Michael Joviala

Tag: 3rd-5th Grade

  • Freedom and Control

    When I work with Dalcroze teachers-in-training, the most frequent question I ask them is, “What are you teaching?” It’s easy to confuse what we are teaching (music) with how we are teaching it (Dalcroze teaching strategies). For most teaching situations, the goal of the class shouldn’t be Dalcroze teaching techniques like follows or quick reactions, it should be a musical goal like experiencing simple triple meter or syncopation. I named the blog (“Musical Subjects”) after this concept to help myself remember what my job—when I’m not training teachers— actually is: teaching music. But at the end of this school year I noticed myself pulling at the harness, and so I allowed myself (um, my other self) to loosen the reins. This took on quite two quite different forms in two different classes.

    In my 5–7-year-old class, I used a scenario about inhabitants of far-flung islands who don’t yet know that other islands and people exist. The children each demonstrate how they move in their world, gradually discover each other, and come together to learn about each other’s culture, which can involve things like flag making, pageants, peace anthems, musical and dance performances. (Yes, I’m creating the actual world I want to see. I can dream, can’t I?)

    I usually tie the different islands to specific rhythms, for example, if my subject is compound meter (like 6/8 or 12/8) one island may be the beat (i.e. dotted quarter notes), another is the division (groups of three eighth notes), another the long-short skipping pattern (quarter-eighth) intrinsic to compound meter, and so on. Students would move their assigned rhythms as the sun came up on their island indicated by what they hear me play. They would come together to form combination rhythm patterns as they discovered each other. Their ‘flags’ would be large notecards with their rhythms printed on them.

    But as I was teaching it this time I suddenly dropped all of that and let the kids completely decide how they wanted to move. When it came time for ‘flags’, I let them create their own with crayons and paper. Though I definitely influenced their choices by the music I played to match their movement, I wanted them to feel ownership and agency in the direction the story took. We all improvised together at the end, each child with their own unique percussion instrument. I told them that after the islanders encountered each other, they decided to play so that they could hear each individual instrument well. They succeeded, much to my delight. The girl playing the finger cymbal let it ring instead of playing it as fast and loud as she could. This let us hear another child’s simple soft beat on the drum as well as another’s gentle repeating pattern on the xylophone. It needed little intervention from me once I decided that it was okay that the sounds they were making weren’t going to fit neatly onto a rhythm grid. If I were evaluating a student teacher, I might have been critical of this, but they were making their own music, not ‘teacher music’. Maybe their rhythmic inclinations did not align perfectly with my curriculum—but it was authentically and undeniably theirs. Of course, rhythmic precision and clarity is indeed an essential musical skill to learn. But who am I to say that the kids must do this all the time? The most important thing was that the kids were really aware of and listening to each other. That’s not a theoretical musical topic like beat and division, but it is an essential musical skill. I don’t think the result would have been the same in a lesson focused on an exclusive set of rhythm patterns.

    In another class, I went the opposite way: from creative freedom to more structure and accountability. These kids are older (3rd-5th grade), and they’ve spent quite a bit of time with ‘loose reins’ this year. We’ve done our share of straight nuts-and-bolts Dalcroze exercises, but have also done a lot of freer, exploratory improvisation as these kids seemed to really respond to that type of work. Over the year, engagement has been up and down, and the group lately has been a bit cliquish. So instead of planning a precise lesson with sequenced events, I gave them a practice list of things to figure out and perform, such as dissociations (hands, say, do one rhythm and feet do another), conducting patterns to execute, and rhythmic systems to move (such as stepping a rhythmic pattern with divisions that change position in each measure).

    I demonstrated each one and asked them to practice one thing with someone else, making sure they partnered at least once with every person in the group. I expected some resistance, but to my surprise they were completely into this. One girl who had seemed intimidated by the older girls all year left the room with a big grin. Although my main goal was breaking down the social barriers that kids this age are prone to, I realized it also tied into the essential musical skill of collaboration: orchestra members must find a way to work with their stand partners; a comping jazz pianist should support the harmonic choices of the soloist, for example.

    Typical Dalcroze classes are focused on a single subject and we aim to let the subject unfold so that as much as possible students discover what they need to learn on their own. At our best, the lessons gradually unfold, building skills and understanding in an artful way. But in this class I just dumped a bunch of stuff onto the table and let them work on their own. It seemed to bring them closer together and more independent. My takeaway from this is to question the value of any kind of rigidity, orthodoxy or dogma. There can be a time for freedom and a time for control. And given the state of the world at the moment, that may be even more important than building musical skill and understanding.

