Dan Asia Lectue

Last week, I attended a lecture by Dan Asia regarding the future of musical education in this country, particularly education on the subject of music history. A colleague described the lecture as being about "how we are failing our students," in our teaching methodologies.

The first part of of the lecture started well; Mr. Asia spoke about the need for deep listening and about the tradition of the university as a place where people sought to learn about truth and justice and beauty.

He asked the audience to participate in a deep listening exercise in which we closed our eyes and listened to a few minutes of a composition, "Blacklight," which he composed.  He later asked us to repeat the exercise, and to notice what different things we noticed on a second hearing.

I think these sorts of exercises are valuable, and in fact our university offers an entire course based on a similar goal of nurturing deep listening.  We do this by exposing the class to a wide breadth of dissimilar music and ask them to critically analyze music using parameters like sound, melody, rhythm, harmony, and growth.  We also ask them to consider 3 questions-  who's playing, who's paying, and who's listening.

So, I share Asia's view that deep listening is a skill that we need to cultivate in our music students.
I could not bring myself to agree with much of what else Mr. Asia had to say.

He made the argument that the way we are failing our students is that we are not telling them with authority what great music is and what music is truly of value.  In his view, the music which ought to be taught in a university is music of the common practice period.  Harmony, if I understood Mr. Asia correctly, is the sole parameter by which great music ought to be judged.  Music of John Cage, for example, is rather rather worthless by Mr. Asia's view, while the music of Mozart, well, that is deserving of our time and study.

I sat there and listened to Mr. Asia dismiss many world music traditions by name, including mariachi, gamelan, and pop music, the latter of which he described as being ultimately immoral in its focus on banal subject matter.  It may have sociological significance, he argued, but little musical value.  He went on to say that he would rather see universities do away with courses on rock and roll, jazz etc., in order to focus on music that is truly valuable.

This argument was rather shocking to me, as I have watched and listened and participated in a variety of musical traditions outside of the Western European Classical tradition and found these musics to be quite complex, beautiful, and profound in their composition.  Generally these art forms that I am familiar with (music of Ghana and other regions of Africa, Indian music, flamenco)  place priority on rhythm over harmony, but in my view this makes it no less intricate or compelling or emotive or worthy of study.  I can't understand how he dismisses Jazz- as a pianist who did not grow up reading charts, I often find jazz music more complex in its harmonies than, say, a Mozart sonata. The knowledge that a great jazz pianist has to possess regarding scales, etc.-  it's enormous.  I've never heard anyone seriously try to argue that Western Classical music was "better" than jazz... Mr. Asia noted that part of the problem with curriculum today is that we are afraid of making value judgements.  But how can you say geometry is better than algebra, or that European history is somehow more worthy of study than the history of Asia.  Ridiculous.

But when things really went South was when he began to eviscerate the culture of today's young people.  The people who came to hear him speak.  The people who he wants to buy his music.  The people he is trying to convince to listen to Puccini.

He stood there in front of them and said they had no direction, that they had no ability to focus, no conception of what it means to work hard.  That they had no academic curiosity and were only interested in receiving an "A."  And on and on.  That it was our responsibility to "show them the way," i.e. the way of some dead European white guys.

Now don't get me wrong- I love the music of those dead European white guys.  But hearing Mr. Asia speak about todays young people- it was disheartening.  I can't help but think this is how we are failing them.  This generation has heard so many times that they are distracted or lost or in whatever way inferior to previous generations- is it any wonder that maybe some of them believe it?

It makes much more sense to focus on commonalities. To judge music within the parameters of the framework of the priorities it was created within.  And to encourage tomorrow's scholars, not belittle them.

Contemplative Learning in Higher Education

I started reading Contemplative Practices in Higher Education  by Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush earlier this week, and I've been very impressed so far.  The book has also impressed upon me how important teaching is, and what great responsibility comes with it.  

Even the first paragraph of the the forward is provocative and challenging.  With any university proposal, Parker Palmer say we should ask ourselves, "Does this proposal deepen our capacity to educate students in a way that supports the inseparable causes of truth, love, and justice?"  

He questions the wisdom of a structure of education that sometimes produces graduates who go on to do heroic noble things, but has also produced well-educated leaders involved in malfeasance in industries ranging form health care to business, finance, even education.  

Palmer notes that we have too often created a divide between a subject and the individual, and this creates an ethical gap.  "Contemplative" practices has unfairly been associated with the mystical and therefore deemed unsuitable for an academic realm.

