A new approach in a challenging school

I’m trying out some new ideas in my teaching at Pelican Primary School this term, influenced by some of my current reading. The two books I have on the go at the moment are Teaching for Musical Understanding (2^nd edition) by Jackie Wiggins, and Music, Informal Learning, and the School: A new classroom pedagogy by Lucy Green.

A recommendation in Teaching for Musical Understanding, concerns the proposition that all music-learning experiences need to take place in the context of authentic, whole musical works (as opposed to music that has been contrived in order to demonstrate or explain something). These musical works – songs, orchestral pieces, solo works, world music, jazz, etc – are selected by the teacher because they demonstrate a particular idea or musical dimension that will act as a ‘doorway in’ for the students’ practical learning experiences. Meanwhile, an early stage in the pedagogy described in Green’s book has students working to reproduce songs of their own choice, working with CD recordings, in small groups, and independently of teacher guidance.**

Thus, I’ve selected a piece of recorded music for all but two of the middle and upper primary classes at Pelican Primary School to use as a stimulus for a range of learning experiences. I’ve used a mix of student suggestions and my own choices to come up with songs like Fireflies (Owl City), California Dreamin’ (Mamas and the Papas), and Three Little Birds  (Bob Marley).

One thing I’ve loved observing is how eagerly the students take hold of the song sheets and sing along. This is a high-level ESL [English as a Second Language] school with a large refugee  and new immigrant intake, and it is not unusual for some students to have a much lower reading level than is standard for their age group. However, following the words on the song sheet and singing along with the recording is a huge motivation for reading. They were completely engaged and inspired, this first week, keen to sing along with the words they could recognise, and keen to have their own copy of the words to take home.

With a song like California Dreamin’, I’ve asked them to notice the 2 groups of singers in the recording – the main group (or soloist) and the backing singers, who sing the ‘echo’ of each line. I get them to sing along with one part or the other, and suddenly they are having their first experience of part-singing, something that they have not been able to manage yet, when it is just them on their own with me and the guitar.

Pelican Primary School is not a straight-forward school environment – it is probably the most challenging school I teach in, and have ever taught in! It is challenging for all sorts of reasons – to do with behavioural issues and the way that the students engage with learning, and with each other. Their capacity to listen, to stay on task, and not seek distraction is incredibly limited, something that still can take me by surprise even now, after two years at the school.

Music is sometimes just too ‘invisible’ and abstract for them. They actually work best with very structured, formal, directed teaching with only a small amount of creative thinking or applying knowledge in a variety of contexts. By contrast, my approach as a teaching artist is to facilitate rich, multi-layered experiences, through a process of collaborative inquiry and exploration. I use a lot of informal learning approaches – building skills and understanding through a range of games, tasks, and creative projects that run across many weeks. This doesn’t really work at Pelican!

Therefore, perhaps the biggest challenge for me is in figuring out the most effective way to create meaningful music learning experiences for these students that work to their learning strengths. I’m always open to trying out new things, and always trying to deepen my understanding of this cohort and what they need from me. I’m cautiously optimistic about this new approach with CDs providing the musical context for our creative work and understanding of concepts and theory. I’ll describe more of what we do, and how it goes, further into the term.

**Of course both books have far more to say than this, and are inspiring, thought-provoking reading – highly recommended! However, I’ve limited myself to these points for the purposes of this blog post.

What does engagement look like?

Today in the grade 1/2 class at Pelican Primary School I had an interesting exchange. The last child into the class, Ali, was in a very bad mood. He threw himself into the chair, and sat with his arms tightly crossed and his face screwed up in a dark scowl. There had clearly been trouble before coming into music. He snapped a response at his teacher and she whipped around, “Don’t talk like that to me! That is very impolite!” He scowled even more, and sank even lower into his chair. He was not happy.

Meanwhile, we started our class warm-up. After some initial work with names and rhythms I introduced them to my ‘magic chalk’, as I call it. I held an imaginary piece of chalk in my fingers, and explained that we were going to pass it around the class, and each person could draw something with it. Numbers, or letters, or a picture or shape – anything you like, I explained. It’s a lovely game for building a really quiet, intense focus in a group.

When it got to Ali he leaped out of his chair, threw the imaginary chalk on the ground and stomped on it, then looked at me, watching for my reaction. As if he hadn’t done this, the child who was passing him the chalk leaned over him, offered a new piece of chalk with his fingers, and passed it on to the next child. The game continued – but only for a moment. Ali watched the next child, but as it got passed along again, he darted out of his chair, intercepted it, and mimed throwing it across the room. “There!” he said. “It’s gone!”

