Week 6: Students Responding to Music

The focus of this week's reading/viewing assignment covers how students respond to music. Chapter 5 is filled with several gems of knowledge that can be useful in improving how our students listen to and respond to music. One of the gems that resonated with me the most is realizing that students respond to school music in a variety of ways. The chapter opens with Elizabeth's experiences as a general education teacher. I instantly made several connections with the scenario as I reflected upon my teaching experiences. Considering I was hired to teach chorus and band, my first year, I was thrown a curveball. I was assigned to teach two courses of general music or music appreciation to high school students. Band was my primary focus. Enrollment and morale were down due to the leadership change. Therefore, I used those two classes to teaching students how to read music and was hopeful that I would get them to learn how to play an instrument. My play was to recruit as many students as I could to join the band. However, I quickly realized that was a mistake. The students were not enthusiastic about coming to class, often showed out, and lacked participation in the lesson, and eventually expressed their distaste for the course. I was devastated. I thought if students enrolled in a music class their interest lied in the performance of music through band or chorus.

After an entire nine weeks of failed attempt after attempt, I came to the realization that I was not successful. My plan to recruit was not working and I desperately needed to find another alternative to ensure all students were engaged. This raised an important question. What can do to turn this situation around?  After a few surveys and several discussions on the classes' music habits, I found some important things that inspired me to try one more option. I learned all the students enjoyed creating music, singing and rapping. However, they cared not to indulge in any of structured programs such as the band.  I downloaded Mixcraft, allowed them to form cooperative learning groups, set a few constraints, and let the creativity to take over. I was amused at how quickly the participation increased, and morale soared. After the project was completed, I asked each student to write a reaction to his or her group collaboration. I disappointed with the responses I received. I read journal entries with sentences as followed: "The song was good." "The song needs some bass in it."

I realized I did not teach those students how to actively listen to music. Woody (2004) [as cited by Bauer, 2014]  said that the most an important aspect of music education is "to develop student's ability to respond emotionally to the expressive properties of sound." I did not deliver. I took for granted the process of having to teach students how to critically respond to music. In the near future, I plan to give this project a facelift by adding a few things:

1. Discuss the elements of music and help students to develop a musical vocabulary. 
2. Instead of using Mixcraft, allow students to exploring different DAWs to create an original composition.
3. After the project is completed, all students will be asked to write a reaction to their assignment. The students will be asked to explore the emotional and technical realms of the composition.
4. Each group will present their composition to the class. All students will verbally describe how the music makes them feel. Students should use musical terminology. 
5. Use a rubric to evaluate student work.
6. All student work will be collected, added to your Spotify email, burned onto a CD,  or placed on YouTube.

In the grand scheme of it all, Effective response to music is an area of interest that is truly a weakness for me. I do not get the well-thought out responses to music inquiries. Simply because I do not set my students up to succeed. However, this conundrum is now a distant memory. With some slight adjustments to the instruction and the incorporation of music technology "to refine [their] music listening skills, deepen the understanding of musical concepts, and strengthen the awareness of the role of music in cultural and society" (Bauer, 2014) will encourage them to build upon their skills to describe music, listen to music, and gain knowledge about music.

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Pedagogical Approaches to Composition. In Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.