    I was also reminded that my teaching is not always about the kids, it’s often about me. I needed to loosen up my own expectations about what a class should contain, about what constitutes ‘good teaching’. I wouldn’t have given either class in a public demonstration. If a student-teacher taught similarly for a teaching exam, I wouldn’t have passed them. But I realized I needed to listen not just to the kids, but to myself. What do I need this week? What will prevent me from going through the motions of a lesson I know will ‘work’? I think our students, especially when they are children, respond well to us when we are being true to ourselves. They can certainly sense when we are not.

  • It’s All a Charade (Part 2)

    I was first attracted to the educational practices of Èmile Jaques-Dalcroze because they seemed to turn everything on its head, allowing a fresh perspective on music and teaching. What can you learn from singing every scale from one pitch? What could moving precise rhythm patterns tell us about the very nature of rhythm? But even revolutionary approaches can become rigid. Here’s part 2 of the story of a 3rd-5th grade class which encouraged me to think outside of a box that was already outside of the box.

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    Believe it or not, 9-12 year-olds love rules. They have a burning desire to ‘be right’, with an often cool exterior that can barely keep the lid on an absolutely goofy interior. (Sometimes is it is the exact opposite!) Over the years I’ve worked with groups this age that seemed to have an innate understanding of the connection between movement and music, and how movement can be put to use to discover the ‘musical truths’ that reside in the body, as Meredith Monk put it. This year? Not so much. In a previous post, I described how I used the timeless party game of charades to demonstrate how almost anything related to human experience could be expressed solely through movement.

    They loved playing the game and they continued to ask for it all year. We had many follow-up classes in which I attempted to steer the experience more overtly to musicianship training. I felt that they understood the point of playing, but it still didn’t seem to spark too much curiosity about music as a physical experience. Music, at school at least, seemed for them to be more about learning notes and then playing them from memory.

    If there is anything like a dogma in Dalcroze education, it is that students should experience music before analyzing it. With some groups, I can simply give a direction like, “Step the beat and clap the division.” Once this has been mastered, I can add, “Change hands and feet at the signal.” Assuming terms “beat” and “division” have been well defined and are basically understood, once most have mastered the skill I can then ask them questions about their experience. I might start with a precise question like, “How many steps for each clap?” If, for example, we are comparing simple and compound meters (beats with two and three divisions respectively) the answers will be ‘2’ or ‘3’. But to move beyond the math, we can compare how it felt to move the 2’s as compared to the ‘3’s. (If I keep the division of the beat constant, when written as 2/4 and 6/8, the eighth notes will be played at the same tempo, expressed usually as “division=division”.) Did one feel more linear and the other feel more curvy? Did one feel more ‘flowy’ and the other feel more angular? Why might that be? Their physical experience becomes their teacher.

    When I tried my usual experience-first approach with this particular group and asked them to compare the feeling of the two meters, instead of using words like “curvy” vs “angular” they answered with words like ‘shorter’, ‘longer’ and ‘faster’ or ‘slower’. These are relative words that can point to a significant aspect of the experience, but only if we can compare them directly to physical experience. But these students couldn’t discern basic movement data such as the three divisions of 6/8 which lead to opposite footing every beat, and the two divisions of 2/4 leading to regular footing every beat.

    I needed a different ‘different’ approach.

    So the next week in small groups, I gave them separate challenges. One group had to demonstrate the difference between simple and compound meter, and the other was asked to show the pattern of whole and half steps in a major scale. Both had to use movement alone. They would be successful if the other group could explain the concept back to them.

    Normally this kind of activity would come somewhere towards the end of a class. The students would have had enough experience of the subject to accomplish it without too much input from me. They would simply be putting their own spin on it. But by this point in the year, I knew this group well. If I tried my usual approach, I expected that at some point I would look up from the piano and see them listlessly trudging around, dutifully doing what they were told, but doing it mechanically and without making any strong connections between their movement and the music they were hearing.

    So I decided to simply tell them right away what the difference between the two meters was rather than giving them experiences that would allow them to discover it. “The beat in simple meter has two divisions; in compound meter the beat has three,” I said and sat down to watch them work. They blinked at me (they knew me well, too), surprised that I would just come out with a fact like that, unearned. For those working on the scale, I brought them up to the piano and simply showed them the pattern and then stepped out of the picture.

    This goes against the cardinal Dalcroze pedagogical principle that class activities should lead students to discover facts like these rather than be told them from the outset. But I needed a way to get them to want to “discover”.

    The groups divided themselves into boys and girls (at their request). The girls got to work pretty quickly. They needed help focusing and paring down their ideas, but they came up with something that effectively signaled the pattern of whole and half steps mostly on their own. The boys needed quite a bit of coaching, but mostly because they were having trouble working together. Eventually they, too, succeeded. The efforts of both were very mechanical even though I insisted that they use the whole body in their creation, but they were accurate and successfully communicated at least the ‘math’ of the concept. It took the entire period for them to accomplish this.

