- Published on
Rosenshine the Musician
by Liz Dunbar
If you haven't come across Rosenshine’s 'Principles of Instruction' here's a link: https://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/Rosenshine.pdf
I'm not going to say that I think this Rosenshine thing is the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the fundamental ideas are part and parcel of how music teachers teach, and students learn and function in the classroom. All I've done here is state the obvious, but sometimes that's exactly what we need to do.
And if we can enlighten non-specialists and bust a few myths about the academic value, purpose and relevance of music education, then that's a step in the right direction.
1a. Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning (led by the teacher)
Hands on - recalling, remaking, reworking one aspect of what you learnt last lesson - in sound - to get everyone thinking and responding musically (after a gap of a 7 days for most). No lengthy talking, make in sound straight away.
1b. Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning (led by students - after you have trained them...)
Hands-on making through student initiated peer discussion, students use the ‘ladder system’ (see sep article) to decide where they are up to, and whether or not they need help to move forward. Students are taught how to decide whether it’s just time they need or direct instruction/modelling. Does the model students need, have to be provided by the teacher or are there other students in the room who will be able to do this? Make initial tasks so achievable that 2 mins into the lesson any student can provide a live example in sound and the class can evaluate what needs to happen next. Do things need amending, fixing or are we ready to move on. Students offer fixes and / or alternative musical responses, both verbally and live in sound to aid one another’s progress and reinforce their own musical understanding. Now their musical brains are warmed up you can move on.
2. Present new material in small steps with student practice after each step
Treat your classroom like a rehearsal. When we learn an instrument, sing in a choir, play in an ensemble, we stop and start. There’s a pace and a purpose. We build confidence by opening with an easy section, then tackle a challenging section, then run sections into one another to provide context. It doesn’t need to be any different in the classroom and this is where the ‘ladder system’ comes into its own. Each ‘rung’ has a specific teaching point. The act of making in sound brings the learning point to hand. It provides hands-on deliberate practice. Students pace their progression using the ladder. The first 3 ‘rungs’ are accessible by everyone. After that, the level of challenge increases. Students can choose to skip rungs depending on where they are trying to get to within the timeframe allocated iow they have to project manage this and pace themselves/play the long game. Successful musicians are highly skilled in playing the long game.
3. Limit the amount of material
The ladder system lends itself perfectly to this. We present an example of the final artefact at the start, middle, near the end of the unit, and then week by week reveal a small piece of the jigsaw. However, because of the vast breadth of musical experience in mixed ability ks3 groups, the ‘ladder system’ enables students to accelerate their learning and explore other pieces of the jigsaw, or indeed dwell on a section they find challenging. The teacher’s role in this is to start with something for everyone, then offer a range of mini modelling workshops on the various pieces of the jigsaw. Students choose when to join the teacher based on what’s on offer. The teacher regularly loops back over earlier stages of learning in these workshops, so there’s nobody left behind thinking they’ve missed the boat. This flexibility means that students aren’t waiting around for the next bit, nor are they rushed on when they need more dwell time.
4. Ask lots of questions and check understanding
Questioning is really interesting in Music because we operate in 2 worlds simultaneously. Objective accuracy and subjective judgement sit side by side. When I ask you to play me the dominant 7th chord of A, there is a fixed answer. The success of an improvised melody, or the use of rubato in interpretation is open to a vast world of taste, experience and musical understanding. Shaping the right questions is vital. Questions with fixed musical answers build confidence and students in that moment are checking their understanding. We check understanding in sound right from the start of year 7. Tim Burnage’s ‘Show me, show me’ questions (see ‘Games in Sound’) do this beautifully. In the case of subjective responses, the least experienced musicians are often shocked at how simple a correct answer can be, and the most experienced musicians have the room to spread their wings creatively. Experienced musicians discover they have a lot to learn too, when a simpler, cleaner response than their own, proves to be the better response. (Good quality tasty vanilla ice cream rather than knickerbocker glory visual fireworks with no flavour). When we use student work to generate questions and check understanding, it throws up another world of interesting learning opportunities. Using this method means that students are constantly being trained how to hear correct/incorrect, successful/unsuccessful responses. The next step is finding the right language to kindly correct errors live in class, and those on the receiving end have to learn to be resilient when faced with corrections, accept corrections and be mature enough to learn from it. All too commonly Music teachers will praise poor or average outcomes rather than providing guidance that will allow students to take a step forward. When I suggest a modification and the student tries again I will say to the class ‘have you noticed what a difference that tiny modification made in just a few seconds?’
5. Provide models of worked out problems
This is a very musical approach to learning. The interaction between any teacher and an apprentice is based on modelling. At any level of learning there will be concepts that need a bit more thought on the student's part, than simply copying. As soon as you cross a threshold into creating rather than copying, models need to be varied, plentiful and achievable. We can do this both visually and in sound depending on what aspect of musicianship we want to develop. Modelling that doesn't have a fixed outcome can be both freeing and frustrating from a student's perspective. It often reveals how much students want to 'get it right' for you but are frustrated by there not being one 'correct' answer. This is where the modelling of both a 'musical' and an 'un-musical' response' are essential. It takes time to train students how to hear and think as a musician and develop the skills that enable them to tease out what they need to be successful. With improvisation and composition, thematic development, arranging, structuring etc etc you can model endless outcomes. (See ‘questions and checking understanding‘ section for the 2 worlds music inhabits.)
