Lesson planning is one of the most important things teachers do. Many methods and formats for lesson planning have circulated within teacher preparation programs and professional development seminars. Today, I’d like to reduce them down to the most essential points, and show you how I go about planning my music lessons. The best place to … Continue reading The Basics of Lesson Planning
Month: April 2014
Early Childhood and Learning How To Sing
Two years ago, a music education major in his senior year spent two weeks observing me teach, and trial teaching my students. Over the course of those two weeks, he expressed his surprise at how well my first graders could hold pitch and sing in tune. According to what he had been taught, they shouldn’t … Continue reading Early Childhood and Learning How To Sing
What Does Music Mean–Revisiting Bernstein’s Lecture
In 1958, Leonard Bernstein gave a Young Peoples Concert entitled “What Does Music Mean?” In it, he said that music doesn’t mean anything in the ways language does, but instead means what it is. Today, I will take up the matter of musical meaning, restricting myself to developing Bernstein’s points, and avoiding deeper aesthetic and … Continue reading What Does Music Mean–Revisiting Bernstein’s Lecture
Music and Literacy–The Backbone of Musicianship
In my last post, I discussed the meaning of musicianship. Certainly, part of what goes into musicianship is the part of music literacy that is the generating of musical ideas. Literacy of any kind does not only include reading and writing, but also creating ideas and communicating them to others. In music, improvisers do this … Continue reading Music and Literacy–The Backbone of Musicianship
What is Musicianship?
Musicianship is one of those words that is used frequently but thought about rarely. As music teachers, we want our students to acquire musicianship, but we don’t necessarily spend much time specifically teaching it. Much of the time we are teaching skills, and then assuming musicianship will automatically follow. But it is often the case … Continue reading What is Musicianship?
Solving the Problem of Students who Don’t Practice
For those of who play orchestral instruments and guitar, recorder, keyboard, accordion, harmonica, ukulele or whatever, disciplined practice is still necessary for advancing and achieving success. At the same time, we all have students who are less than willing to bother practicing. It also happens fairly often that a student will claim to be practicing, but … Continue reading Solving the Problem of Students who Don’t Practice
Your Attention Please: Teaching Your Music Students to Correctly Focus
Everything has a starting point; an order of doing things that must be followed if the undertaking is going to succeed. When building a house, one must start with the foundation. In teaching, the starting point is having your students’ attention. Nothing else matters in the classroom if the students are not putting their attention … Continue reading Your Attention Please: Teaching Your Music Students to Correctly Focus
Effective Strategies for Teaching Students to Play In Tune
Teaching students to tune is an area of concern for many music teachers. Students, particularly young ones, often need frequent attention to help them tune correctly. While there may be times that student difficulties tuning are physical, such as an inability to turn a tuning peg on a string instrument, many times the difficulty is … Continue reading Effective Strategies for Teaching Students to Play In Tune
Educating the Whole Person–Ethical and Social Considerations in Music Education
In this, the third and final installment in my series on educating the whole person and music, I will discuss the social and ethical pathways identified by Comer, and the intra- and inter-personal intelligences that Gardner found. There is perhaps no greater purpose to music than for one person to relate to another through the … Continue reading Educating the Whole Person–Ethical and Social Considerations in Music Education
Educating the Whole Person–Movements and Emotion with Music
This is the second in a three part series on educating the whole person and music education. Yesterday, I gave an overview of parts of the whole person, and in general how music engages several of those parts. Today I will discuss in detail the relationship between music and the physical and psychological pathways identified … Continue reading Educating the Whole Person–Movements and Emotion with Music
mister a music place 
You must be logged in to post a comment.