But this was not always the case-  historically, some of the most well respected scholars rooted their scholarly study in contemplative practices.  Consider, for example, the monastic schools of the Middle Ages, or the philosophers of Ancient Greece.  Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Experiments in Back Channels

After reading about back channels and about the need to use lectures not primarily for content delivery, but rather for telling stories, inspiring, and pushing thinking, I decided to shake things up a bit and try something new in our Friday discussion class.

I decided to allow laptops in the classroom as an experiment.

I thought there was about a 50% chance of complete and total failure.  If I had to bet on it, I would have bet on failure.  I had nightmares the night before in which I asked the class a provocative question which was followed by a resounding silence because they were all slouching and staring into their screens, checking their newsfeeds.

But that is not what happened.  They were really excited and engaged.  I got a lot of participation from a variety of students, despite the high number of people.  More importantly to me, I heard from several students who had never participated in class before. But, I didn't hear from them verbally-  I heard from then in one of our "backchannels."

One backchannel I created was a free, easy to use chatroom.  It's called "Todaysmeet.com" and I created a chatroom for our class.

Here is a screenshot:

I've blurred the names, but the cool thing is that some of these students responded even though they typically don't raise their hands in a room of over fifty people.  But they felt comfortable commenting through the chatroom.  They asked questions that I was able to later respond to.  And all of the students have the link, so it's kind of like a built in study session- the students have an easy way to bounce questions off of each other.  They haven't used the chatroom in this way yet, but I'm just happy that is gives people an opportunity to add to the discussion during class, in real time- even if they don't want to raise their hand. 

The other backchannel I used is a Google Doc.  Google Docs can have up to 50 real-time collaborators, but for this go around I had 3 designated note takers whose job is was to collaboratively prepare notes during the lecture.

When my husband was in medical school, they had the same sort of idea.  They had a "scribe" for each lecture.  Someone different every time.  Then, the notes were made available to the entire medial school class. 

This is similar, but there are a handful of note-takers  working as a team from different parts of the classroom. 

I do not use Power Points, so this is not as if they simply copied down what they saw on a screen.  These are notes that were prepared in real time and I feel they are an excellent reflection of what happened in class: 

For this time only, I sent a link to the collaboratively prepared document to all students.  Not all of them are collaborators, so not everyone can edit the document.  However, everyone can view it.

I spoke with a collaborator after class, and she said she really enjoyed it, and that it was "cool" to see another student going back in and filling out details she herself had missed.  She noted that together, they were able to organize the notes in real-time.  

I've asked those interested in becoming a collaborator to e-mail me.  In the future, only collaborators will get the links to the documents (my thought being that this would encourage students to be involved in the process and not just beneficiaries.  They would have to be a designated note-taker at least once over the course of the semester).

I was pleased with how these experiments turned out.  The really exciting part to me is that collaborators can continue to add to the notes outside of class.  If someone finds a link to a relevant website or an image, they can share them on this document.

And, because I am the "owner" of the document, I have the ability to edit as well.  I am going to try to refrain from doing so-  I want this to be a student-created document.  But, if there was something I really wanted to emphasize, I have the ability to add to the conversation.

I did not feel that students were less engaged than they were prior to the integration of laptops.  As long as this continues to be the case, I want to continue the experiment. 

Lectures, Backchannels, and Interactive Classrooms

While I was looking around the web to see what other educators had to say about Drive I found this blog called "The Thinking Stick," by Jeff Ultecht.

http://www.thethinkingstick.com/the-evolution-of-the-lecture/

Anyway, he advocates the integration of laptops, twitter conversations, real-time classroom chats during lectures.  He says that lectures are no longer for content delivery, but rather for "inspiring, telling stories, and pushing thinking."   Students can (and do) look up information on their own- that's not what lectures should be about. People just get bored listening to people drone on or repeat bullet points off of PowerPoint slides.  And if they are bored, they will not be engaged.

Ultecht suggests breaking lectures into roughly 10 minutes of speech followed by 3 minute conversation segments, during which time a teacher can check the chat room feed, etc. and respond and adapt based on student interaction. Later, students can have the chat room conversation as a resource for notes.  Also, the "conversation" can be carried on well after the initial lecture is complete (and, if I were to hazard a guess, might pick up in intensity as exam dates loom ever-closer).

Ultecht notes that the overwhelming success of TED talks is due to their brevity.  Capped at 18 minutes, it is perfect amount of time to deliver a compelling message, but not to long to lose the attention of the audience. After 10-20 minutes or so, our brains need to process information, hence:  Lectures should either be  1) Short or 2) Interactive (this is where back channeling comes in).  

