helpful to those very near us, it is impossible that a teacher who is performing with the ensemble can hear the entire ensemble as well as if he were quiet and listening intently.

Application:

Demonstrate as a soloist - conduct and listen (or just listen) when the ensemble performs. That is vital assessment time and should be dedicated to listening and planning the best possible strategy for further development of the musicians or the ensemble.

Never (almost never)perform with your students.

The practice of listening intently and not performing when students perform is especially important when the ensemble is counting aloud to demonstrate rhythmic understanding.

11/26/06 - Rhythm Instruction is the Magical Brain-builder in Music Instruction.

Philosophy:

A considerable body of research is developing to point to the element of music that is responsible for the much-touted "Mozart Effect" and other similar brain-building effects of music. In many ways, the result is logical, since one of the primary claims is that music accelerates the development of spatial-temporal reasoning. Dr. Frances Rauscher has documented that low SES (socio-economic status) students who have regular instruction in rhythm surpass low SES groups who study singing, piano, and computers in the development of spatial-temporal reasoning. Of course, all of those groups surpass control groups who receive no instruction.

But an additional surprise has emerged from this study. Dr. Rauscher has found that the low SES students who studied rhythm equaled and even surpassed the spatial-temporal achievement of middle class students after a two year period of instruction.

To understand the previously mentioned logic of this outcome, we must realize the meaning of spatial-temporal reasoning. That term refers to the ability to determine the future state of objects after specific manipulations are performed on them. One of the situations that is often cited is the ability to determine the shape of a piece of paper after certain designs are cut out of a folded sheet.

First of all, let's realize that rhythm notation is nothing more than a highly detailed time line. The facile rhythm reader is able to predict the precise events that will occur at each point along the time line.

Secondly, we can say that to perform that notation is to place events (sounds) into physical form at precise points which correspond to the prediction. With those two facts in mind, it is easy to imagine that consistent instruction and practice of rhythm performance could result in a marked increase in spatial temporal reasoning.

Application:

Make full use of the "Mozart Effect" and similar claims for music instruction by teaching rhythm performance every day.

11/18/06
Philosophy:

It is vital that every performance based class have the following:

1. An awareness of what excellence looks, feels, and sounds like.
2. A consistent (daily) experience of performing at high levels of excellence.
3. Confidence that excellence is attainable in simple and complex performance tasks.

We often neglect this important aspect of daily ensemble experience. It might be said with some confidence that an ensemble cannot progress from 100% mediocre performance habits to a completely excellent performance. Learners need the frequent experience of excellence in some form so that the habit of quality performance is in place and in the process of being nurtured and solidified in every ensemble rehearsal.

Application:
Use high level execution of simple tasks to remind the ensemble what excellence is like. That must include posture, instrument position, rehearsal procedures, and all other physical mechanics of performance. Any ensemble can perform all of these daily tasks as well as the best ensemble on the planet. Unless quality is maintained in each of those areas, it is impossible that the ensemble will accomplish high levels of music performance.

Other simple performance tasks that can be consistently performed with excellence include the warm-up, a traditional chorale, the school song, the Star Spangled Banner, and any other selection that has to be in constant readiness.

Unless we keep those simple tasks at a consistently high level of quality, it is impossible that more complex ones will ever arrive at that point.

10/31/06
Philosophy:

When we are in the mode of "drive-by teaching," we often fire a parting shot. That is, we hear the ensemble perform a given passage, scale, or exercise, and we notice something that should be better. So we say, "Be sure to play A-flat in the third measure," or some other corrective comment. Then in the same breath, "Get up your contest music," or other instructions to move on to the next task. Of course, the "parting shot" rarely has any effect at all.

Furthermore, what message do we send to the students through this practice? Here are some possibilities:

1. That was not correct, but it is not important enough to work on.
2. That was not correct, but it won't help to work on it.
3. I know you are not capable of paying it correctly, but I absolve myself of responsibility. After all, "I told them!"
4. You don't have to play correctly, because I won't really insist that you do.

