Formal

This is an example of formal song.  It is uncommon for a six year old to be in this stage, but she does meet the criteria.  She sings well, musically, on pitch, in rhythm, with dynamics, and is adding artistic choices such as vibrato and ornamentation.

Learned

This is an example of learned song.  This three year old can get through the entire song, Let It Go, and knows pretty much all the words.  There are obviously tons of inaccuracies, but she is close to being on pitch most of the time and has a clear sense of higher and lower pitch.  This is very typical for her age.

Potpourri

This is an example of potpourri.  This girl is two years old and her mother is asking her to sing songs.  She sings Row Your Boat and The ABCs successfully, but when she sings Twinkle Twinkle she morphs back into Row Your Boat half way through. I do not believe it was intentional, as the melodies of the songs are so similar, she probably got them mixed up in her head.

Spontaneous

This is an example of spontaneous song.  This six year old is making up a song on the spot.  You can tell she is making it up because you can physically see her thinking of what to sing next as she dances nervously.  She is also singing about common things like birds and flying.  The lyrics do not rhyme.

Babbling

This is a video of a 20 month old child babbling.  She is reacting to the music on the radio, and happily singing along and changing pitch, even matching the radio at times.  She is attempting to make a musical sound. This is typical for her age.

Weikert

The Phyllis Weikert method of music was originally developed for dancers to learn their steps.  The process is fairly quick and efficient.  It starts by saying the steps, then saying while doing, then whispering and doing, and finally just doing.  An example of these steps would be:

1. Say "Step-hop, step-hop, side-close"
2. Say and do "Step-hop, step-hop, side-close"
3. Whisper and do "Step-hop, step-hop, side-close"
4. Think and do "Step-hop, step-hop, side-close"

The transition from saying to doing is smooth and simple, making it an efficient method.

Gordon

The Gordon Method of learning music is all about audiation.  Audiation is the ability to hear music in your head without actually hearing or playing it out loud.  It includes a lot of aural perception and discriminative listening that develops the overall understanding of theory.  Here is the eight step hierarchy of his learning sequence:

1. Aural and oral
2. Verbal Association
3. Partial Synthesis
4. Symbolic association
5. Composite synthesis
6. Generalization
7. Creativity and Improvisation
8. Theoretical understanding

Through these steps, students eventually develop the ability to look at a piece of music, and sing it in their head.

Orff

The Orff Method allows children to discover music through play.  They use instruments, dancing, and movement to express themselves creatively.  This method is very big on exploration and improvisation, in addition to literacy.  The video above does a good job of demonstrating this method.

Kodály

The Kodaly Method focuses on using hand signs and solfege syllables to establish inner hearing and music literacy.  Notice how she starts with hand signs and establishing the scale degrees first, then continues with the rhythm.

Dalcroze

The Dalcroze method is all about movement.  The children move to the music and in doing that they internalize the rhythm by participating in it.  Above is a video demonstrating some exercises and games within the Dalcroze method.

Constructivism Vs. Behaviorism

Constructivism and behaviorism are two very different approaches to teaching.

  David Jonassen's constructivism is associated with mental constructs or principles and how they are developed.  Children are an integral part in the learning process with this style.  An example of constructivism is a lesson where the students take the information presented to them and then do something creative with it in order to teach it to the rest of the class.  By contributing to the class, the children are more likely to understand the material as opposed to just remembering it.  Wrong answers are always welcome and helpful because they become memorable teaching opportunities.  The overall quality of construction depends on the range and quality of information available to the student, or constructor, and while all constructions are to be considered meaningful, not all are complete or well done.

Albert Bandura, on the other hand, believed that social learning was best done with a model of the behavior that the student would emulate.  This is called behaviorism.  The student's observations of the model are mentally organized, memorized, and recalled when similar situations arise.  This style is lecture based, and it is assumed that the teacher has all the information and the students do not contribute.  While constructivists are mainly concerned with the process, behaviorists are mainly concerned with the results.  The disadvantage to this is that sometimes the students don't quite understand the meaning or explanation behind what they are doing. 

Uri Brofenbrenner

Uri Brofenbrenner is a developmental psychologist who suggested an ecological systems theory that is a great way of understanding the social network of children's learning.  There are four types of influences in this nested system.

