Saturday, November 10, 2007

Planning a Class as a Performance, part ii (grades 2-6)

This article continues the idea of planning a music class to resemble a musical performance, except now moving beyond early childhood and into grades two through six. I first explore a few important related points by Bruner (1966), Elliott (1995), Pulaski (1980) and Gardner (1983). I then suggest a lesson plan, along their lines of thinking, blended with my own, that demonstrates the usefulness of this particular planning process and how it can address students’ various behavior and developmental issues students in a music class. These issues are different for this age level as compared to early childhood, and as many music educators may attest, the idea of ‘relevance to real life’ begins to emerge as students mature into the upper grades.
Jean Piaget’s perspectives on childhood development continue to be valuable in planning music class experiences at this age level. The period of between ages seven and eleven (usually second through sixth grade) Piaget called “concrete operations.” One of Jean Piaget’s key phrases "pedagogical mania" captures the essence of the need to students for have enriched sensory-motor experiences to "interiorize" them (Crain, p. 120). He is referring to a method of teaching which involves teachers doing a lot of talking and showing rather than allowing students to explore and learn concepts for themselves; a fault of much teaching which cheats students out of engagement in the discovery process. For example, Spencer Pulaski (1980) writes:
"A child with many physical experiences with a concrete object such as a ball can then form a mental image of that object and act upon it in thought as he has in actual experiences in the past. He can picture the act of throwing the ball, and his thought is "interiorized action." But the child who has never handled of thrown a ball is handicapped in his intellectual development." (p. 13)
As music educators, it is necessary to establish a balance between letting the students discover knowledge for themselves on the one hand, and transmitting concepts to them though lecture or handout material on the other. Time is an important factor in achieving this balance: it can take longer to create learning environments where students discover for themselves than to simply lecture or pass out material to them. Jerome Bruner (1966) develops a view of constructivist learning theory in which the teacher is aware of the structures students bring to the learning experience. Educators then build on those structures in a spiral fashion, revisiting concepts at increasingly higher levels, as the student is ready. Embedded in Bruner’s theory are the pursuit of excellence and the emotional connection of the child to the learning experience. In Bruner’s (1979) words, “How can I know who I am until I feel what I do?” (p. 43) This mode of thinking has clear applications in the choral curriculum and is closely tied to Elliott’s (1995) views. In Music Matters (Elliott, 1995) Elliott writes, “we don’t hear music as it is, we hear it as we are.” This points to the importance of the student as the center of planning in curricular development.
While factual knowledge is essential, facts alone become what Perkins calls “inactive knowledge” or others have called “inert knowledge” when it is not applied to critical, reflective problem solving. Many educators are trapped in such “fact-based” teaching. Howard Gardner (1999) calls this a “dipstick” approach. He explains: “If you want to know how much oil you have in your car, you stick in your dipstick, and you pull it up, and you say, ‘Oh, I need another quart.’ Most of us, think that if you had the right cortical dipstick, you could shove it into your cortex, pull it out and see how smart you are. “ (p. 11) These perspectives would suggest the importance of choosing a curricular model that moves beyond a “fact-based” design and engages students who are able to leave the classroom with the abilities to analyze and solve problems on their own.
A recent class period scenario illustrates this. One day I was passing out a written in-class assignment that asked students to label notes on the staff according to a picture of a piano keyboard that had the names of the notes printed it. Most students were intent on understanding the instructions so they could proceed with what appeared to me to be a productive way to learn how to read notation. Though the class was a little confused at first, most students seemed to understand the assignment and after ten minutes or so of explanation, were working happily. One student, however, came up to me in the front of the class and stood in front of me. I assumed that she, like many of the others was there to ask for clarification of the directions. Instead she looked at me. “Why do we have to do this?” she asked slightly annoyed, continuing to look expectantly at me. “Well, this will teach you how to read music,” I replied, “don’t you think that will be valuable for you?” She continued a slightly irritated look at me, “I don’t want to be a musician,” she shot back, “why do we have to do this?” The conversation continued for a few minutes with me explaining the value of learning “another language” and how this will help her problem-solving and thinking skills in other subjects. I found the whole episode a bit disquieting.
As I later reflected on this exchange, I began to realize the source of my discomfort with the conversation. I was afraid she was right. I was afraid there might actually not be a good reason for me to have asked the whole class, in fact, all my classes that day, to work on this assignment. This was a situation in which I was trying to fill my students’ heads with prescribed knowledge and it was obviously very hard for some of them to see how this material was relevant. I began to think about how structuring the class as a performance combined with allowing the students’ to pursue the discovery of what they are passionate about might be achieved.
The idea of relevance is different for each student as well as each teacher. In the case of this article, I suggest the performance paradigm as a means of structuring the class, but also as a means of addressing relevance. Part I of this article dealt with the benefits of planning a classroom experience as a performance from the standpoint of classroom management and operation. But here I take it a step further and suggest how ‘planning as performance’ may also influence how relevant students feel music class is to them. For example, the class may be preparing for an upcoming winter choral performance. The various spoken, sung, and perhaps acting and choir parts are all important for the success of the program. When students consider the ‘relevance’ of the class activities, this moves it beyond the age-old “because I said so” from the teacher, which takes away ownership of the classes common goals from the students.
The following is a contrasting example of a class plan that addresses these concepts of ‘planning a class as a performance’ as well as ‘relevance to life.’ It is generally for a fourth grade class, but could be modified for slightly older or younger grades.
Introductory activity/vocal warm-up: I ask the students to stand in a circle and think of a brief activity each could do while standing in place such as clapping, snapping, smiling, etc. The first student sings “hey, hey, look at me, I am clapping, can you see,” on “sol-me.” Each student sings the lead with their particular action and the class echoes in response. We go around the circle until each student has had a turn. This is setting up work on the sol-me relationship that is prevalent in the repertory we will be learning later in the class.
Solfege activity: Without skipping a beat, I then have a leader come forward to lead the class in an improvisation he or she creates using “sol-me-do.” This can be a simple or complex as the student wishes, but I expect accuracy from both the leader and the class. The student is asked to be “teacher” by choosing the next person to come up based on their performance. I am careful with this activity not to choose a difficultly level beyond what has been previously taught.
Repertory activity: The main work of the day involved preparation for our upcoming school concert which involved each class. The piece of repertory is “Lullaby Little Papoose” based heavily on the sol-me relationship. The logical progression to this throughout the class period has lead to the warm up of the interval of the third and since this is a program all the students are involved in, there is a sense of group purpose in our work.
This model is different than my previous scenario because it is more student centered. In the first case, I was transmitting information to them via my handout on notation. In the second, I was acting as a guide or facilitator leading them to the understanding and performance of a piece. It is clear that planning a class as a performance is an efficient way to optimize music class time. It prevents gaps of time in which students might lose their focus. But, particularly in the case of upper grades, need to be taken a step further so that the progression is logical one. In the second example used here, there is a clear sense of purpose which addresses the questions students may form about “why this class is relevant to their lives.”


Crain, W. (2000). Theories of development: concepts and applications. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Spencer Pulaski, M. A. (1980) An introduction to children's cognitive development. New York: Harper and Row.
Bruner. J. (1966). Toward a theory of instruction. London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Elliott, D. (1995). Music matters: a new philosophy of music education. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. New York: Basic Books.