In the past, I have recorded myself playing scales and repertoire on various students so that they can listen to their part as they read it. Each student has a Google account and I can send them these recordings via Google Drive so they can receive their recordings on any device connected to the internet. My teaching style revolves around modeling and hands-on learning. If they are at home listening to my recordings, they are only getting the audio part of it. When they are in my classroom, I will play a different instrument almost every day so that each section of players can both see and hear how they must play. When modeling, I always emphasize proper posture, embouchure, and hand positions (or drumstick grips for my percussionists). The next step would be for me to record video segments so that my students learn the visual and musical concepts that we are working on in class. Unfortunately, I do not have a webcam at the moment but I plan on using my iPad next year to do videos for my students. They still have access to apps for metronomes and tuning so I encourage them to use those in addition to the recordings.
The concept of structure and setting boundaries within the area of creativity is something I strongly believe in, at least in the beginning of the learning process. When I teach my jazz band students how to improvise, I will often limit the number of notes they can pick from the blues scale. By doing this, they can free their minds from the pressure of choosing the right notes and focus more on style and rhythmic applications. After they've gotten the hang of it, I will let them choose from a larger set of notes, lifting the constraints that were placed earlier. Depending on how experienced they are, the limitations will differ from one year to the next. Just last year, I had a strong jazz band and we were able to go beyond traditional blues and get into pentatonic scales, modes, etc. A few years ago, the jazz band played well but were extremely shy when it came to improvisation. We had gotten into the pentatonic scale but that was it. Since the jazz band is an audition-only group, I use my Chromebook to record each audition and carefully assess each student's skill level. It is imperative for the music educator to evaluate his/her students' abilities at the start of the school year. One of the most challenging parts of teaching music is making adjustments to lessons that play to the students' strengths while encouraging improvement in areas of weakness. Careful assessment of student skill can certainly assist music teachers who face this challenge.
Bloom's Taxonomy breaks learning into three definitive realms: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. If I were to pick the way that I learn, I'd go with psychomotor mainly because I'm a hands-on learner. Consequentially, my teaching style involves a lot of physical work. Sometimes I'll have my students stand up and stretch before we warm-up, I do breathing exercises with them, and we often clap or stomp our feet when we learn about rhythms. By its nature, playing an instrument requires a strong foundation of motor skills. This doesn't mean that cognitive and affective learning aren't as important when it comes to music. As previously stated, when I model for my students, I do more than just play the music. I try to impart as much knowledge as I can regarding technique through my modeling. As far as reading music goes, I'm glad that Bauer mentioned Suzuki and Gordon because I support their style of ear-before-reading. Much like the spoken word, children learn to speak by listening to others speak long before learning how to write. The same goes for music and without a proper foundation of aural skills, learning how to read, decode, and notate music may be more difficult. Many factors play into how students learn and teachers must always be aware of these factors. Implementing technology is perhaps the best way to adhere to how students learn in this day and age.
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