Principle-Centered Facilitation and Leadership in Music
In my opinion, music educators usually have very different pedagogical principles from other main subjects such as science and language class. However, although music class in elementary school does not weight as much as other main courses, I still realize that music teachers must set up their own principles which are important for shaping our daily teaching activities in the right way. A principled teacher is always “student-centered”, provides long term interest for students in any situations. For me, my principles are all very straightforward.
My first principle is to always be well-prepared and organized before class. Compared to the content of many other subjects, music as an art subject usually combines more flexibility and creativity for children learning experience. So the preparation before class should include self-teaching assessment especially in timing and effectiveness. For timing, we usually can not complete everything on our lesson plan in a 30 minutes class, so we need to separate one class period into two classes by dividing into two different subjects. For example, if I am going to teach two songs in one class including both singing and xylophone playing activities, time won’t work. Usually I need to only teach one song in a class, using the first 15 minutes for teaching singing and the last 15 minutes for instruments playing. For effectiveness, I need to observe children carefully and asking for their feedback for my first teaching experience. For example, if my first song teaching is ineffective, maybe I need to apply interesting materials and guidelines for children due to their feedback after a boring class.
My second principle is helping students to know the importance of music by connecting to other subjects and student’s life experience. Although music is mostly experienced by human auditory sense, the visual, logical and historical sense is also undeniable in learning music. For priority of educating music, students have to learn the notations in order to read and compose music. Moreover, the basic music notations of signature of beats and the length of different notes are closely related to one’s mathematical ability; the form like ABA and the repetition use of music is related to one’s logical thinking ability; the contact between one’s self experience and the level of understanding the lyrics are related to one’s literacy and historical background. In order to make students value music subject as an important part of their learning experience, music teachers need to always contact with other class teachers and talk with students with their favorite topics and attain some fitting and valuable information into music class.
My final principle is to develop children’s independent skills to learn music for their the future. In order to reach the goal of improving students’ individual ability in learning music, I need to take my own experience as an example. In my previous teaching experience, children won’t learn anything without an appropriate music and general music knowledge for their age level. We need to make effective contacts in every step of teaching and give them an understandable audio and visual material is usually work. More importantly, breaking every basic knowledge from simple to complex into steps and giving small quizzes of notations is also helpful to find out their difficulties and organizing solutions for students.
Musical concept I focus on：Teaching Fast/Slow Tempo.
Grade Level: K-5, 4th grade.
Lesson Plan #1: Experience Tempo
Watching a Disney Musical Cartoon about “The Tortoise and the Hare” The cartoon is combining with various symphonic background musics with continuous changing music tempo.
For students, they need to both watch the movements of characters and hear the changes of tempo from the background music. Trying to describe the relationship between the cartoon characters’ (the turtle and hare) movements and the tempo of music, what happened to the music when hare was running fast, turtle was walking slowly and when they stopped?
I will play a folk song recording about “The Tortoise and the Hare”. In this part, I want my students to pretend themselves as a hare and tortoise. Listening carefully about the changing of song tempo in the middle. The song started with the hare in fast tempo and then tortoise came with a slow tempo.
Separate the whole class into peers, practicing their own motions and then perform “The Tortoise and the Hare”in the end of the class. The only requirement for this performance is to create motions which can follow the beat of my recording from the second step.
Voting for one of the best performance and telling me why, what makes it the best in the very end.
Lesson Plan# 2: Learning tempo by game
Bubble game: “bubbles”is described as students use their personal space. We pretend to turn on our bubbles around our bodies by snapping above our heads. When I play music or sing, students may move around the room with their bubbles on, but they may not talk or touch anyone or anything. I will give them 5 minutes to prepare their own “bubbles”.
Here is my song I am going to use in this game:
I will start GALLOP, I want them to gallop and sing with me.
Then I will use: Walk and stop.
During this activity, students will do “Bubbles”, walking around the room and beating on their feet too. However, when I say “stop” , they need to freeze themselves in their recent posture.
For both activities, Firstly, I will model for them by singing with piano accompaniment.
Secondly, I will move the tempo of both song from slow to fast then comes back to slow.
Thirdly, I will add stop in random place during the fastest tempo to make some challenges.
Finally, with many repetitions of moving and singing, I want them to be able to sing the song with me at the end of the class in different speed of tempo without playing with “bubbles”.
