Building Student-Centered Experiences in Exploratory Music

Submitted by Melissa Goetschius
Instrumental Music Teacher, Joppa View Elementary

Students play instruments.  How much more student-centered can you get?  After some brief directions and a bit of modeling from the teacher, the student is responsible for practicing the necessary playing skill(s) needed to master the performance of that instrument.  Yes, the teacher is needed to oversee this process, correct mistakes in technique, and encourage the student when he is struggling, but, it is ultimately up to the student to master his own learning.  Right?  Isn’t that what being student-centered is all about?  These were my initial thoughts entering this school year.

Then came all the trainings, faculty meetings, PD’s, etc., and the more I started to unpack what having a student-centered classroom was going to look like, I quickly realized that my old way of instruction just wasn’t going to cut it anymore.  Yes, the act of making and participating in music is still, indeed, student-centered.  Students are responsible for performing their individual part, for working in groups when performing songs, and for making aesthetic decisions about the music and performance in real time.  Students are always actively “creating” in a musical environment.  But what about students making choices about musical selections?  What about students deciding on activities that will improve their technique?  Stations…in instrumental music?   What?

Last year, I taught one lesson using stations.  It was a lesson about vibration, sound waves, and how these vibrations interact with the environment.  Students visited four stations: 1) What causes sound 2) sound waves 3) sounds waves traveling through the air and 4) eardrum.  There was a science experiment at each station, and by the end, the kids were able to complete a diagram about how sounds were produced.

Since I had the format somewhat in my mind from last year, I decided to focus on station-based learning this first half of the 2014-2015 school year. I was hesitant to adopt this approach for the majority of my instruction. I was thinking; people do realize that Johnny has never played an instrument before, right?  How in the world is he going to learn the necessary playing skills by being sent off to a station without me teaching?  Despite extreme trepidation, I went ahead and dove in and hoped that I wasn’t ruining my students’ first instrumental music experiences.  Of course I started the year with my time-tested vibration lesson!

Seeing that this format of rotating through four stations worked, I decided to model my next lesson with this structure. For the exploratory music curriculum, a set of four stations that students rotate through adapts quite easily. Of course there have been growing pains.  It took students some time to adjust to working through problems on their own.  It took some time for them to realize that they were indeed responsible for doing their work at the station, that they were responsible for the correct answer, or practicing a performance skill.  My writing and posting of specific, concise directions to follow improved.  I learned which activities produced the best results.  In short, through making music, we helped each other! 

After a few weeks, I stopped stressing (well, a little) and took a good look at what was going on at these stations.  I noticed some really neat things:

• Students who were stronger academically were helping others with the work/answers.
• Students who don’t always fit in had a group to belong to and were finding ways to contribute.
• Students were actually having conversations about music and instruments and sometimes even how these things relate to their personal lives!
• Students were making connections, lesson to lesson about how skills and concepts relate to each other.
• Answers were becoming more articulated, vocabularies were improving, students could now tell me “why” things were happening.
• Students were actively exploring their musical world; which is the whole point of the Exploratory Music curriculum.
  
  

Best of all, the students are also learning how to play their instruments!  One of the stations in each lesson allows me to work with students in small groups on specific playing issues.  Through the use of the other stations, students work on note reading, rhythm reading, why instruments function, aural development, or creating their music.

It has been a very rewarding teaching experience thus far.  I look forward to the continued use of stations and the implementation of technology for the remainder of the school year.