So, what benefit is derived from the practice of firing a parting shot?

1. Uhhhh . . .
2. Then there's . . .
3. Let's see . . .

Application:

To develop a student-teacher relationship of integrity and consistent insistence on quality performance, we must always hold them to the highest standard we can imagine, and we must always be truthful. That means we should:

1. Raise issues when we have the time to insist that they demonstrate accurate performance.
2. Address every performance task with a determination to help our students conquer that task.

An appropriate motto might be:

Unless I am willing to help them fix it right now, I won't bring it up.

10/28/06
Philosophy:It is important that simple concepts establish a basis for learning. That is - learners must be comfortable with certain fundamentals in order to learn other concepts which expand on the fundamentals.

Addition is a base on which learning multiplication is built.

Nouns are a base on which learning proper nouns and pronouns can be built.

Weight is a base on which learning about gravity can be built.

It seems that being comfortable with rhythm concepts is a base on which many performance goals can be built. Reports from across the RhythmBee world indicate that students who spend time working on RhythmBee alone find it easier to grasp the concepts involved in learning to play an instrument. Now how would that work?

1. We know that the brain cannot think of two things at once.
2. We often ask them to read music as soon as they can make a sound, which is asking them to do strange activities and read mysterious signs.
3. If they have become accustomed to reading rhythms when they begin to play, one of the mysteries is removed, and the brain can concentrate on the remaining demands.

Seeing RhythmBee units, which make it impossible to mistake the proper performance of written music; students are comfortable learning one new skill (playing).

Application:
Allow students to become comfortable with RhythmBee before they even have their instruments. Get as far as you can so that the students feel comfortable with printed music.

With this strategy, when you introduce the beginner book, it will seem familiar because the visuals are things they already know.

10/7/06
Philosophy:

There was a time when a subject matter authority was indispensable to the education of every student. The facts were unavailable to common citizens without extensive research requiring travel to original sources or to centers of learning where research was possible. So a teacher was important to convey information and to organize and present that information.

The internet and other technology applications have changed the world of education in ways that are not reflected in our practices.

• We consider ourselves the only means that students have to acquire basic information.

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• We continue to stand before students and impart raw information that they can acquire in a variety of ways within and without the classroom.
• We continue to organize information as though there were no other sources, and we approach students in the mode of eighteenth and nineteenth century educators.
• We ignore the learning enhancements that are well-documented when we consider and focus on relationships, modes of learning, and adjustments to the "tried and true" methods of our predecessors.

• We offer the static and immutable printed page as the primary bridge between ourselves and our students.
• We perform many functions which can easily and more efficiently be performed by technology, thus freeing the teacher to observe and assess each student while building strong student-teacher relationships that can accelerate learning.
• We see ourselves as the "Sage on the Stage" when we should assume the role of the "Best Ears in the Room."

Application:
We must find ways to assess every student every day. With technological advances, that is possible in these earliest days of the twenty-first century. Here are some suggestions:

1. Use every available means - including personal determination - to get off the podium so we can teach among the students. (In 2006, students can even learn to follow a conductor without ever seeing a live person in front of them.)
2. Hold every child accountable while developing relationships that encourage every student to succeed rather than causing them to fail.
3. Set the goal of assessing (not necessarily grading) every student every day. Goals are not always achieved, but we always achieve more with a goal than without.
4. Ask for small achievable improvements with short and concise requests.
5. Have a colleague time your rehearsal to determine what percentage of rehearsal is spent in performance. "Performance" is anything but silence and the teacher talking. You will be shocked how little time your students spend performing!
6. Investigate every possible technological advance that is pertinent to your subject matter. My favorites are SmartMusic, and, of course, RhythmBee.
7. Consider yourself the highly trained professional ears rather than the all-wise mouth.

9/22/06
Philosophy:

You may enjoy this more if you begin at paragraph 6. Paragraphs 1-5 provide background logic that many will not appreciate.