Ultecht not only allows laptops during lectures but encourages them.  He goes a step beyond this, and provides "backchannels" hyperlinked documents prior to each lecture and tells people that "if you're going to wander off, here are some links to visit and to be thinking about" 

In the comments, someone brought up the point that encouraging students to be on twitter during class was a complete disaster waiting to happen. 

Ultecht's response was that "if you are zoned out, does it really matter if you are tweeting on an unrelated topic or doodling in your notebook?"     

I was thinking about this today while watching a student who kept falling asleep. We don't allow laptops in our classrooms, but this student might as well have been checking twitter throughout the lecture.  

I tend to side more with the person who thinks enabling twitter is a very. bad. idea.   But,  I am toying around with creating a "Google Doc"  for each lecture that students in the classroom to collaboratively take notes.  It's a way to "backchannel," and can be a way for students to continue discussing the lecture and adding to the notes after the lecture is over. 

Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose (Part I, Autonomy)

Pink argues that the three main areas we can focus on to cultivate intrinsic motivation lies in three areas: autonomy, mastery, and self-purpose.  He argues that human beings have an innate inner drive to "be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to one other."  Much of the first chapters summarize interesting examples of experiments or case studies that demonstrate this truth- monkeys fiddling with puzzles even when no award was offered (presumably because they enjoyed it), or companies whose profitability and innovative productivity soared when workers were released to work on whatever project interested them rather than be limited to their job description. When these needs of autonomy and self-direction are met, productivity increases precisely because of our desire for mastery. Quality and richness of life also demonstrably increases.

Many leaders of companies, and perhaps teachers "incentivized" to meet performance standards for standardized exams,  exert so much control that autonomy and self-direction is severely limited.   Yet many psychological studies show that when a bit more freedom is given, performance increases even in the absence of reward.

Pink gives many interesting work-place examples.  Often the examples he gives involves companies (one example is Meddius, a computer software and hardware company) with a "ROWE" structuring plan-  a "results only work environment."  In these environments, people don't have schedules and are free to show up when they choose, so long as the work gets done.

I'm not sure that so much autonomy could be given to an undergraduate classroom as to not require them to show up.  But perhaps less emphasis should be placed on attendance?  I wonder what would happen if students' grades did not have points deducted because of lack of attendance.  Conventional thinking would seem to say that if we did not have their attendance count for 10% of their grade, well, no one would show up.  It might be interesting to tell people that on a certain day, they could choose to come or not come, and see who shows up anyway.  Or to not consider presence in itself part of attendance policy, but rather placed emphasis on what the student did while present (more of a participation grade).

This of course would be difficult to do in a large enrollment course.  This is one read that at our university large enrollment courses are split up into smaller sections once a week for "discussion" sections, like the one I lead.

Regardless of how attendance policies are structured, it is important to cultivate a classroom environment that results in a desire to attend class because it is interesting and dynamic- not because they "have" to go.

One way that autonomy is often respected in college courses is through the research paper.  Because students select their own topic, they take ownership in the task of learning about their subject of choice.  If possible, an effort should be made to learn about the individual student's passions and interests and apply those to the research project, even if an immediate connection isn't readily apparent.

For example, last semester we had a student who loved video games.  "Why don't you write a paper on video game music?"  They came up with a  great bibliography full of interesting and scholarly sources.

This semester, we are focused on music from about 1700-1880.   I have one student who is interested in medicine and wasn't sure what her topic should be.  After talking about it with me, she settled on writing a paper about how Beethoven's lack of hearing impacted his compositional choices.   Another student is writing a paper on Yankee Doodle.  This wouldn't necessarily be a "typical" topic for a course on classical music, but the way she's shaped the paper, it's going to work find, and I can guarantee you she'll be more engaged in writing this paper than she would if we insisted she analyze a Mozart sonata.

I had an undergraduate professor who let me write a paper on the film score of Lord of the Rings as opera, and I was so thankful that he allowed me to write that paper.  I learned more about opera by writing that paper than ever would have if my topic had been over Don Giovanni.

Another very successful way we have given autonomy to students is by allowing them to be teachers themselves. In a course at our university centered around acquiring critical listening skills by analyzing musical parameters such as sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, and growth, we ask for "student volunteers" to choose any piece of music they'd like and present it to the class.  The students are responsible for breaking these parameters down and explicating them to the class.  No extra credit is given.  In fact, no grade is given at all, and these student presentations are completely optional. Yet, the response is often overwhelming. Sometimes, so many students volunteer we have really limit the length of their presentations so as to not eat in too much to the course calendar.