I looked at him and smiled, but with my eyebrows raised. “You’re a good actor, Ali,” I said. “I like how you’re showing us everything. But you also need to stay sitting in your seat during this game. ” A look of pleasure flashed briefly across his face as he resumed his seat (and his previous facial expression) – I think he liked being acknowledged as a good actor, especially when he was having such a bad day. I think it came out of the blue for him.

What I love about this interaction is that all of Ali’s gestures were offers. He ‘accepted’ the chalk, rather than blocking it or denying it. He didn’t want to play, so he mimed actions that would put the chalk out of action. Which meant that he was playing. Or that he wanted to play, wanted to connect and participate, but didn’t know how to.

Sadly he got withdrawn from the class only a short-time later (his teacher following up whatever had happened immediately before music class, I suspect). But I hope that I’ll be able to build on this small glimmer of engagement and participation from him in my class.

My newest school

Last week was the first week of Term 2 and I started all my weekly school-based projects. One of the schools is new – Darling Secondary College (a pseudonym) in the western suburbs of Melbourne. Another is an old friend – Pelican Primary School, just around the corner from where I live. This school had a lot of renovations and other disruptions going on in Term 1, so held off starting the music program until Term 2. My third school is ‘Melbourne English Language School’, which I usually refer to as the Language School, and I’ve been working there steadily since 2005.

New schools mean going in with an open mind, and taking a bit of time to get a sense of the territory. At Darling SC, I’m working closely with the specialist music teacher and her year 7 and 8 classes. We talked at length on the phone before I started there.

“Never give them a choice!” she warned me emphatically. “What ever you do, don’t even think about asking them what they want to do! Because they won’t give you anything!” Steely and essential advice from her point of view perhaps, no doubt gleaned from experience, but pretty eyebrow-raising for me, given that my work is all about giving young people ownership of the music they play, and engaging with their ideas.

Therefore it was a relief for me to start at Darling last week and meet two groups of pleasant and responsive young people, who’ve already got a good grounding in music literacy. I enjoyed seeing my colleague in teaching action and getting a sense of how she likes the class to work. Now to get them playing and working with their music knowledge creatively. So far, so good.

Having a weekend

Today I was reminded how gradually children learn to use a new language. I was walking through the playground at Pelican Primary School, on my way to lunch, and one of the younger students – perhaps in Grade 1 – came up to me and asked me sweetly, “Gillian… are you having a weekend now?”

It’s Tuesday today. I smiled at him and told him, “I’m just going out to get some lunch.” “Oh,” he said, and skipped off to rejoin his friends.

Most of the children at this school speak another language at home. If they have been in Australia two years or less (I think), they are entitled to attend the Language School in order to have intensive English language tuition in a curriculum context. But for children who have been here longer than that, starting school may be the first time they have used English on a daily basis. They are often very articulate and confident speakers, but there are some turns of phrase that reveal the gaps in their understanding .

I have no idea quite what he meant by ‘having a weekend’. I assume he asked me this because he saw me heading for the gate, carrying my handbag. I wish I’d asked him what he meant. Maybe for him, ‘having a weekend’ is what happens when you leave the school grounds. ‘Having a weekend’ sounds like a nice thing to do on a Tuesday when your task is to clean the music room after months of renovations and storage cartons!

Back in Melbourne, back to school

Ah… home from four months in East Timor. I’m back in my flat, and back at work, reconnecting with friends, family, colleagues and workplaces, and putting plans for the year in place.

The day after getting home I did two days of workshops at ArtPlay, as part of the MSO ArtPlay Ensemble year-long program of activities. These workshops were focused on “express composing”, where a group of children creates a new piece of music in an hour, and performs it to their parents at the end of that hour.

We had so much fun! We asked each group to invent a story of some kind – a tale that had a beginning, a middle and an ending. We divided into three groups and everyone went away to create music for their assigned section. At the end of the hour we performed the music in order, from the beginning section, to the middle section, to the end section.

Some of the stories were wildly inventive:

Beginning: People are in a shopping mall, wandering around, doing their shopping. Suddenly an alarm sounds. Panic ensues. It is a cyclone warning.

Middle: People stampede the exits. The cyclone approaches [this story was written in the aftermath of Cyclone Yasi in northern Australia]. Suddenly a gigantic platypus lands on the roof of the shopping mall. [Be truthful. None of us saw that offer coming, did we?]

Ending: It’s Bob, the Gargantuan Platypus, here to save the day. He picks himself up from the roof of the shopping mall and flings himself at the cyclone, squashing it completely.