6. Guiding student practice
Guided practice is a disciplined daily routine for musicians. We are used to modelling and correcting in sound. We know how to find solutions, how to take a student from zero to polished artefact. We explicitly teach how to practise and that it’s normal and completely acceptable to make mistakes. I often use the analogy of a potter throwing pots, fail fail fail, better, awful, better, better, uniform. You might manage to make 5 that are worth firing, but when you open the kiln door only 1 has survived. It takes time, patience and resilience. Don’t let anyone away with calling a student talented. Educate them as to how long it takes to get to this level of proficiency.
7. Clear and detailed explanations and instructions
Students love clear routines, clarity and purpose. They hate teachers banging on for ages. They want to get to it. It takes years to master this as a teacher and even then, you are forever tweaking it. A 30 second demonstration and a 1 min opening task is great for waking everyone up, reminding them of how to think and respond musically. Students are back with you inside the first few mins and ready for new learning. Repetition of a model and new modelling need a bit of space. Even when everyone appears to be gainfully employed, keep offering to repeat models to individuals because there will be a handful of students who are quietly drifting both above and below the set task. A common problem in the music classroom is that there will be 2,3,4,5, students all wanting something different simultaneously. That’s when you can draw on the most confident and experience musicians to co-teach with you. ‘Who has done the x,y,z section? Lovely...student A is just going to listen to you do this’. Again, this is part of establishing the culture of the classroom and making collaborative learning the accepted norm. This approach keeps levels of industry really high. Sometimes it works so well that the role of the official ‘teacher’ becomes redundant because the whole room has become a teacher. During this time you’re listening to the sound of the room, listening to how students are engaging with specialist vocabulary while tackling challenges in their work. You listen to the room like you listen to your car and know when it’s time to change gear. At certain points you bring everyone back together for significant new learning, or for redirection as a result of misconceptions, or because focus is poor. Good explanations and instructions guide the learning with the subtlety of a skilled mariner guiding a ship.
8. High level of active practice
Active practice isn’t enough for developing musical understanding. Students can play for hours and make no progress whatsoever. Engaged practice is the key, iow analytical identification of specific points for improvement and a method of using time efficiently to embed new learning. This is the bread and butter of developing good musicianship. Knowing where to start practising from, or which section of a composition to work on, how to spot the rough bits and how to remedy them is how students make progress. We’re back to training students how to hear and respond musically again. You know when you’ve got it right , when you’ve got a roomful of independent learners, thinking about it, fixing it, analysing it, rather than sitting for 15 mins with their hand up doing nothing.
9. Think aloud and model steps
This is how musicians learn all the time as performers. We constantly model and talk about posture and breathing or hand shape and vocalising a line. No musician just sits down and plays something complex first time. The patterns aren’t in place. Some people are fabulous sight readers, but we all hit passages where we need to take it apart and practise it in stages. Most things need breaking down into hand shapes, finger patterns, crescendos, rallentandos, breathing, starts and stops. Developing a method of how to go about doing this is an essential part of developing our students’ sight reading/ sight singing skills and in developing an ‘inner ear’. If you model by playing/singing it , copying is fairly straightforward, but when musicians are expected to take a silent visual code from paper and turn it into sound then that skill of knowing whether it’s right or not with no aural clues is another level of understanding. On top of that there’s the gestural and non verbal form of communication between musicians, as there is with dancers and actors. In rehearsal we talk about it. In performance we do not. In listening and appraising exams students are expected to ‘hear’ the answer, by filtering for elements, devices, techniques, thumbprints of style and them finding the right musical language to express all of that in words The ‘thinking aloud’ approach to analysis needs to be part of students’ training right from the start. The naming of names isn’t enough. I’ve taken to writing live analysis on the board as an unfamiliar work plays. This allows students to see your thinking without you talking over the music and obscuring it. They can see you systems and what you hear first, and then some of the finer detail that you hear on a second and third listening. Then you swap roles and get students writing in groups on white boards doing the same thing, and finally move to individual analyses on paper.
10. Asking students to explain what they have learnt
This is a REALLY interesting one because verbal/written language isn’t always the best way of getting students to ‘explain’ what they have learnt. If I want a student to show me that they understand the difference between a straight and a swung rhythm, a major and a minor triad, homophony and canon, I ask for it in sound. Is there anything more unmusical than a mechanical description of a hemiola? Make it in sound. By all means pair the verbal/written and sound but don’t ask in the abstract. A memorised dictionary definition tells you nothing about a student’s musicianship.
