Perhaps you've heard the age-old adage: we teach how we were taught.
Of course, we know this isn’t the full story: we all have unique backgrounds and a variety of experiences that inform the people we are today and the teachers we are becoming. As you reflect on your own teaching practice, here are three things you should know:
When first introducing music-reading, it can be challenging for young students to recognize patterns and organize the content visually when everything is black and white.
For this reason, color can be a helpful tool. In this episode, I’m sharing four simple, unique strategies to use color to teach music literacy.
Welcome back to Music Education Basics!
Today, for our final lesson, we’re talking about one of my favorite topics, creative musicianship—what it is and how to teach it, and 5 ways to cultivate creative musicianship in your students.
First, let me explain what I mean by creative musicianship. When I say creative musicianship or musical creativity, I’m talking about improvising or creating music spontaneously and also, the ability to write those ideas down.
Now, if the thought of that makes your palms begin to sweat, I get it! If you had classical music training growing up, you probably didn’t spend much time improvising, composing, or creating your own music. I know that was my experience. Instead, the focus was probably on learning how to read and interpret what was on the page. Can you relate to that?
I'm sharing a few ways you can introduce musical creativity to those you teach in this lesson.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You know those things you’ve heard that seem true? I mean, they sound plausible. Plus, if enough people say it, it must be true, right?
Before long, we find ourselves buying into the hype, retelling the story, believing something we’ve heard without stopping to ask questions.
This is how myths begin.
Sometimes, there’s simply a lack of information—nothing to disprove this theory or that idea. Other times, they sound good on paper but are only surface-level with no substance to back them up.
Whatever the case may be, we’ve all encountered myths (big and small) in various parts of our lives.
But have you ever stopped to think about myths related to teaching and learning?
