Real-life examples...

Hello from inside my teaching studio!

Here are two real-life observations from the past week related to our 6400 course work.

I've been paying more attention to some of the methods I use in working with music students and paying more attention to watching how they appear to be processing what they are learning. Working with two young female students, 10 and 15 years old respectively, I observed some interesting examples of what we have been learning about in Dr. Knapp's 6400 class:

Student A, 10 years old, struggles on an off with anxiety to perform and has difficulty with, among other things, recognizing continuity, following a pattern or a chain of actions or retaining and repeating an action she performed less only a few seconds before. Reading notes is difficult for her, as it is for most students. I could write volumes about why that is, but that's a subject for another time.

This week, as every week, this student struggled to perform a piece from her homework, halting to see the note, process what it was on the page and then relate it to the action of playing the note. After an arduous effort she completed the piece.

I asked her to attempt the piece again, only this time I would play each note ahead of her. The music stand blocked her view of which note I was playing, but in hearing it, she could go directly to it with almost no hesitation. Meaning, reading the note and knowing what it was and playing it was a very jerky process, but in hearing the note itself with no other trigger, she could recognize what it was and where it was on the instrument almost instantly. I continued this through the 8 bars of the piece and she was able to complete it in about half the time. When I had her repeat it again without me playing the note ahead of her, it became the halted and arduous process again. The auditory trigger in her ability to retrieve information improved her performance and it revealed more about how much information she has actually retained. It also not only made that information more usable for her, but she exhibited little anxiety in the performance of applying it.

Student B, 15 years old, had as her homework an exercise that involved transcribing a new short melodic piece of her choosing, which she did very well. When she sat down I first asked her about her process, and what she shared reflected some of the concepts we learned about in our information processing module. She described a similar process professionals use to transcribe recorded music. She said she would listen to a part of the short melodic piece, pause the recording while continuing to sing the part back to herself (rehearsal) as she connected it with the scale and key knowledge on the instrument that we had covered in earlier lessons (assimilation)(elaboration). This is exactly what I had hoped she would do, it is what I hope any student will do, but not many of them achieve this level of applicable proficiency.

I thought these two examples from the past week were interesting and worth sharing... I also keep them here as examples I may want to cite in future work.