Video and Blogging

I finally gave up and posted the video’s I promised the kids unedited. Editing video can be a full time job! Clearly the sound could be better, and as a music educator I know that, but I also have a life of my own.  Video is linked under Music K-7. Enjoy.

I’m also getting ready to help one of our French Immersion classes get ready to learn about blogging so they can share with a class in France.  My initial thought was that I should set the blog up in French, but then I realized I wouldn’t be much help to the teacher. For now it’s in English, I imagine we can switch the language as we get used to the interface.

Too Late I guess

It seems that the school board passed the motion for our librarians to “deliver an increased proportion of non-instructional time.” at a savings of $410,000 at the expense of every student in the district who will now receive less or no music from a specialist teacher.

Its sad.

Maybe not, I just got this response from one of our Trustees:

I am very supportive of the Arts and Music for all the reasons you mention. I was not aware that these cuts may impact music programs in the way you are stating. I have forwarded your letter to John Lewis and our Board Chair and Vice Chair for comments.”

I wonder how the notes from the public meetings missed this important aspect of transferring time to librarians.

Music Education Improves Reading skills-who cares?

A study completed in two elementary schools in New York, found that children exposed to a multi-year music program, had better cognitive performance in reading skills compared to peers at an elementary school which offered no music program, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

What will it take for our school boards to see that music education is not a luxury but a necessity for making well rounded students, for teaching cooperation and performance skills? Even if we didn’t find correlations to “real” subjects like reading, do we really want to have a whole generation who gets their only music exposure from YouTube, TV and programmed pop radio?

Who will see that kids learn the rich historical and cultural stories that music can tell? Who will teach them jump rope songs and hand jives, or to play the guitar, or the trumpet instead of their iPhone? Or how to sing in tune, in the octave that their young bodies were designed for? How will kids learn to stand in front of people and speak, or sing, or play? These are the things that my elementary school music students learn with me. They tell me their most vivid memories are of being in “Stone Soup” or of the talent show, or of the sea of Santa hats in the gym when we did holiday sing-alongs.

What do you remember about Elementary school? My most vivid memories are of events. (concerts mostly)

I remember singing Jingle Bell Rock in Chorus, and that my mom said the only reason my dad went to concerts was because the teacher was cute and big chested. I remember the balance beam and the parallel bars in the gym and not much else. The few classroom memories I have were due to trauma, not learning- Mrs. Brady bringing a cow brain in a bucket and me almost passing out, and the same teacher accusing me of cheating on an SRA test, when actually I was noticing that the girl sitting next to me had the same birthday as me.

If you care to read the study it is cited below. Or there is a nice summary here: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090316075843.htm

Reference:

SAGE Publications/Psychology of Music (2009, March 16). Music Education Can Help Children Improve Reading Skills. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 6, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­ /releases/2009/03/090316075843.htm

Places to Learn About music Online

I ran into a blog post which had a good list going here and thought I’d add a few ideas to the list which were more suited to elementary aged students.

• Learn Music Theory Online - suitable for young students (grade 2+) or University students.Very visual!

• Learn by doing – Noteflight lets you create, view and print professional quality music online.

One of the most interesting projects I have found is called the eamir project, which was originally designed to help special needs students create music, but uses input devices like the guitar hero guitar, or the DDR mat, which students typically already know and understand to create music.  Just goes to prove with the internet, seek and you shall find.

Elemental Music

I knew that I would change my teaching strategies after the summer course with Steve Calantropio, but I didn’t really realize how much until teachers asked me today if I could support their math curriculum which is pattern identification and recognition at the moment. Easy! We do that in music all the time, we had just been working out a pattern using a piece from the Schulwerk and the kids names, broken it into parts and identified the form with a color pattern. The grade 7 teacher wants to know if I can have the kids write the form as though it were an algebraic equation. So how would that look? Our form was A A’ B B A’, do I use exponents to show the A’? I’ll have to think through that one!