All of these examples underscore the importance of autonomy in college classrooms. Some students may come from a background in which they received comparatively little personal autonomy in their education, and trusting them with a little freedom to direct their own study has the potential to really increase their intrinsic motivation.

Carrots and Sticks

Does offering incentives improve student performance?

Daniel Pink addresses the question of whether or not rewards improve performance in his book Drive.  

A wonderful, animated summary of some of the main points in his book can be found here:
 

Basically, Pink argues that the science indicates that if a task is purely algorithmic or mechanical, then "carrots" or "if-then" rewards work just fine. But when the task is more complicated, or when the task requires even minimal amounts of creative thinking, not only does a reward (big or small) not improve performance, but rewards can actually severely decrease performance, even when the rewards are quite large. This is true whether or not the reward is large or small.

He gives an example of scientists going to Madurai, India and offering rewards for performance on a variety of games.  Three levels of rewards offered, with one group offered two weeks pay for excellent performance. Surprisingly, the people offered the highest rewards performed the most poorly in eight of the nine tasks.

Pink hypothesizes that offering rewards can shift the focus from the task at hand to the reward, thus having the unintended consequence of dulling creative or critical thinking, leading to poorer rather than better performance.

Pink argues that instead of offering "if-then" rewards (which sometimes, but not always includes "extra credit" in college classrooms), we ought to start people less like horses performing work, and more like humans.  And humans, science indicates, are motivates by Autonomy, Mastery, and Self-Purpose.

He proposes a question that I think we should ask ourselves as teachers, "Do you want compliance or engagement?"

My next entry will cover in more detail Pink's ideas on Autonomy, Mastery, and Self-Purpose as it relates to the undergraduate classroom.

Spring 2014

I've always loved teaching- I've been doing it since I was 16 years old.  I've taught private piano lessons for almost 15 years now. I've taught Spanish in an affluent private Christian middle school and elementary group piano courses in a lower socio-economic public elementary school.  I've taught as a T.A. in undergraduate ornithology courses and I've taught college graduates how to prepare for the GRE.

But last semester was a different experience from all of these. In the fall of 2013, I lectured to a large-enrollment undergraduate class for the first time. I had the opportunity to teach about Malagasy music and about the Kenyan nyatiti.

The size of the class was perhaps the most notable difference- at 90 students, there were four times as many humans as there were in any of the previous teaching environments in which I'd previously taught.  I was not the primary professor, but there were a handful of times, when the professor was out of town for academic conferences, that I was able to teach. It was wonderful and fulfilling and I loved every second.

This semester, I teach a discussion section with students every Friday.  Each week I lead the class in learning about music and it's role in culture, society, and history. I get to read their term papers and help students with the writing process.  It is my hope that I can be a resource for these students and help them, in a small way, achieve their goal of graduating college with a music degree, and maybe even help foster a love for the subject of music history.  After all, as musicians, the students I teach are all writing the next chapter in music history.  It's good to know where you come from.

In many ways this is a (or at least it is my) dream job.  So, I want to learn how to be the very best teacher I can possibly be.

With large enrollment undergraduate courses, there are some challenges.  How do you lead a discussion with sixty people in the room?  How do you help student improve their writing when every writing assignment requires detailed feedback on sixty+ papers? How do you keep a crowded room full of students engaged in the topic of Baroque keyboard music for 60 minutes when many young people today are accustomed to consuming information on a conglomeration of topics simultaneously and at lightning speed?  How do you teach students to acquire the skills necessary to retain information and to take adequate notes and to understand the big picture when the education system they just graduated from has, in some cases, trained them to perform well on standardized tests but perhaps not to assimilate information from a wide variety of scholarly sources and then use that newly acquired knowledge to come up with original conclusions of their own? How do you motivate students to want to do these things for themselves, and on their own?

These are some of the questions I would like to address over the course of this semester.  I hope that perhaps a community may be developed as a result of this blog, and that perhaps other books, ideas, or resources might be provided via discussion in the comment section.  Please do feel free to comment and share your own ideas and contributions!

As a starting point, I will be reading and commenting the following books and their ideas:

They are:  Drive, by Daniel Pink

                 Teaching Music in Higher Education by Colleen Conway
                 Contemplative Practices in Higher Education by Daniel P. Barbezat and Mirabai Bush
                 Learner Centered Teaching by Maryellen Weimer
                 The Music History Classroom  by James A. Davis


Also on my shortlist are the following two books:

What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain
Vitalizing Music History Teaching,  James Briscoe, ed.

Thank you for stopping by.  I encourage you to leave feedback on your perspective on these issues.  I would also love to hear about your personal experiences or book recommendations.