Abstract
Life happens on a “need to know” basis, or maybe I should say, learning happens most when there is a need to know. For example, I did not have any real reason to know much about Tanzania until a dear friend and colleague won a Fulbright Award to teach music there for a year. All of a sudden, Tanzania was on my radar. I was intrigued and read up on the country a bit. However, I really started learning about Tanzania once my daughter, Carolyn, received an invitation to spend a few weeks there. Suddenly, it was not just a country on the eastern edge of Africa. I now needed to know much more about the culture, the religions, the politics, how to get there and back, the immunizations, whether one uses an ATM or some other way of getting currency, and how to Skype to Africa (which is a little different from Skyping to Texas!). And then, when Carolyn was invited to play with the Nairobi Symphony along with our friends, I now needed to know much more about Kenya, relations between Kenya and Tanzania, the culture of Kenya compared with other countries in the EAC (East African Community; an acronym with which I was previously unaware), who conducts the Nairobi Symphony, and so forth. One could directly trace my Internet searching on African topics to the need to act on such details.
We have all experienced this “need to know” element of learning. For example, perhaps one pays little attention to the harmonic structure of a bridge in a song until actually trying to write a song. Those alternate fingerings are a bit theoretical until trying to get a tricky note in tune. The students about to take a new job certainly have a whole new interest in finding suitable literature to play or sing. The students about to student teach suddenly are much more intent on finding good procedures and classroom management strategies. When we need to know something, we seek out information with a whole new hunger. This is a salient point about learning and teaching.
In fact, I was just about to write “teaching and learning” and realized that even the ordering of verbs indicates our teacher-centered perspective. Because we do the teaching, we tend to think of our responsibility first, and so we usually say “teaching and learning.” And yet the “needs to know” principle suggests it really is “learning and teaching,” if we actually want students to internalize certain information, concepts, or insights. Fundamentally, this is the whole point of assessment, the engine driving the U.S. educational programs the past decade or more. We need to know what students know or do not know and then figure out how to tap into their “need to know.” This then is the real charm and challenge of teaching (at least to me): figuring out how to set the stage so students need to know the material. The more authentic the need, the deeper the desire is likely to be. A student memorizing material for a test may need to know it to get a good grade, but that is less likely to cause real internalization, compared with knowing it because one will share it with 30 seventh graders tomorrow! This was a point that came out strongly during the Society for Research in Music Education research symposium in Washington, D.C., this June during Music Education Week. There was quite a bit of discussion concerning how to organize fieldwork, ensembles, and private music study such that our teachers-still-in-college gain more “real-life” teaching experience early on, as well as the reflective orientation that leads to growth across one’s career.
Since you are reading this editorial, you likely feel like I am “preaching to the choir” right now. Anyone reading Update is already demonstrating a “need to know” more about the latest trends, the newest approaches to understanding music learning, and the current data on interesting new topics. In this issue, we have information on topics that may be new to you, your colleagues, the student teachers you host, or your administrators. The underlying theme is motivation.
Let us start with the instrumental area. Many programs in recent years, given budget tightening, have looked at reducing or eliminating instrumental instruction in the “pullout program” format. Sometimes the rationale is put forward that the pullout program is undermining academic achievement in reading or math; after all, how could a student out of class frequently possibly keep up? Yet music teachers and parents have suspected there is a lot of motivational power in those lessons and that students are not hampered in their academic class work and homework. Phillip Hash explores the data for students taking the ACT Explore test and finds that the pullout program participation has no negative effect on academic achievement. If an administrator, parent, or colleague hears this information and says, “I thought music was supposed to make them smarter!” then it is important to consider the following point. If students achieve at the same level when participating in a pullout program, it shows that they are staying on par academically while also receiving an accelerated music experience. They get the best of both!
Another study focusing on instrumentalists looks at band students’ extracurricular activities, exploring the ramifications for lifelong musical participation. Tammy Kuntz’s qualitative study uses focus group discussions to explore suburban, urban, and rural students’ perceptions of music opportunities beyond school. These revelations raise philosophical issues concerning who and what we teach. Or perhaps I should say who is learning and what they are learning! This is an excellent article to explore both our students’ motivations and our own.
The thread of motivation continues with three choral studies that explore attitudes, skills, and repertoire. The vocal jazz area is a new frontier for many choral educators, and Billy Baker explores the repertoire available with three publishing companies. In this day and age of “Glee,” directors may be finding students, parents, colleagues, and administrators interested in musical ensembles that feature or overlap popular styles. Interesting to me is the variable of improvisation opportunities provided through this literature. As improvisation is a valued skill in our national standards, our National Association of Schools of Music accreditation procedures; and in our states’ teacher-training mandates, this is a good point to explore.
Regarding skills in the choral ensemble, pitch matching is one of the most fundamental (and perhaps one of the most frustrating when lacking). One might assume that all high school students are able to match pitch well, but such is not the case, and in places where middle school choirs are jeopardized for scheduling or budgetary reasons, this places even more responsibility on the high school teacher. Aaron Riegle and Kevin Gerrity look at the impact of direct instruction on pitch matching with high school students. Read it and see if your preconceptions hold true!
Last, Mark Lucas brings us data on adolescent males and their attitudes about singing in choir. Surveying seventh and eighth graders in the Midwest, Lucas finds some interesting patterns regarding perceived support from adults and peers, with illuminations regarding gender effects. For those recruiting young men to choir, or interested in their staying in the program, this information is particularly useful.
We continue the exploration of students’ motivation with our first special topics article. Bradley Hruska specifically targets high school students’ motivation and leadership, studying how goal theory relates to motivation with a literature review. He takes us through a number of psychological and sociological sources, not specific to music, concerning mastery learning goals. He also gives some very practical tips and examples to show how this motivation may be encouraged in the high school music setting.
Now let us have a “change-up pitch.” When one sees the term heart rate variability, one’s own heart may start to race, envisioning a scientific study with so much jargon as to prove virtually incomprehensible. Evelyn Orman’s special topics article, however, takes us through her scientific study in a very clear, understandable way. Her recent evidence explores university students’ emotional reactions to music they like or dislike, with heart rate variability as the measure. I find this article especially interesting as it raises issues with musical genres and their classification, a topic that has piqued my interest ever since my own dissertation! It shows how tricky it can be for a researcher to find pieces of music that are perceived in a universal way, and it illustrates people’s inclination to divide and subdivide classifications based on their own experience. For anyone interested in musical styles, how they are categorized, and how this relates to their enjoyment, you will get insight from this article.
Our final offering consolidates a great deal of information for PreK through high school teachers. Lori Gooding and Jayne Standley have pulled together a wealth of studies into one elegant article. For anyone who is learning about musical development, such as preservice teachers or classroom teachers wishing to incorporate more music into their lessons, this proves a very useful guide. Additionally, this gives a very useful, data-based resource for anyone needing a list of relevant studies on musical development, all in one place. Many of us have this information scattered across a number of textbooks, dissertations, journals, conference proceedings, e-mails, and Facebook! How nice to have it accessible in one, easy-to-find source! I’m sure this will become reading in many classes to come, for both undergraduates and graduate students. It might also prove quite useful to share this information with parents, administers, community members, and media. So if you come across someone who needs to know more about musical development from early childhood through adolescence, this is the place to go!
Enjoy!