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?
Robert Adams
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
Educating the Whole Person
This post is the first in a three-part series on educating the whole child and music education. Today, I will discuss what the whole child means. In the other posts, I will cover how music education addresses ways of learning and knowing children have. Most philosophies of American education include a statement to the effect … Continue reading Educating the Whole Person
With Music, The Learning Is In The Doing
Today, one of my eighth grade classes was composing percussion ensemble pieces. They had begun their works last week, and were continuing composing today. As I circulated through the class, looking at student work and pointing out notational issues that needed to be corrected, I was reminded of how many students make the same errors, … Continue reading With Music, The Learning Is In The Doing
Music, Emotions, and Student Listeners
Every now and then I'm reminded that there are some hints I take for granted that are perplexing to some students. The learning activity for fifth grade classes was to listen to the first ten minutes of Maher's fifth symphony and make a list of each emotion they heard expressed moment to moment. The activity … Continue reading Music, Emotions, and Student Listeners
Music Teachers and the School Community
Music teachers can easily have many reasons for feeling disconnected from the rest of the school. They are referred to as specialists, teach a subject most other teachers have minimal training in, and work in a room that is probably isolated from most of the other classrooms. Also, music classes are typically taught when other … Continue reading Music Teachers and the School Community
mister a music place 
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