Lesson Plan#3: Instrumental Experiment
This time I want students to learn how to keep a beat with music by playing a rhythmic instruments.
I will play a video of Peters and the Wolf, asking them how each characters are related to a certain instrument from this video. Also I will tell them that they will select a rhythmic instrument to represent actions from musics I will play.
I will give them various rhythm instruments (shakers, maracas, rain stick, wood block, finger cymbals) to choose. And a copy of “What would I do”for everyone.
I will play the song “What would I do” a the website:
Thinking about where their action should happen in the song I have played. 5 students in a group that every group mate should choose a different rhythmic instrument, practicing to fit their own instrument into the music I have played. I will repeat the music all the time during their preparations.
( 1st student makes a rain action, 2nd student makes a jumping a puddle action, 3rd student makes a walking in a mud action, 4th student makes a hopping in grass action, 5th student makes skipping in the driveway action)
Performing their action by their instruments with my music recording, the rest of students doing jumping, raining, walking, hopping and skipping motions by following their instrumental changes.
At the middle of song, there is a part when tempo is slowing down and then back to the original. I want them to choose two instruments which fit this part best and tell me why the instrument is related to certain tempo play. (Brainstorming)
Everyone plays together with recording to make a harmony end of class.
By watching through all my videos, I have noticed that I had always several pulses during the time when I am going to make a transition between two different subjects for each of my short lesson. This kinds of unconscious stops are lasting until my last video teaching project. In my opinion, as a future music teacher who used English as a second language to our home language, we need more time and efforts to preparation and organization in order to teach fluently in an English speaking country. For example, my first two lesson are teaching the moving beats and folk dance movements which are two similar teaching projects. Most of the time, I played the music and modeled the movements with students followed. So I did not need to organize my language so much and the class can be effective. However, when I came to my third teaching experience of song teaching, I felt like it was becoming less effective because my I totally messed up the order of my lesson plan what I needed to say in front of my students. Moreover, by accomplishing with piano and sing, the balance is also a challenge for me who had less experienced of this kind of music practice.
On the other hands, I have observed that my voice and energy needs to be more steady and improved. Like what I have seen in my clinical experience, teachers are involving with students because when teachers stop, children do not know where to go or what to do. This is also the reason why I need to overcome the problem of pulsing. Unfortunately, I can barely hear myself from the video.
Although those are obvious problems to see in the video, I do fell like my lesson plan is getting better and more organized especially in my last teaching experience. I think the practical teaching experience for 3rd grade students before this teaching really gave me a much clearer direction of teaching. First, I can sing more confident and I can let everyone know what to do by using giving them xylophone all sets. During my elementary school teaching experience, I chose a very challenging topic about the Civil War Songs and History content. In the first class, I asked children about historical question and I had got no answer back. However, when I applied the xylophone playing section and giving them an energetic music recording with military marching elements, they gradually involved and got more exciting about the content. In fact, the Civil War history is a too difficult content for 3rd grade and I have not realized that until I started to teach. Moreover, my mentor teachers also gave me advice about how to use hand gesture and eye contact which Dr. Stauffer had stated in the very beginning of the semester. I am getting more and more used to that right now.
For my next goal, I need to start thinking about what kinds of children teaching fit me the best. From my previous experience and feedback from children, I found out that using video or recording is very important for my future teaching. Instead of starting with historical content or something unfamiliar for my future students, they will easily lose their focus of my class. Furthermore, since I had been a piano major for two years but only focus on solo, I still need to train my singing and accompanying skills more during this summer. I felt like maintaining a good balance between my voice and piano during teaching is my prior task. And finally for my lesson planning organization, I wanted to have more practical teaching experience and feedback from my students. The ideal situation is to become more and more perfect by more and more adjustment through the time.
For this semester’s children teaching observation, I had been to the Broadmor Elementary School, which locates in a district only two streets away from the school of music. The school has combined several parking areas for visitors and teachers, around with a large playground and a small garden, where is pretty relaxing and free for everyone to observe in the school building. For the school’s neighborhood, there are only a few residences are still away from the school building, so I thought it should be a peaceful place for students to learn. Actually, the school combines a grade level of students from kindergarten through sixth grade, all of them studied and live in this huge building, separated into different floors and rooms.
