My High School Band Rehearsal

Since most of my posts have been analyzing different teaching styles from the perspective of me as an observer and teacher, I decided to write about my own experience in high school band.

I went to New Braunfels High School from 2005-2009. Since it was a 4A school (now 5A) it definitely had a marching band. We had summer band 3 weeks before school started. We started off outside in the early morning while it was still cool by learning the marching fundamentals, and the first part of the show. Each director took time down on the ground with us to teach us the different marching techniques such as backwards marching. My sophomore year we installed a huge tower. So then the directors all "barked out orders" from way up high as well as using the mic.

We also have a concert band. This was my favorite part of high school because I didn't have to play the tenor sax (that's what I marched). I got to play my bassoon :) My band director always picked the best pieces for the UIL competitions. We had a traditional march, usually a orchestral transcription and then a more modern piece. Each piece was taught similarly: sight-read it when we first get it, and then work on sections by breaking it apart and hearing different instruments. For example, if the woodwinds had a very hard 16th note link, then my director would take the lick and slow it down so that the players would get all of the notes, and then speed it up with different ways of playing the line so that it would lay under their fingers. This is definitely teacher-centered learning because everyone has to stay quiet as the teacher teaches the concept.

It was a process getting these 3 pieces ABSOLUTELY PERFECT (which of course is never the case) for the competition. There was a lot of stopping and starting, which got boring when my section had mastered its part because we just sat there. But, once everyone got their part it was really enjoyable to play because we were making awesome music together!

Elementary Music Teaching

Today I want to share some teaching styles of elementary music that I saw last Thursday. I went with a fellow future student teacher to go observe the music class at Jefferson Elementary. We had to get 10 hours of observations in before we could start student teaching in the spring. While it was a pain to have that sprung on us last minute (considering finals and everything else), it was awesome to see the kids really enjoying themselves.

We went to see our future cooperating teacher in action. But he wasn't the one teaching lessons today. Instead it was a good friend of ours who was still in his full teach mode for the last stretch of his student teaching for this semester. This was great for me to see because I never thought that I would see this person up in front of little kids. So I decided to share some of his teaching techniques because they were so effective.

His main lesson was fast/slow throughout all of the grade levels. This involved some very loud drums! The way the kids were learning what was fast and what was slow was with pictures of a turtle and a car. He had made up a story that a car had zoomed by this turtle, and while the picture was being shown to the kids, they were supposed to be hitting the drums REALLY FAST! And then he brought up the turtle picture while saying "I was walking on the street, in the heat, with my feet". He said this a low voice and it sounded very lethargic, but the kids loved it. They were then supposed to be drumming really slow to represent the turtle's walking pace. The best part was that he used a rhyming scheme!

I don't think I've ever seen so many kids have fun with drumming! Some of them were doing a little dance when it was the car :) The best part was my colleague and I got to drum with them! It was very exhilarating!

And just in time for the holidays, the classes learned how to sing Jolly Old St. Nicholas, and then sing it while we all passed a ball around the circle. I think it was very handy that we were there because we have higher pitched voices than the teacher, so the kids caught on really fast. One even said, "Can they play with us? I like the way they sing!" That was totally worth putting in the extra time for observing. 

Have any of you ever got children singing? I had no idea that they loved to do it until now. Please share!

My Experimental Student :)

I know this has been a long time in coming, but my camera decided to die, so I had to charge it for a while...

So I really wanted to talk about my new teaching style on this post with one of my bassoon students. My student (in the following pictures) is my experiment for this year as I have been growing as a bassoon instructor. I used to just ask kids to play what they heard from what I played. I was really comfortable with teacher-centered learning as this is what I have grown up with,  but now I am starting to incorporate ways for the students to analyze themselves and help themselves improve without me telling them everything. While my students were doing well the old way, they have now become excellent sight-readers and have a good sense of whether a note is in tune or not.

In this first pictures, my student is buzzing on her reed. This is a little warm up that I do with all of my students first to see if the reed is working, and second to stretch out the jaw and the back of the throat. This helps relax the muscles and gets her ready to play the whole instrument :)

           

 Next I usually have her sing lines that we are about to sight-read (after I've modeled; going along with the familiar) while she fingers it on her horn. This has made her play the line with 98% accuracy on the first try, whereas if we just read it we would've been stopping every two measures. This has helped know what pitches actually sound like and what fingerings to use to get the right notes. Once she's sung it in her head, it's pretty much ingrained.

     Lalala

Last Friday in our lesson we were working on half-holing for some very difficult notes for a sixth grader.

In all honesty it takes a good three weeks for a beginner to get these completely accurate, but my student is way further along than some of my other students have been in the past.

Here are the notes (the ones I was working on are the notes before the "FLICK NOTES!":

                     
Here is a fingering that I was teaching her. For those of you who don't know, I was working on half-hole G, or on the bass clef space G

A lot of the time I was asking her to match me to get the notes perfectly in tune. She may have had the correct fingering, but G on the bassoon is really sharp, so she had to lower it a whole bunch. I had told her in the beginning ways to do that, and I asked her what she did. Most of the time she replied in saying that she opened up her throat to make it more resonant, and in tune with me. I'm getting to the point where I don't have to ask her any more because she automatically does it :) This is what I considered student-centered learning because I was asking her to analyze herself.





Has anyone else had a big change in their teaching style (in any subject!) that has worked out better for the kids? Let me know!

Teacher v. Student-Centered Learning

Greetings readers!

I hope that this blog will be useful for you in your encounters with people, especially children. Learning how people learn is essential for being able to progress in society. I have struggled learning different concepts has I have gone further in my college career, and I have found that there are so many ways of teaching kids, some that work, and some that don't.

I wasn't really sure how to start this entry off other than defining what my focus is...teacher v. student-centered learning.

Teacher centered learning relies on 

• focus on the instructor
• Focus is on language forms and structures (what the instructor knows about the language)
• students listening to the instructor while he/she talks
• Students working alone
• Instructor monitoring and correcting every student utterance
• Instructor answering students’ questions about language
• Instructor choosing topics
• Instructor evaluating student learning
• Classroom being quiet

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/goalsmethods/learncentpop.html

 

This is what I grew up with; this is where I struggled in college because I expected to be told what to do.

Student-centered learning relies on 

• Focus being on both students and instructor
• Focus being on language use in typical situations (how students will use the language)
• Instructor modeling; students interacting with instructor and one another
• Students working in pairs, in groups, or alone depending on the purpose of the activity
• Students talking without constant instructor monitoring; instructor providing feedback/correction when questions arise
• Students answering each other’s questions, using instructor as an information resource
• Students having some choice of topics
• Students evaluating their own learning; instructor also evaluates

http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/goalsmethods/learncentpop.html

The classroom is often noisy and busy. To me this is too distracting, and as a future music teacher, it is alien to me.

So, I will be exploring different ways of teaching musical contexts with both approaches and seeing what works best. I have heard that the north of the United States favors student-centered learning, and the south prefers the teacher-centered, but I haven't seen that much research or talk of it...yet. :)

Let me know how you were taught when you were growing up and if it was effective or not!