I have certainly seen that taking learning down to the basics and building it from there is the way to go. I had grade 6 students today laughing and working to do a body percussion piece and then commenting “that sounded so cool!” I guess sometimes I do somethings right. Steve said we should use high quality music and the kids would respond, so I chose a piece from the Schulwerk, adapted it for all the different grades, and voile! I only had to learn one piece this week. Brilliant! – Thanks Steve!

The Power of the Pentatonic

A master class last week with Steve Calantropio got me thinking more about the pentatonic scale that we use so much in Orff Schulwerk. I have been doing some reading about the harmonic series and its relationship to intervals. It also reminded me of the video that has been making the rounds with Bobby McFerrin at the world science festival. I went digging for more information and found that the conference has made video of the whole lecture available online here.

More thoughts on Creativity

I just finished reading a paper by Pamela Burnard titled, Reframing creativity and technology:  promoting pedagogic change in music education and there are so many thoughts going through my head that I thought I’d share some of them.  Burnard advocates for research based education, claiming that it is “the most enduring and successful way of ensuring progress in high-quality musical learning…”  I wonder about that.  It seems to me as I go on this research journey that often by the time research makes it through the channel it is already outdated. It seems to me that “research based education” is a way to pay professors, not to educate children.  I suppose that would be unpopular as part of my Masters project…

Burnard does make a lot of good points in her paper though, many of which I have been reflecting upon.  Like her claim that music education uses restrictive pedagogic ideologies. I like to think that I am open to change, but I also know that my Orff training has certainly had an influence on my pedagogical practices.  I hope in a good way, that what I do allows children the opportunity to play and learn and grow in a natural way and not one that is regimented and dictated.  How can I take the elemental truths that exist for children today, and build on them?  Hmmm.  Maybe I need some research to find out what those truths are

Research on Creativity in Music Education

What is Musical Creativity and How do we Measure it?

Creativity is a major factor in the context of a complete music education. Whether it can be taught is still in question. Musical creativity has been found to be connected to exposure, which is not always something that happens in a formal educational setting. Researchers have found creativity in jazz improvisation to be linked to knowledge of and exposure to jazz theory, to be linked creativity to classroom participation in a school wide arts program. They have explored ways to structure curriculum to promote creativity, and there has also been much written about the use of technology to aid in fostering creativity.

Ahh creativity?  What is it? Can we teach it? Is it divine or perhaps just luck?  Do we need skills to be creative?  So many questions.  Some argue that musical creativity can be defined in a similar way to general creativity, in that it must produce work that is both original and appropriate, have structure and not be random noise, but isn’t that what many consider the music of  Arnold Schoenberg or Jimi Hendrix?  Is distortion or dissonance noise or creativity.

The biggest obstacle to researching creativity in music education, has been finding a way to quantify the creative value of an artifact. The majority of the literature on creativity in music education focuses on improvisation and composition, two areas that are commonly agreed to require creativity.

I recently gave my grade 5 students a mini composition assignment.  One student wrote a very interesting piece that had a clear form, and structure, but had no clear tonal center.  Was it creative or just naive? How do we measure it objectively?  (btw – half the kids thought it was awesome, the other half rolled their eyes.  I’m thinking Schoenberg here…)

Like I said, more questions than answers.

Creativity in Music Education and Technology

My current coursework has us looking at the idea of research and research questions.  After I finished my research last term on Creativity and technology in Music Education, I was left with more questions than I started with.  The most difficult is how do we define what is musically creative?  Most of the studies look at improvisation or composition.  There are, however,  plently of brilliant composers who basically stole from their colleagues and contemporaries and mixed things up.  (Ever listen to both Handel and Haydn at the same sitting? it becomes clear that they shared) How different is borrowing a motif and re-arranging it from a mash up?  Is it creative, innovative, or theft?  Or some combination? What role do new technologies play?  Can I consider student work to be creative when there is no “musical” skill involved?  So many questions… not many answers.

Color Book Lesson

As part of ETEC 530, I designed this lesson using google sites.  It was a fun and easy way to make a lesson available to my students from any location.

https://sites.google.com/site/onehourcolorbook/