In teaching, we must analyze what we want and, sometimes, we have to prioritize among many results that we seek. For instance, we want to teach our students music, and we want to teach them to be productive citizens and persons of honor, high character, and spotless integrity. If we place music above the character traits, we would organize our activities in a certain way. If we place those personal traits above teaching music, we would organize differently, tolerate or be intolerant of different activities, and develop a grading system that reflects such a decision.

Within the category of teaching music, we must also distinguish among various music skills and understandings. For instance, some teachers concentrate on theory and history far above performance. Others see performance as the end-all of their duties. And, of course, there are gradations through the continuum that links those two extremes.

Within the performance priority, we have to decide among several goals that we would establish within that objective. We can choose to concentrate on tone, technique, tuning, articulation, and many other skills that we wish for our students to demonstrate. We would all hope to balance those successfully, though each of us would choose a different specific balance as the ideal. That choice would depend on our own philosophical notions as well as on our skills of perception and our personal musical tastes. As responsible teachers, we should also set priorities about the timing and circumstances under which we want to hear our students demonstrate mastery.

Many times, we are short-sighted in the establishment of our performance goals. It is easy to convince ourselves that we must do whatever it takes to help our students perform accurately at each moment in our interaction with them. This is an admirable mind set, but in its extreme, we resort to rote teaching, which encourages the opposite of music literacy. Well before we engage in rote teaching, we may find several practices that are immediately fulfilling, but do not demonstrate the highest ideals to which all music educators should aspire. One of those practices involves the over-use of a metronome in music ensemble training. (Incidentally, metronome has only one "n" and two "m's.")

A metronome is a wonderful invention, and it should be used daily in the practice room for development of technique and establishing a steady sense of pulse for drill and minute tempo progression. But it can be - and often is - greatly over-used. When we do that, we unwittingly train our students that the authoritative tempo for ensemble performance is from an aural cue. In large ensemble performance, that is rarely the case. In small ensembles, the authoritative tempo is a melding of that which each of the ensemble members feels internally. Communication about that tempo is constant and, in highly trained ensembles, almost at the subconscious level. When a member departs from the tempo of the ensemble, aural skills pull that member back into the "correct" tempo. That authoritative tempo is internal to the ensemble and is constantly being negotiated. When the ensemble is large enough to have a conductor, the authoritative tempo is that which the conductor communicates to the ensemble with hands or a baton. Ensemble skills are still very important, and should be taught as one of the most critical elements of music literacy.

Paragraph 6
Performing in a large ensemble does not vest the authority for the tempo in the ensemble members as in a small ensemble. The tempo authority of a large ensemble is the conductor, and the tempo cue is almost always visual with aural skills playing a secondary, though highly important, role in the establishment and maintenance of ensemble tempo. We all agree that we ultimately want our students to watch for the proper tempo, so it is interesting that we persist in using a metronome as the tempo authority in the early stages - and sometimes the later stages - of ensemble development.

The metronome sound allows and encourages young students to bury their eyes in the music at that time in which they are establishing habits they will use for the rest of their lives. We gravitate to and depend on the metronome because it gets immediate results and causes us to think we are successful. Later, we often find that such feelings are evidence or our successfully providing a crutch rather than successfully building student musicianship. That realization may hit when we begin to ask our students to depend on a conductor as the tempo authority after months or even years of teaching them to listen for the tempo. Unfortunately, the first event at which we attempt this change of tempo emphasis is usually within a week of the first large ensemble performance. Rather than analyzing why our plan doesn't work, we resort to extreme measures as the survival instinct takes over and we struggle to put a reputable performance before the adoring parents.

In most programs, we never really break the dependence on the aural tempo cue that we established in the beginning year. That can be observed most in high school band and orchestra rehearsals when impatient conductors, with emphatic gestures and verbal creativity bordering on sarcasm, stress the importance of watching.

So we spend a full year or more teaching them to listen for the tempo and the next five or more years trying to get them to watch for the tempo.

