PAST PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE Michael Pressler, Maine East High School
21st Century Learning Skills and the Power of Collaboration: Something for Students and Educators
Collaborative learning (sometimes lumped together with project-based or problem-based learning) is increasingly seen as having the potential to play a key factor in increasing student participation and motivation in classrooms. Some of you may question the need for collaborative learning since your music students are already engaged and meeting your expectations. My response is that there are ways to create learning experiences for students based on specific content and concepts (determined by you) that give them increased agency in making decisions and solving problems. In this model, you as the teacher are the facilitator–you set up key elements of activities, courses, and programs, but you leave some of the content and process of these activities to be decided by the students themselves, allowing them to work from your pre-established lesson guidelines to personalize their own learning experience.
Make no mistake: collaborative learning requires a great deal of effort for the teacher to “frontload” the experience to ensure that students have the foundations of knowledge and skill to be successful in the tasks to come. It requires the students to have knowledge of how to participate in a collaborative experience (positive interdependence, face-to-face decision making, individual and group accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing), much as a music student needs to know how to practice before she can effectively practice. I offer an important caveat here: there are clearly some lessons that do not lend themselves to a collaborative approach–collaborative learning is just one of many instructional strategies that can be applied in a classroom in combination with other strategies. Collaborative learning is not the “be all, end all.”
For the sake of discussion, let’s consider applying the collaborative approach to a chamber music unit for ensemble students. Depending on the experience and background knowledge of your students, you may charge them with the selection of the music they will perform (technical demands, historical details of the musical selection/composer), the audience and venue for performance, and considerations for how their shared work will be evaluated. I’m sure you can think of many other directions this might take and, no doubt, your students will think of a few angles that never occurred to you! Te role of the teacher in this instance is much less about getting the “right note in the right place” and now more about guiding the students’ listening and decision making skills in relation to the others in the ensemble . . . and helping all members of that ensemble understand how to work support each other, yield when appropriate, and have an understanding of what other ensemble members are doing as necessitated technically and artistically as they work together.
Te “21st Century Value” of this experience for the student, however, does not end with the performance and its required
artifacts: the value comes from intentionally “unpacking” or analyzing the process with your students so that they can specifically identify the knowledge and personal skills they possess to effectively work with others–and helping students understand how they might be applied in the future both inside and outside the classroom. To be sure, the music-making experience that we as educators love and value is highly unique, but there are “authentic” skills and processes involved that can be transferred to other situations. We must be deliberate in helping the students understand how the experiences they have in the music classroom apply to their other studies and life experiences.
Most teachers don’t need to be persuaded that project-based learning is a good idea–they already believe that. Some policymakers seem to believe that teachers already know how to do this, underestimating the challenge of implementing such methods, and
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Illinois Music Educator | Volume 69 Number 3
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