music learning theory

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Ready to Read: 4 Steps for Developing Proficiency (Music Education Basics)

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Ready to Read: 4 Steps for Developing Proficiency (Music Education Basics)

Welcome back to Music Education Basics!

Today, we’re talking about readiness for music-reading and developing proficiency.

Just like learning to read language, music-reading follows listening and responding, developing a musical vocabulary, and active musical experiences in a natural progression, as we’ve been reviewing this week.

If you’re a choir director or an elementary music teacher, I recommend introducing music-reading (as in holding a score in your hand) around 2nd or 3rd grade. We tend to introduce music-reading a little sooner in one-on-one settings — piano lessons or other beginning instrumental studies — but in choir, you can usually wait until 3rd grade and spend more time with rote-learning and gradually bridging that gap.

I’ll walk you through a simple 4-step process and a few tangible ways to do this in today's lesson.

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The Case for Musical Expression (Music Education Basics)

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The Case for Musical Expression (Music Education Basics)

Welcome back to Music Education Basics!

Today, we’re talking about musical phrasing, dynamics, and movement and why it’s important to incorporate these elements of musical expression into the teaching and learning process from the very beginning.

Visuals and active experiences are a huge part of the learning process. In some cases, they are more important in our teaching than spoken directions and letting people read things for themselves. How can we be intentional about structuring our teaching in a way that supports visual learning and active, hands-on experiences?

We’ll explore a few useful strategies, ways to create opportunities for active experience, and meaningful analogies you can use to support music learning and the development of musical understanding in your students.

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How to Develop a Musical Vocabulary (Music Education Basics)

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How to Develop a Musical Vocabulary (Music Education Basics)

Welcome back to Music Education Basics!

Today, we’re talking about what it means to develop language skills in music—namely, the importance of building a vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns, something you’ll hear me describe as the building blocks of music.

Tonal patterns are short, 2- to 5-note groups or phrases. Think of them like words: instead of reading and focusing on the individual letters that make up a word, our eye recognizes the group of letters together; we understand the letters within the context of the word. The same is true in music: instead of focusing on individual notes, we want to help our students learn to read groups of notes as meaningful patterns.

The goal is to understand the notes within the context of the music.

Rhythm patterns are the same: short, 2- to 4-beat groups or phrases. It’s important to recognize them as patterns vs. reading individual note values.

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The First Step in Music-Learning That’s Often Overlooked (Music Education Basics)

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The First Step in Music-Learning That’s Often Overlooked (Music Education Basics)

To begin Music Education Basics, we’re going to talk about a primary component of music teaching and learning and something you may not immediately think of as being the first step in the teaching process: listening and responding.

In the introduction last week, I talked about the Music Learning Theory and the idea that learning music is a lot like learning how to speak a new language.

When you learned how to speak your native language, you probably didn't start with reading; you spent time listening to others speak the language around you, soaking it up, exploring how to create sound yourself, and eventually, imitating them.

It’s so important to build listening and responding into your teaching, because, while it's vital at the beginning of musical development, it’s something we come back to over and over again as we learn.

Everyone can learn from opportunities to listen and respond to music, at all stages of musical development, something I explain more in this lesson.

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Welcome to Music Education Basics

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Welcome to Music Education Basics

Music Education Basics is a free online workshop for music educators in all types of settings.

It’s available as a video series, but I’m going to share the audio version right here on the podcast so you can tune into the content here each day if that’s easier for you.

Each day, we’ll explore a different foundational aspect of music teaching and learning — a core mindset or process or sequence or approach that will apply to you and your work whether you’re teaching elementary or secondary students or even working with adults. Each lesson has a corresponding workbook and a brief challenge to encourage you to take action in some way.

In this introductory lesson, we're going to talk about the Music Learning Theory and how learning music is a lot like learning a new language.

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