Every now and again, when I say to a student, "please stop talking and instead sing," I get a reply of "but talking and singing are the same thing." I used to be amazed that anyone would not pick up on the differences between spoken word and sung lyrics. But then I stopped to reflect … Continue reading Singing and Rapping: Two Vocal Traditions
Month: March 2017
Making Lessons Interesting and Important
Any classroom will run more smoothly and be a place of effective learning when the lessons taught are both interesting and important to students. Lessons that are interesting to students are about things that students can use, want to use, and to which they can make connections with their personal lives, their other classes, their … Continue reading Making Lessons Interesting and Important
Student Engagement in the Music Classroom
Music is one of those areas where people seem to think natural ability has as much to do with success as anything. Whereas we assume that with differentiated instruction all children can learn to read, learn to reason and compute mathematically, and learn to use the scientific method to find and discover knowledge and understanding, … Continue reading Student Engagement in the Music Classroom
Using Student Feedback to Improve Instruction
In order to provide the best possible instruction for our students, we must be informed about what they are experiencing as they go through the learning activities we have planned for them. We must know what difficulties individual students are having, what progress each student is making, and what connections the student is making between … Continue reading Using Student Feedback to Improve Instruction
Teaching Musical Phrases
From a perceptual perspective, phrase may be the most important musical element that a music educator teaches. While pitch and rhythm are perhaps the most foundational, and while there can be no phrases without pitch and rhythm, people perceive and understand music aurally in groups of sounds, not from individual notes. Even in instances where … Continue reading Teaching Musical Phrases
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