Then I met with my mentor teacher who called Jolene Warner(Wieler) who had just married a few months ago. She was a very energetic woman and introduced me to every teachers in her office. Teachers who in charge of writing, math, arts(painting), and band share the same office together in a great harmony. This is the first time I have seem this kinds of teachers office setting! Afterward, we went to the music room behind the playground. Surprisingly, the music room is so large and bright with a small piano, movable stairs, facilities for digital projection and various kinds of small percussion and mallets keyboard instruments for children to use. Moreover, the gate of the music room leads to the playground which allows teachers to set up outdoor musical activities instead of traditional in door class.
For students in the music classroom, they are very curious about me as a new visitor that everyone stared on me quietly and carefully at the first time. However, after a short introduction of myself as an internship observer, they became active again like usual. As what I had observed from the class, students are very ethnically and culturally diverse. For example, in every music class, I can find some students from foreign countries such as Purto Rico, China and Mexico from different grades. Most of those ELLs (English Language Learners) hadn’t born in America but they can all talk with native students fluently and even better than me sometimes. However, some of them were still afraid to talk to native speakers and seemed to be gradually isolated by other students in class. Moreover, due to this music class was just after a P.E. class, some students were still exciting and kept talking about the interesting staffs because they didn’t realized that music class did begin. Then after class, Ms. Warner told me that the P.E. and music class are the two least-weight classes when their head teacher will not usually come, so students are usually more relaxing and having fun. However, I started to realize the difficulties of teaching in this situation.
The music classes from Warner’s curriculum are divided into three different subjects, first is for the 4-6 grades chorus; second is for the 3-5 grades general music class; third is for Seals( music for students with mental retardation). For the 4-6 grades chorus, they had a task which is to learn and perform four songs in the end of the semester in front of their parents : N.Y.C, Hard-Knock Life, Tommorrow and You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile, all from Annie Jr. In choirs classes, Ms.Warner usually played the song recordings to help them have an image of melodic progression of each piece. Ms. Warner also created some dance movements to help everyone evolve the music which I think it is a great idea. And then she asked them to pick out the easiest and the trickiest songs after a few classes of song experience and started to learn from the easiest two N.Y.C and Tomorrow, followed with Hard-Knock Life and You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile. For teaching song N.Y.C, due to the difficulties of leaps in this song, Ms. Warner always used the hands gesture to conduct the jumping pitch levels and she encouraged them to sing loud and proud for this song. Especially when another tricky part with small pulses involved, she covered her mouth with right palm for every rest. Moreover, she told the story of time square and transportation for students to better learn the content and lyric faster.
For the Tomorrow, Ms. Warner turned into a “Shh..” gesture to let them calm down from the N.Y.C. The song developed from a sorrow to hope, Ms Warner used the previous way to first let them find a sense of hope and make a crescendo move of their sound. On the other hands, for the Hard-Knock Life and You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile, two very naughty pieces, Ms. Warner taught them to use more accent in voice during both songs. For the tricky part of Hard-Knock Life is the pulse between the call and response like “Cotton blankets’ steada wool; Empty Bellies’ Steada full!”, she used the same way of covering mouth for several classes and it had got slightly better. Then for the You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile, Ms. Warner designed a 80’s tap dance and gave them the lyric from projecting slides because the lyrics this song is very difficult to remember. The melodic rhythms also had a lot of doted notes, however, students forgot the toughness of songs because most of them are addicting into Warner’s song and learned the song very fast after two class periods. For my perspective of adult facilitator, I found out that Ms. Warner’s methods of teaching choral are different from my previous perspective. If I am going to teach the chorus, I may straightforwardly give students the lyrics and let them sing with recordings first and then teach them with separated phrases and let them practice. And I might have no idea how to really make every students absorb four tricky songs in a 30 minutes class. However, her strategy is to give them live related information to make a contact with songs, adding interesting staffs like dancing movements and hands gestures and singing with childish energy first, then teaching the specific music. For children in 4-6th grade, most of them can read basic notation in this school, they are more adapted to Warner’s strategy than my previous way.