The following week I started a new year at the Melbourne English Language School, my fifth year as an artist-in-residence there. The idea is to create music projects with each class that support their English language and literacy development in some way. (More info about this school here).

Planning with the class teachers is an essential part of this. First, I met with the three primary teachers, in order to discuss the kinds of themes and project work they had planned for their classes this term. We also talked about different students in their class – who has been there a few terms and is preparing to make the transition to mainstream school; who is new or recently arrived; what languages are spoken in the class; and how the class works together as a group.

All three primary classes have the broad theme of “food” this term. They will be talking about healthy eating, and doing some cooking in the classroom. In Lower Primary, I liked the teacher’s description of the categories of food they are learning – ‘every day’ food, ‘sometimes’ food and ‘never at school’ food. I can imagine building a simple, repetitive song out of these phrases, with different foods being promoted as belonging to one category or another.

The teacher of the Middle Primary class is keen for them to build up their oral language skills. I find a good way to do this is to develop rhythmic phrases from the syllables of words and sentences, and get the children to repeat these over and over, as a way of memorising and internalising the rhythms. We started with this idea in our first class and developed two lists of five food words each (pushing our rhythmic phrases into 5/4, which I love). We developed body percussion patterns for these phrases in our first lesson; in time, we will transfer the rhythms to instruments and develop melodic lines for them on tuned percussion.

In Upper Primary the students have also started their unit of work by discussing ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ foods. On the day that I was there, ‘pizza’ was under discussion. Is pizza healthy or unhealthy? I have a feeling that with this class, they will start to categorise their foods in more sophisticated ways, considering how the food is grown or prepared. I can imagine our composing work growing from these discussions. Perhaps we will develop different modes (in ‘dark’ or ‘light’ moods) for each category of food, and develop songs and instrumental music around these ideas?

Other projects that are in the planning pipeline are with Pelican Primary School (my pet name for a school I teach in regularly). Pelican’s school renovations have only just finished and it will be a few more weeks before instruments will be out of storage and the music room will be ready.

I’ll also be working with the Australian National Academy of Music again this year, and met this week with the senior artistic team to start fleshing out the kinds of projects we want to offer the students this year. After their much-talked-about participation in my work in East Timor in January, hopefully similar work in other challenging environments can be part of the 2011 program.

Meanwhile, my chikungunya virus is still kicking around in my system and giving me all sorts of joint stiffness and pain, so I’m also making the rounds of doctors and other health professionals. It’s a very exotic souvenir from Timor Leste to bring home with me, but on the bad days, it’s pretty painful and I hope to find if not a cure then a reliable way to manage it.

Concert preparation – visual map

It’s been a short term and a fast one. Very busy for me too – since my last post I’ve been back up to Sydney for another project, and started my new job (training young musicians in teaching-artist approaches) at a Music Academy, and taught several one-off classes up at the University, and… got really stressed trying to fit it all in!

This post is about my Lower Primary students at the Language School. About 60% of the students are new arrivals this term, so not much English among them. They’ve been a very sweet class to work with, and, responding to their teacher’s ‘theme’ of the term on health and hygiene, we have composed a song about Germs.

Here are the lyrics:

If you touch something dirty you have to wash your hands

If you paint or your draw, you have to wash your hands

Touch a cat or a dog, you have to wash your hands

If you go to the toilet you have to WASH YOUR HANDS!

(Chorus) Germs can make you sick!

Germs can be Anywhere!

You have to put soap on your hands

And the germs will go away! Yeah!

(Vocal percussion bridge)

Scrubbing… and rubbing… and shaking… and drying….

They came up with the words, I hasten to add. Their teacher has clearly indoctrinated them well – they could think of heaps more occasions where it is necessary to wash your hands. It’s quite a folksy tune that we’ve written too – I sound a bit like Patsy Biscoe on the recording I made for them to listen to in the classroom.

We have a percussion section in the song, which they play sitting down. But they sing the verse and chorus, and bridge, standing up. In last week’s lesson we tried to introduce the concept of the end-of-term concert (performance to parents and other students), and I drew the following map to explain to them the order of the different song sections, and whether they are standing or sitting for them.

1= singing (verse & chorus)

2= instruments

3= singing (verse & chorus)

4= bridge (with hand-shaking actions).

I pointed to each number and they had to do the appropriate action (stand/sit/sing/play instruments/hand-shaking actions). I played around with the order of the numbers to encourage them to read the symbols on the board. It was like a game and they loved it.

As you can see, drawing is not my forte.