Making meaningful connections and fostering classroom ownership

Every class starts with a choice. Each student gets a turn in the rotation picking a warm up exercise to start class. After we have made a few attempts at performing the selected exercise, I ask for feedback from the class, have some individuals play (I loosely select a few, and based on time, will take volunteers) and then give my own feedback. We will follow up with a few more attempts with all members playing together, and then move on to a few other exercises that may be more difficult or just something that can be used to practice reading and comprehension of notation.

Guytano Martorano noted in his essay about the importance of sight reading notation: “First, the advancement of sight-reading ability, especially early on, could allow musicians to read through a greater volume of literature, advancing their individual schema of music, and subsequently improving reading ability in a positive feedback loop.” (Martorano 2019) By continuing to develop the skill of reading music, students are more willing to approach new tasks when given the opportunity to choose between something new and something old. Martorano speaks of the feedback loop, which to me comes back to a favorite phrase from a previous instructor of mine “Success builds upon success”.

In the 12 Touchstones of good teaching (Goodwin & Hubbell, n.d.) there is mention of what I see as a theoretical line in the sand. The writers mention that it is important to keep the class materials “fresh and fun” but also that while choices are important and a good way to get students engaged it is possible to present too many options. This can be referenced by the common phrase “paralysis by analysis” or having “option paralysis”. I did take not of that fact that the packet of warm-up materials which I start my classes with does have a lot of examples to choose from and I will consider some options this school year regarding whether it could be beneficial to the students to break the packet up into smaller segments.

Giving learners the opportunity to critique the class’s performance gives them more of a stake in the day to day operations of the class. Teachers who have placed high expectations on their students need to show that the information and skills they are teaching are valuable, necessary, and beneficial. The only way for teachers to understand how their students can truly benefit from their lessons is by making connections to the person who becomes the student. Some students need help developing routines. Some students will want to excel at the artistic part of making music and play in a conventionally pleasing manner. Some students will want to be the “best” player, seeing music as they would an athletic activity.

Some students, however, remain involved in music programs for purely social reasons. For my class, with a few exceptions, I hope to establish the personality that we are in school, but the students aren’t expected to fit into any specific mould. Perhaps it is a luxury associated being a music teacher, but with such little ability to evaluate students from a grading standpoint, I am willing and interested in finding ways to give students positive reviews. There are a lot of ways to succeed in band class and part of my job is to find out where those areas of need are, see the improvement, make connections with the student, and let them know when I’m seeing them develop skills. Often, students who are seen as underachieving are putting a lot of effort into what they are asked to do. When one’s are felt to have gone unnoticed, frustration rises and effort wanes in the long run (Birdsell 2009) so it is important for the teacher to make every effort to see when and why students are struggling. Making connections to your students helps make this less of a mystery.

In my day to day class, we might spend one third of the class not working on music, but sharing stories about music or talking about non-musical life events, food, video games, movies, comics, pop culture, or anything else. Conversation is an important tool for earning not just the respect of your students but also an important tool for learning to respect your students. My place as a music teacher is obviously to teach students the skills of playing their instruments. But, as someone who teaches their students from 5th grade to 12th grade, it tends to be also to teach them self respect, civic pride, accountability, time management, and even the occasional cooking tip.

Resources

Martorano III, G. (2019) Developing a sight-reading pedagogy for the brass studio: the use of supplemental material to improve sight-reading ability, https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/86840/Martorano-Dissertation-2019.pdf?sequence=2

Birdsell, B. S. B., Ream, S. M. B., Seyller, A. M., Zobott, P. L. (May,2009) Motivating students by increasing student choice. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED504816.pdf

Goodwin, B., & Hubbell, E. R. (n.d.). The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching. Retrieved from https://platform.virdocs.com/r/s/0/doc/578098/sp/176919619/mi/566607871