Application:

Every student should own a metronome for practice at home. Sometimes, we should turn on the metronome in a large ensemble rehearsal so that we develop technique, facility, internal pulse, etc. with absolute certainty that the tempi are accurate. But we should realize that a metronome builds individual capacity, but it may inhibit ensemble development. Surely there is a better way.

With technology, ensemble training need not depend on a tempo cue upon which we do not want our students to become dependent. RhythmBee has developed Maestronome, a virtual conductor, so that the director - from anywhere in the room - can establish any tempo in any time signature with a visual cue. Other visual tempo cues are and will be available. Whatever the source, students can learn to depend on visual tempo cues from the first day of their secondary music experience.

What would it be like to have a full band or orchestra that had never known any means of ensemble performance other than watching a conductor?

9/17/06
Philosophy:

Imagine that becoming musically literate is like working a jigsaw puzzle. There are shapes of the pieces, colors, and the minute gradations of colors and patterns that are clues to the proper position of each piece. The puzzle picture is not attainable without considering all of those factors.

If a puzzle had randomly shaped pieces and no interlocking features, we could group the colors. We could even line up the changes of color and the obvious patterns. But the nuance and fine definition of the picture would be impossible to put together, much less distinguish. Having grouped the colors, etc. we would still not have anything we could enjoy viewing. We would quickly lose interest and find another way to engage our minds and pass the time.

Too often, we consider - and try to teach - tonal color and harmonic detail without insisting that the students master the concept of interlocking puzzle pieces (rhythm reading). When we teach tonal matters without also insisting on the mastery of rhythm reading, we may eliminate from our program those students with little ability to perceive and grasp aural nuance. And at the earliest stages of our secondary music programs, that is most of the students, because those aural skills can be highly developmental. That is - those perceptions are not present and/or easily taught in our younger (least developed) students.

On the other hand, rhythm is more easily perceived and grasped by every student. It is kinesthetic - a physical event - that we all feel and enjoy. It is closer to our immediate level of awareness, so learning it is appropriately challenging. Rhythm reading is much like solving a puzzle or working a math problem. In fact, when taught as a skill - like walking, tying your shoes, writing your name, etc. - rhythm mastery is something that every student can acquire. In so doing, they are likely to become "hooked" on music because music notation is no longer mysterious and undecipherable. If they can easily perform the rhythm of a tune at sight, they can dedicate their curiosity and mental energy to the tonal issues on the printed page. If rhythm continues to be a mystery, we must learn to tolerate the question and prepare to answer when asked, "How does this go?"

Application

Rhythm reading should be the musical element about which we are most persistent and least patient. Every student can learn to perform rhythms correctly at sight. When taught in a carefully sequenced program which makes us of the physical nature of rhythm, every student can succeed. And we all know that student success means higher levels of retention in our music programs.

9/16/06
Philosophy:

The teaching profession is such an interesting one. We have a very practical and indispensable job to do. So there is a lot of physical activity that requires great energy. But each and every action is so important that careful thought should precede its doing so that there is reason, purpose, and an end goal that warrants the high-level of activity.

One of the challenges facing every teacher is student engagement. In fact, it is likely the most important precursor to our success as teachers and the most challenging problem we must solve to be successful. In this age of video and instant everything, conventional techniques and methods may not be sufficient to offer every student a reasonable opportunity to be a successful musician.

Our students deserve our thoughtful consideration of every available instructional method.

Application:
It is important to notice who is "getting it" using the present method of instruction (whatever that may be).

Often, we become wrapped up in the whole so that we don't notice that we are really engaging in "drive-by teaching." That is, we spray our instruction at the target and do not notice when it sticks with only a few because we are on to the next instruction before we assess the result. We must develop a means of frequent (daily) individual rhythm assessment at the earliest stages so that we know two things:

1. How effective is our instruction?

2. Who are the kids that we are really engaged in this all-important instruction?

And the follow-up question must be:

What happens to the other students?