Teaching Towards Musical Understanding

Today is the second consecutive “snow day” this week in my area, totalling 4 snow days this month alone.  It’s not surprising – we generally have upwards of 10 snow days in any given winter. The snow days have allowed me many hours in the classroom to plan, organize, and clean. Today, however, I began reading (or rather, re-reading, since this is a text from one of my university courses) “Teaching Towards Musical Understanding” by Amanda Montgomery – a book I mentioned in my last post.

I’ve read through the first three chapters, noting any sections that I found interesting or important. So far nothing is new to me – everything I’ve read is already a part of my teaching. However, it’s good to read it again, and remember why we do certain things, and even realize when we’re not putting enough emphasis or too much emphasis on certain elements.

The following is comprised of bits and pieces of the first three chapters of the book – none of this is my own work, but simply my paraphrase!

In chapter one, Amanda Montgomery defines “musical understanding” in her terms – it is “the ability to think and act musically with personal meaning” (4). This whole text is based around creating opportunities for our students to do just that – think and act musically with personal meaning. This is not something that comes naturally to most children, it has to be taught. To teach musical understanding, we as music educators need to make sure that students are engaged in “active, concrete, authentic experiences”(5) though eight different classroom experiences:

1. Singing
2. Playing Classroom Instruments
3. Improvising
4. Composing
5. Listening
6. Reading music
7. Writing music
8. Moving to music

Not only do children need to experience music in these ways, but they also need to be given the opportunity to reflect on what they have done. The music teacher make time for classroom discussions so that the children can think about and talk about their musical experiences.

In chapter two, Montgomery further discusses the role of the music teacher in helping students make music meaningful. We teach music in a “spiral progression” – we don’t simply teach a concept until it is fully learned, and then move on to a new concept, we are continually introducing and reinforcing concepts all throughout our students’ musical journies. Montgomery says that, “children study progressively more sophisticated musical concepts…of music during each consecutive grade level”(11).

Classroom experiences in music must be developmentally appropriate if we are going to make music meaningful for our students. The same goes for any subject, really. For example, I was at a teacher inservice a few weeks back to look at strategies for French literacy. My students recieve 45 minutes of instruction in French every second day – they are definitely not as proficient as a student in French Immersion, who recieves French instruction for the full day, every day. The books they were showing us at this inservice were for our grade 4, 5, and 6 students. The books were simple enough stories, but the plots were contrived and juvenile – meant for a grade 1 French Immersion student. My upper elementary students will not find any meaning in those books because they are not developmentally appropriate. They are appropriate for their skill level, but not their developmental level.

Montgomery also encourages the “sound-before-symbol” approach to teaching musical elements.  This approach “provides a teaching process by which children experience music aurally, kinestehtically, and orally first, before labelling and reading its symbolic representation” (15). This is something that I’ve been doing with my grade 1 students. Since November, we’ve been thinking of specific words – usually seasonal. First, we just talked about the words, how many “sounds” each word had, putting the words into our hands (clapping), or into non-pitched percussion instruments. Then, we started putting strings of words together, later putting them over marked beat patterns (using hearts). Once we were really good at this, I started writing words on the board and would mark in the “sounds” using dots above the word. Then, after this, we started transforming our dots into “tah” and “titi.” This progressing has been incredible. It’s the first time I’ve ever had the opportunity to teach students from square one, and I would definitely keep with this approach, maybe refine it a little more, but it works!

ok time to take a break…more to come later.