1. The microsystem is comprised of the family or the classroom.  These are the people who are closest to the child, and therefore directly influence the child.
2. The exosystem is made up of indirect, external influence such as parental occupations that include the workplace.  This can affect the background of the child and the way he or she is raised.
3. The mesosystem is comprised of the interactions between the microsystems and the exosystems.
4. The macrosystem is the larger sociocultural system of society as it interacts with government policy and civic institutions.  

Understanding a child's environment and background is essential to teaching them effectively.  We as teachers should always be aware of how these four types of influences affect our students.

Jerome Bruner

Jerome Bruner is a psychologist who suggested a type of stage progression that can be applied to all ages and is somewhat dependent on maturation.  He proposed three teaching and learning strategies.

1. Enactive- learning through a set of actions.  For example, clapping out a complicated rhythm, so that you feel it in your body instead of just your ear.
2. Iconic- learning through images and graphs.  For example, drawing out a graph or diagram to better visualize the rhythm.
3. Symbolic- learning by going beyond what is immediately perceptible in the environment.  For example, simply reading or writing the rhythm in proper notation and being able to play it correctly.

Lev Vygotsky and the ZPD

Lev Vygotsky was a Russian social psychologist who established that the adult, usually the parent or teacher, is the main influence on the child's socialization process.  In this theory, the idea is that the child will model themselves after whatever the adult is doing, and the adult will transmit cues to the child whether it be through verbal comments, facial expressions, or gestures.  As the student continues to imitate the model, they will eventually be able to preform the task on their own.  A student's musical interactions with adults  while singing, moving, listening, and playing instruments are essential for their musical independence.

The Zone of Proximal Development is an idea based off Vygotsgy's theory, shown in the diagram below.  The green region represents what the child can do without any help from an adult.  The Orange region is what the child can do with the help of an adult.  The red area on the outside represents what the student cannot achieve, even with the help of an adult.  The orange region is what is known as the Zone of Proximal Development, because it is where the child learns, achieves their goals, and expands their ability.  The key to the ZPD is that it is constantly expanding.  As the student progresses, the level at which they can achieve things by themselves gets higher, so they are continually able to play harder music.  Depending on the child, the ZPD with expand at different rates.

The way I think about the ZPD is finding a "sweet spot" with the student so that whatever you're working on with them is neither too easy nor too hard, but just the right amount of difficulty to be in the Zone of Proximal Development.

Curriculum Suggestions from the 1960s

Musical Curriculum will always grow and evolve, however, there are some points from the 1960s that are still relevant.  The Yale Seminar, the Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project, and the Tanglewook Symposium made three main recommendations for Music Curriculum.

1. They suggested a broader and more representative repertoire for listening and performance.  This includes Western music of all periods, music of different cultures, avante-garde, and American styles.  It is important to show students music that they may have never heard before, because not only does it help teach them about different cultures, lifestyles, and historical periods, but they might even find something they really love and want to pursue.  In high-school, I was never really exposed to anything too different or eclectic.  A big part of music education is learning to appreciate and understand styles we aren't used to.
2. Music programs should include greater opportunities for musical expression and creativity, through composition and improvisation experiences.  This may be more true for middle and high school, but it is something that seems to be missing from the music curriculum lately. When students begin playing in ensembles in middle school, their music class experience becomes much more rigid.  Students should be encouraged to improvise and compose more, because it gives them more insight into how their instrument, and music in general, works.
3. There should be a more extensive use of technology and the media to aid instruction.  Its amazing how much more relevant this point is now than it was in the 1960s.  We have so many different options when it comes to technology in the classroom.  Whether it's a Smart Board with Smart Music on it, a composition lab equipped with Macs and midi keyboards, or a simple microphone to record rehearsals, it all helps tremendously.  The challenge now is to start welcoming technology and using it as a tool instead of viewing it as a threat.

Jean Piaget

One of the biggest names in music education is Jean Piaget.  Piaget developed the idea that there are four stages that kids go through in the learning process.