11. Check the responses of all students
Make it perfectly normal for everyone to produce answers in sound. This takes training, and it takes time. It means setting the scene, modelling, encouraging, shaping thinking, growing the right conditions in the classroom. It’s all about routines, culture and trust. Nobody wants to get laughed at, and nobody should fear getting it wrong. Developing a working environment where it’s ok to fail is essential. Yes there’s the response of the answering student, that you are checking, but there’s also the response of the listener too. Rather than allowing students to wait passively for ‘their turn’, actively engage them in listening to live responses through analytical questioning. Establish ‘courteous classroom’ behaviour that enables mistakes to be made and encourages other students to listen and respond with useful advice on next steps. Here once again the ‘ladder’ comes into its own by allowing the least experienced to provide some kind of useful feedback that the recipient can work with. The more experienced will have, of course, a response with more granularity. In this way you are checking the original student’s response in sound, alongside the student listener’s response in words. With experience and knowing how to handle questioning you can learn a lot about a student’s understanding beyond the banal pumping out of key vocabulary. With any verbal response you can frame yet another question to dig down into. Each time you do this you are also broadening the reach of your questioning. ‘Play it again for us. Now that we’re settled on this being correct in terms of pitch and rhythm, what else can we do with this? This is the bit that most teachers don’t dig down into. They just let it go at the surface and move on. Don’t move on, dig a bit deeper.
12. Systematic feedback and corrections
Common misconceptions can be addressed in the form of whole class verbal feedback. Small group ‘similar errors’ verbal feedback also works as illustrated in ‘modelling’ previously. You need to think about how you correct, at what pace, and whether it us live in performance on the hoof or at the end. ‘Stop, start, stop start’ can be immensely frustrating for the student, like TV channel flickers, or people who butt in, mid-sentence. So you need to establish a routine to make students feel comfortable and a way of correcting that is respectful and well timed. Train students how to feedback to one another, for another multi-layered way of checking responses.
13. More time for explanations
This can be a double edged sword. In Music you want to be principally teaching through sound. Stopping to talk about it for too long can be arresting rather than advancing. You have to use verbal explanations carefully. Modelling in sound is frequently a better answer. It’s better to illustrate ‘swagger’ in performance rather than talk about it. On the reverse side of the coin targeted repeated short verbal explanations using specific specialist vocabulary is very effective. I did an experiment with year 7 where I repeatedly used the word anacrusis in context during modelling to see how many in the group adopted it in rehearsal task talk. I didn’t say it was an important term, but I did start to pretend I couldn’t remember the term in later explanations and students started prompting me to help me out. Fascinating.
14. Provide many examples
The start of the lesson is great for this as you are both providing examples to remind students of prior learning and also waking up musical ears and brains. A simple starter activity I commonly use is ‘10 in a row’. This can happen either purely in sound or by combining sound and something on paper. I write ten instructions on the board of varying levels of difficulty (connected with our current learning) e.g. a rising chromatic line over a tonic pedal . With a question like this I can get up to 30 valid examples for students to learn from. The students create a range of examples themselves - not me. Obviously at GCSE and A level the complexity lifts again with students having to recognise characteristics/influences in sound, but the student generated model still works. Asking students to voice a chord sequence over 5 single line instruments will generate a staggering range of responses - and we all learn something from it.
15. Reteach material where necessary
The trick with this is to revisit but with more depth and at a faster pace. A student recently described learning music like learning a new language. You learn what a cat and a dog is in the early stages and you can say Tuesday and my name is Bob, but as you become increasingly knowledgeable the cat and dog become part of a sentence, you add subtlety and detail to your description, and find other ways to express the same thing e.g. replacing ‘cat-like’ with the word ‘feline’. You never stop using the foundation stones but your handling of the language becomes increasingly nuanced and sophisticated. Let’s say you need to teach diminished 7ths to year 10 so they can access the harmony of a work from the romantic period you are studying. You reteach the basics of triads (in sound) and work out the intervals between the notes. Next, you ask students to build you new chords just using one of those intervals. The chord built from a stack of minor 3rds is a dim 7. Now you work out (in sound) how many dim 7ths exist, and what the harmonic purpose of a dim 7th might be in context. Chuck in The Specials ‘Ghost Town' while you’re at it, to provide a familiar model.
16. Preparing students for independent practice
This is how you learn an instrument. You introduce, you model, you structure the work, you pace it, review it, refine it. When students have good independent practice routines, they make great progress, and love it and practise some more. When they don't practise nothing moves forwards, in fact they commonly move backwards because things get rusty, then they get board because their skills aren't advancing and those connections are not being made. This is when students ’quit’ and say it's boring as a way of hiding from what’s really going on. The key thing in music is learning how to do it in a meaningful way and on your own, rather than filling time with playing and thinking that by making noise, you’re making progress. Students' parents think they're practising…. 'he's never off that piano' …… and don't commonly get the difference unless they are a musician themselves.
17. Monitoring students when they begin independent practice
Again, this is just good Music teaching, tried and tested. Demonstrating what good, purposeful, useful practice, is essential. We talk all the time about 20 minutes of meaningful practice versus two hours of faffing about. By all means faff about, but not as a replacement for meaningful practice. Instrumental teachers commonly use little notebooks both for student and parent reference with carefully planned menus of a varied diet of activities which are modified and redirected, as different skills advance or lag behind. As in sport, musicians train for stamina, flexibility, breath control, posture, motor independence etc. etc. It takes time and commitment, from both teacher and student.