Letters On Music Learning offer reflections on music teaching and learning at the Come Children Sing Institute from 1989-1995. The fourteen issues are available in full as an e-book. The excerpt presented here addresses the development of techniques.
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Excerpt from Issue 8—Exerpt from Issue 8 Winter, 1992
Dear Colleagues,
There is nothing more humbling than to walk into the classroom. We may theorize about music learning, design classroom activities, compose songs for children, and write to make sense of our experience in the classroom, but teaching is still the greatest challenge. Only in the classroom do our theories go out the window, our activities prove ineffective, our songs go from artistic satisfaction to pedagogical challenge, and our writing become obsolete.
As I tug and probe the process of music learning, I am led to new insights and new misunderstandings, new dimensions and new dead-ends. Sometimes I know precisely where I am going with the children. Sometimes I haven't a clue. Like an explorer with Gordon's music learning theory as my compass, I forge ahead into unknown territory, which I frequently encounter with very young children who have been with me for several years. Three and four year olds continually force me to better define the needs of emerging musicianship.
What resources do we have to help us find our way in the classroom as we attempt to further uncover the process of music learning? The best are homemade—activities, songs, chants, and techniques, designed specifically to probe the very aspects of music learning we are trying to understand.
Whether we are examining music babble or music reading, observing children's response through a number of well-designed activities can give us a glimpse of the process of development. As we compare children's musical response from one activity to another, we begin to form hypotheses about a learning sequence of music skills. Acting on our hunches, we design activities to expose more of the hidden process of development.
Assume the children have had considerable exposure to a variety of meters and rhythm patterns and experience with movement. We want to know more about their development from rhythm babble to precise rhythmic movement. We design activities that might demonstrate a variety of skills and then observe the children's response. We might choose to use pom pons as a technique to stimulate movement response in duple meter. How precise are the children's macro and micro beats? How does their movement response compare to their verbal response in chant? Is there greater precision with individual children when they are delivering a chant, echoing my rhythm patterns, or dialoguing with me in the meter? Is there greater precision when they are tonguing macro and micro beats? Does tonguing while moving with pom pons stimulate more rhythmic movement? How does the children's response in duple meter compare with their response in triple meter? What hypothesis can we begin to form about a sequence of skills from rhythm babble to rhythmic movement?
Each well-designed activity provides a different window from which to view a particular aspect of music learning. The more we observe children's emerging skills from different perspectives, the better we can develop theories about learning that can guide our teaching. Frequently we get conflicting data from our observations, forcing us to revise our theories and design additional activities to probe further.
We can explore a different dimension by creating songs and chants to expose the natural sequence of difficulty of music content. Assume that the children have had considerable aural experience with a variety of tonalities and meters. We know they attend more to songs without words than to songs with words, and we wonder if there is a sequence of difficulty of songs without words that might guide our teaching? We keep the chosen activity and techniques constant over several class periods and explore with our homemade songs. What do the children attend to more: songs in dorian tonality or songs in major? Dorian and mixolydian songs in duple or unusual paired meter? Major songs with macro/micro beat patterns, or division/elongation patterns?
Observing varying ages and stages of children broadens our perspective of the process of music learning and leads us to hypothesize about the effect of age and audiation experience on the learning process. When grade school beginners' musical response resembles that of preschool beginners more than it does that of musically advanced children of either age, it is likely that music development is generating their response. When grade school beginners respond musically more like grade school developed children than like preschool children of any musical stage, age is the likely cause. If we can eliminate the age factor, we can get closer to observing the process of music learning. Comparing our own audiation experience to that of the children provides additional insights into the phenomenon we are trying to study.
The more we design activities and compose songs and chants for classroom research, the more we need a storehouse of techniques. Using a number of different techniques with the same type of activity helps us to monitor children's achievement. Comparing the young child's responses in several resting tone activities, each of which uses a different technique—perhaps a puppet, microphone, and peek-a-boo game—gives us a means to assess the young child's developing sense of resting tone.
Different children and different groups of children respond differently to different techniques. It is essential that we have a variety of techniques to accommodate the emotional needs of children and to transform activities, songs, and chants that are successful with preschoolers into appropriate material for grade school children of the same developmental level.
A variety of techniques further provides multiple opportunities for children to practice, so to speak, the very skills we are trying to teach. Children need repeated involvement in chants and rhythm patterns to develop skill with macro and micro beats. Pom pons provide one very effective technique for such activity, but children will more enthusiastically interact with macro and micro beats repeatedly when movement activities employ various techniques—pom pons, paint brushes, hoops, jump rope.
A rich collection of techniques is essential to meet the never-ending challenge of making each class period fresh. Children need and want repetition, but a full resource of techniques is necessary to build variety into our lesson plans, as a great deal of repetition is already demanded by the process of developing audiation. Music learning requires the repeated hearing of the various tonalities, meters, tonal and rhythm patterns, and repeated involvement in song and movement at each stage of development. Techniques allow us to vary the experience so we can work repeatedly with skills and content as necessary in each of the various tonalities and meters.
To design and employ activities, songs, chants, and techniques to better identify the process of music learning is to be a classroom researcher. To compose songs for classroom use is to be a composer. To hypothesize about the process of music learning is to be a theorist. To try to make sense in writing of what is experienced in the classroom is to be a writer. To persist in the classroom while juggling our own, often conflicting perspectives as researcher, theorist, composer, and writer, is to be a teacher.
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