Turning to the 3-5th grade general music class, Ms Warner is aimed to accomplish three main aspects of teaching. First, reinforcing the skills of reading music for students from 4th and 5th grade and teach the 3rd graders how to read basic notations and attempting composing. Second, supplementing common sense of dynamic expressions and knowledge of instruments. Third, trying to learn how to use the two small keyboards instruments: xylophone and metallophone to play music in solo and ensemble; and recorder to play melody. Compared to the chorus, students were trained in diverse skills and techniques in this class. In the first half of semester, Ms. Warner taught them the recorder skills by playing from natural note from middle C to high C with correct fingering. However, some children who attempted the recorder for the first time had amount of problems and difficulties in learning the recorder. So I have to facilitate them to fix the difficulties. During my experience of assisting job, I started to find out a phenomenon that most boys students had more problems of girls students in learning recorders probably due to the way of blowing. Boys tried to blow fiercely every time but some of them were unable to fully cover the hole and control the out-running air. And the some students can not play the note on score probably because they have not maintain the knowledge of basic notation well. Especially for third grader, accomplishing a song of “ Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” in the end of the semester seems to be impossible due to the disability of reading notations. However, Ms. Warner suggested them to have extra practice at home and gave fingering guiding sheets for students who had difficulties. The same situation happened in keyboard playing, most students did not know how to make a response and figuring out where to play on each bar from the keyboard, so unclean sounds are usually happened. I always had to assist students about their technical issues. Ms. Warner realized students’ difficulties in playing mallets and gave other percussion instruments such as Maracas, Ratchets and Bass drums etc. for students to play. And this time, the class went gradually better. As I have saw in this class, many children could be frustrated if they met an unsolved difficulties while playing a new instrument, but patience and practices are important. I started with a little struggling of maintaining a mess of frustration from those students. But I tried to encourage the kids and showed them my patience and willing to help, which made them improve very fast and steady with much more confidence in instruments playing.
For the last one Seals is a totally different condition for music teachers. Due to the disability of Seals students on mental control, Ms. Warner found out a lot of sources of the music related video games for them. In my opinion, the main purpose of video games is to stimulate students interest of music and also help them have better sense of recognizing rhythm, color, pitch level and styles of music. In this class, students need three teachers to observe and assist those children because they are so hard to focus on class material. However, the video game did effectively attract their attentions even though they might not be able to accomplish the same level of knowledge like other normal students. Impressively, I have learned a lot from those assisting teachers. They were always helping students and trying to involve with music with hands gestures and dancing movements created by Ms. Warner even though students might not be able to aware the excitement from teachers.
In conclusion, Ms. Warner is an outstanding teacher in both academically and mentally. At the end of the day, she said to me “ Being a teacher is the same as being a entertainer!” which is so true. I hoped I can learn more about how to improve my energy, patience and self-adjustment from her. However, students came from different family backgrounds may have different personalities, I found out that in a short music class, Ms. Warner did not have time to know every child specifically and I did find out some boys were cheating, making chaos or rude behaviors during class. I think a better way to solve this problem is to invite an assist teacher in the back of the class for observing problems and reporting problems to their class teachers. Contacting with their parents can be an efficient way to know more about the kids and facilitating problems which can not be solve in class.
1.I will give students two icon cards to figure out the song progression. Then I will sing through the song for them. After that, asking them which part are their icon card for, A part or B part; Why > < appear by hearing me singing
2.Let everyone has a xylophone to play the song based on what I have sang.
3.Try to play and hum the melody by looking at the Icon Card independently.
4.Try to sing and play xylophone together by looking at the card, after that, try to sing and play without card together.
I had do a self recording of my short recorder piece. I also used midi software to make a of bass with piano sound and add into my recorder’s melody and counter melody. In reality, the piano bass will be played by keyboard percussion like xylophone and marimba etc.
By learning how to compose a short recorder piece, I found that the playing pitch range is very important for recorder playing, so I need to make sure the piece is melodically new and simple for practicing without hard fingering.
And by video recording myself, I found that the tempo is also a tricky part for putting two melody together. Moreover, the problem for me is that if I need to make a melody by digital software which is to steady for my playing melody so my sound track got a little mess up in the end.
This activity actually helps me a lot about learning the process of how to create easy and playful music for children. I think the hardest part is to keep children play on tempo and I have learned that by myself playing is to use the metronome and for children, I might use my hands or feet to keep the beat for them in a group recorder ensemble performance.