    By the next week, they were able to piece together the mathematical difference between simple and compound meters relatively quickly and we were able to focus on what the physical experience of moving them felt like. (I used a list of words describing movement in place and movement from place to place  from Barbara Metler’s “Materials for Dance”. Perhaps the subject of another article…)

    What’s the lesson? The lesson was for me.

    Composer John Cage used to say “get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.” No matter how effective a teaching method, system or principle is most of the time, it won’t be effective all of the time. I don’t know how far I got in connecting their minds to their bodies this year, but it reminded me that every once in a while it can be useful to turn upside-down things right side up. Then guess what: they become upside-down again! (Assuming, as in this case, that “upside-down” is a good thing!) These shifts of perspective helped me stay focused on what I am really trying to do in the classroom: engage with my fellow humans through sound and movement in an effort to express something meaningful and maybe even beautiful.

    And that’s not just a charade.

  • It’s All a Charade

    The Classic Party Game as Music and Movement Portal for 3rd-5th Graders

    Last week, I came across a passage in a book by Elizabeth Vanderspar that stopped me in my tracks. (The book was originally published as “Principles and Guidelines for Teaching Eurhythmics” and is now available as Dalcroze Handbook: Teaching Rhythmics.) She suggested playing charades with older kids who are new to Dalcroze to give them an experience of communicating through movement.

    The second I read this I knew immediately I would try this with a 3rd – 5th grade Dalcroze class I have this year. Most of the students have been studying an instrument for a while and most of them are new to Dalcroze this year. They are basically affable and game to try anything, but after our first month together I did not feel that many of them really understood the point of the class. It’s a good question: just why are we moving again?

    There are many possible answers to this question, and my own answers have evolved (and multiplied) over the years. The one most often cited–to learn music theory primarily through direct kinesthetic experience–still holds up. But simply telling someone this, especially a 5th grader, is not very effective. “I signed up to learn to play the piano. Why am I running around a room without my shoes?”

    Vanderspar’s suggestion seemed perfect for this age group. They love rules (they can be lawyer-like in their execution to the letter of every utterance from me); they are highly competitive; they love to problem solve; and most of all they love any excuse to laugh and get completely silly. What better way to experience communication through movement than with this classic game of, well, communicating through movement? Brilliant.

    So we tried it.

    To save time I decided to bring in the words myself that they would guess rather than let them select. I used a random charades generator (thank you internet) set on ‘easy’. I let them self-select their teams (predictably it was boys against girls). And I let them play one regular round: 3 minutes per team to guess as many words as they could, no talking, only gesture. They enjoyed themselves. The girls did much better than the boys (also predictable).

    We played another round, and this time I accompanied the gesturer on the piano whenever I thought it might help. I tried to follow their lead and complement their movement, sometimes making verbal suggestions if they were stuck. If a team was having trouble guessing, I asked the mover to listen to the piano and reflect more closely what they heard. This often led to a more conscious use of weight, space or time, and it seemed to facilitate more accurate guessing. (The boys did slightly better on the second round.)

    In between rounds we talked a bit about what elements went into successful communication of a word or idea through movement. I was not able to elicit much in the way of thoughtful analysis: how, for example, a rhythmic slicing of an imaginary pizza made use of weight, space and time, and just why that facilitated quicker guessing than just drawing a triangle in the air over and over with an exasperated look on your face.

    So we played a third round. This time, I intervened more often to give direct assistance. One boy was having trouble communicating ‘snow’. The music I played lightly in the upper register of the piano (actually a pale imitation of Debussy’s “La Neige Dance”) gave him a bit of assistance, but then he began trying to mime the making of a snowman and ending up just confusing his team. He quickly drew a few circles in the air and was stymied when no one could figure out what he was trying to communicate.

    I understood so I butted in. I bent down to roll a heavy ball of snow. I made another, slightly smaller, and bent my legs with my back straight to slowly lift it and place it on top of the other. I did it a third time, with a smaller ‘snowball’. The students instantly guessed “snowman” and then it was a short trip to elicit the word ‘snow’.

    This was paydirt. The clear use of weight, time, shape, effort made for clear communication of an image. It was not hard for them after that to make the connection to music performance. When you are playing an instrument the sound you make is entirely dependent on your movement (unless you are programming a digital instrument). Loud and soft, fast and slow, short and long all depend on physical precision, and the connection between the imagination and this fine motor precision are what give music its expressive power.

    All of that took up the full 45 minutes. We discussed no music theory directly. There were no quarter notes or eighth notes on the board, no time signatures.  But I think it was worth it. We talked about the value of using your imagination to translate ideas, feelings and experience from one medium to another: sound to movement; movement to sound; something heard to something visual; a feeling to a phrase of poetry…

    I think we opened some doors, and most importantly I got a clearer picture of how they conceive of both movement and music. It will be fun to see where we end up by the end of the year.

    I’ll keep you posted!