1. Sensorimotor- This stage occurs between the ages of one and two, and it is learning through direct sensory experience, or touching things.
2. Preoperational- This stage is between the ages of two and seven and it is learning through the manipulation of objects, learning consequences to actions, and therefore translating stimuli into symbols.  At this point, they don't quite understand the logic behind why things happen, all they know is that certain things happen as a result of their actions.
3. Concrete operations- From ages seven to eleven, children start viewing objects in a more concrete tangible way, but not yet abstractly.  They begin understanding systematic ways that things happen.
4. Formal Operations- From age eleven on, children begin to learn abstractly using logic and deductive reasoning.  This final stage describes how we think today as adults as well.

These four stages are essential to teaching children and deciding what and how to teach them certain material.  For instance, when teaching music to a two year old, you just want to expose them to some form of music and get them listening in dancing.  It would be very hard to teach a child how to read music until they were at least seven, because that's when they start recognizing symbols.

John Blacking

John Blacking is an anthropologist who studied the Venda people of South Africa and came to a very important conclusion about musical ability.  What he discovered that all children have an innate sense of music in the body already.  All they need is for a competent adult to help them bring it out.  This is connects with Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, because again the main idea is that music is natural for everyone.

Howard Gardner and the Eight Intelligences

Howard Gardner is one of the most important names when it comes to music education.  He came up with the idea that we as humans are born with multiple intelligences.  These include: Spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist, and music.  This suggests that we all have music inside us!  Our jobs as teachers is to help students realize their musical intelligence and help them learn to love and express it.

Sound Before Sight!

Long, long ago (between the years of 1746 and 1827), in a land far, far away (Switzerland), there lived a educational reformer and pedagogue named Heinrich Pestalozzi.  One of Pestalozzi's biggest contributions to music education is the sound before sight principle.  He believed that we should teach children a song first by listening and singing, then we can teach them the theory behind it later on.  This is very important for elementary school teaching, because they obviously haven't developed enough to understand theory.  However, they can still participate in music by playing, singing, listening, and improvising.  This sets a good foundation for the young musician, because not only are we instilling good musical instincts in them, but we are also creating an environment in which the children can have fun and grow to love music.  

Sound before sight is still important for musicians as adults as well.  I find that if I listen to a recording of a piece before I play it, I am more likely to play it the way it should sound when I'm reading the music.  Memorization is also much easier if I have a firm grasp on how a piece sounds.

"Hello, my Name is Heinrich Pestalozzi and I believe in sound before sight."

The 10 FUNctions of Music

Everybody loves music, however few people realize just how much music is a part of their lives.  Music is food for the brain, and helps develop people into hard working intellectuals.  There are ten basic functions of music that we should know about:

1. Emotional Expression-  Listening to music helps express emotions.  It is natural for humans to experience feelings that words simply cannot express, and that's where music steps in.
2. Aesthetic Enjoyment- Listening to music is fun and pleasurable, which is important for overall happiness.
3. Entertainment- Children enjoy the music diversions through television, radio, the media and much more.
4. Communication- Different communities value different musical styles that help them express the way that there society is run and the beliefs that they follow.
5. Symbolic Representation- Many cultures listen to different music than others, leading to a familiarity and symbolic meaning to "comfortable" modes and/or meters.
6. Physical Response- Children will naturally move in their own ways to different styles of music.  Having children dance is a great way to keep their involved and interested in the classroom.
7. Enforcement of Conformity to Social Norms- Music can be used in order to help teach children manners and social etiquette.  Singing the clean up song instead of simply telling children to clean up makes them much more involved in doing an otherwise boring task.
8. Validation of Social Institutions and Religious Rituals- Children often use musical riddles or chants in the games they play.  These songs will also incorporate patriotic, religious and seasonal themes.  In church, children might learn a song to remember the books of the Bible, and in history, children might learn a song to remember the names of the 50 states.
9. Contribution to the Continuity and Stability of Culture- Many cultures incorporate their cultural history into their music in order to teach children through a more entertaining medium.  We grew up learning the National Anthem and God Bless America, but we didn't learn their meaning till much later.  Once we knew the events connected to these songs we were much more likely to hold onto the information, because it was attached to music.
10. Contribution to the Integration of Society- Common musical interests is a great way for children to socialize and meet groups of children that share similar interests.  Playing music in a group is a great way for children to cooperate with each other in a fun, constructive way.

These ten basic functions are things that still affect us as adults, and will continually affect our students throughout their entire lives.  It is being aware of them that will makes us great teachers.