For my lesson plan, I am going to start singing with fingers tap the beat first and then separating two groups for one for taping the rhythm of notes, another for padding beats on their legs;Thirdly, learn syn-co-pa and quarter dotted eighth rhythm from this song; Fourthly, learn lyrics content and trying to react from my body movements hint; Finally, singing together in a group. Actually in my video teaching, I found that I almost put all those steps into my teaching process except the part of singing together and finding the specific new rhythm patterns.
However, I still find out several problems during teaching. Firstly, I pick a low pitch song which might be very hard for female students to sing and for me I need to sing with extra force to make everyone hear the melody clearly and I was very tough. I also need to be mindful about the clarity of lyrics because learners seemed to be confused by what I have sang in the first time. Secondly, the “Jeruslem” is a tricky name of baby that can be replaced by a simple one. Thirdly, I am trying to let them find out the longest note in this song which is the quarter dotted but I forgot there is a half note inside. Fortunately, I had Rebecca’s wooden sticks to help me structure my new rhythm. With a clearer visual structure of wooden sticks, I found that they can learn the rhythmic pattern faster and I can also sing the “Tai-Ti” and “Syn-co-pa” to help them remember the new rhythm. This is the part which worked well.
For the next teaching assignment, I will keep using visualized items into my lesson plan and body movements to help them understand the content of song better. I will also have to pick a song with simpler pronunciation and reasonable pitch range. Moreover, I will have to teach with louder volume and more organized sentences.
I want to compare two those articles of to the resource I found from OAKE called “ The National Standards for Music”. Compared the national standards to the ideas of Kodaly in America, I can find they both emphasized on the idea of starting music learning experience in an early age stage should be very important. However, even the social condition of Hungarian and in America, the culture reception is still a big problem. The solution of that is to make the music easier for everyone not only for elite especially like folk songs which are linguistically and culturally related to children knowledge and experience.
Moreover, after reading those materials, I found that the Kodaly Ideas are both instructive, discovery and constructive for approaching into American education system. The example of National Standards resource is a typical constructive example for Kodaly methods, and the other two articles provide a lot of discovery ideas and instructive for example like the social impact on teaching approaching between Hungarian and American teachers and differences in cultural elements combination of Hungarian and American folk songs analyzing in the first article about Ideas of Kodaly in America.
For the connections between reading materials to our classroom’s experience, I found that many important music learning processes from Kodaly have already covered in our class, such as Singing, Instrumental performing, Improvising music, Analyzing and Describing music and Assessing Experience. For example, we usually improvise body percussion rhythms, melody on xylophone and in many recent assignments in recent class. And we also composing new melody and harmony for group playing video records and describe the our process of making those music. Moreover, we always have self-reflection after music teaching in our assignment. So I think the Kodaly process had been covered a lot in this class already. However, one important thing I can add to my practice is the creativity in teaching process although it started a little inefficient in a short time music class. This process needs well-prepared curricula before class such as active knowledge of musical literature, active musical experience such as choir, orchestra or chamber groups for children and changing the teaching style into the most ideal for children. It should be helpful to develop teachers’ self-confidence and variant teaching methods.
In my opinion, from the article of Humor in the Music Classroom from Dr. Martina Miranda’s dissertation , the class environment was more relaxing which I think because of the students are all in kindergarten ages. Teachers focused on the communication with adding humorous elements into class discussions. For example, the teacher called Rhoda used a humor into a chant because sometimes kindergarten children are hard to control their emotions and turned the class into a sad mood. She sang “Kindergarten Baby, Stick your face in gravy, Wash it off with applesauce, And send it to the navy” which use nonsense phrases to create a silliness for children to forget the negative side. Humor as a tool for those kindergarten teachers to strengthen the relationship within their children. I think it is a great approach for young kids having more brave to show their opinions and active the class environment.
On the other hands, Mrs. Bedford’s Music Class is a totally different story especially in class environment. Due to she was a full-time teacher who taught from kindergarten through sixth grade, she would like to focus on students’ actual musical skills, volumes of repertoires from variety of culture and the efficiency during class time. It seems to be a way more serious and intense atmosphere for children compared to the class in Dr. Miranda’s dissertation. Moreover, her approach is to set up a class rules for children to be able to follow the pace of her fast pushing class and using traditional Kodaly Rhythm methods for children to learn from imitating. She also prepared well-managed class plan for controlling the class time and at the ends of the class, she usually does the assessment for each students performance.
William Bai 