Getting Schooled In
The Feierabend Fundamentals Missy Strong
Mount Laurel Township Schools
strongfamily6@gmail.com
general music teacher. I know it was a la- ment of mine as I embarked on my own teaching career 21 years ago. While I’d love to think differently, I fear that there are still many teachers who enter their first job with the same sense of confusion. As a result of my undergraduate work, I had a solid performance foundation, a love for kids, a minimal understanding of a couple of the major music educa- tion pedagogies, and several fun activi- ties that I had picked up during student teaching. What I did not have, though, was an overarching philosophy and set of practical, specific musical goals for my students, nor a timeline for rolling these things out during the school year. As I started teaching and soon af-
“I
ter entered graduate studies, I began to have more of a sense of the things my students should be learning. I slowly be- gan to develop my own philosophy for how children processed music. Yet I still longed for excellent, engaging, and sys- tematic ideas for teaching music in my classroom every day in a way that was based on early musical development. I not only wanted someone to confirm the ways children should be taught music, I wanted to see excellent pedagogy in ac- tion.
Enter John Feierabend When I learned about Feierabend’s
“30-year plan” for children, I was sold. At its most simple, Feierabend wants all students to be tuneful, beatful, and
TEMPO
have no idea what I’m do- ing!” This is the unfortu- nate cry of many a new
artful. This means that as our students grow into adulthood, they are able to sing Happy Birthday in tune, move competently to the beat to Take Me Out to the Ballgame played during the 7th inning of a ball game, and feel the hushed wonder of bonding with their own children while singing a lullaby to them. To help music teachers guide their students to this point, Feierabend created two overarching curricula: “First Steps in Music”, to help young students become tuneful, beatful, and artful; and his notational literacy program for older students who have achieved musical readiness, “Conversational Solfege”. It was very quickly evident to me that his curriculum for preschool and early elementary, “First Steps in Music: Preschool and Beyond,” met all the cri- teria for best practices in music educa- tion. At the foundation of the program is an excellent, research-based philosophy. It is developmentally-appropriate, uses rich, authentic repertoire, is sequentially laid out, and is extremely engaging. To be honest, though, the thing that put it over the top for me back then was the fact that if I wanted to, I could utilize the 3 years of detailed lesson plans that are laid out in the back of the book! Very young children on the road to
literacy readiness are exposed to a tre- mendous amount of aural input in their earliest years. They hear the adults in their environment talking, mumbling, shouting, exclaiming, whispering-- you name it! The stage immediately follow- ing this exposure to spoken language is characterized by the child’s attempts to approximate the sounds they’ve heard in
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as conversational a manner as possible. This ability to converse verbally is re- fined until the child eventually embarks on formal instruction in reading and writing as they enter their school years. Musical acquisition follows along
very similar lines. Musically speaking, the musical environment of a baby/tod- dler should take the form of the heavily- inflected baby talk, songs, and chants of their primary care-givers. Unfortunately music teachers at the elementary level find that the overwhelming majority of incoming Pre-K and Kindergarten stu- dents are greatly lagging behind in their musical development. This is most often a result of a sparse musical home envi- ronment. Sadly, most young children are not experiencing rich musical environments in their early years. Instead of students who can sing in tune, move to the beat, and connect with the expressive level of music, the music teacher is confronted with students who are deficient in any or all three categories. The music teacher must then remediate so that when stu- dents are ready to start formal instruc- tion in notational literacy, they have a solid musical foundation. In other words, they must be tuneful, beatful, and artful before they can fully embark on their journey to read and write nota- tion.
Through his First Steps curriculum,
Feierabend seeks to foster this musical readiness, as well as an appreciation of great music and wonder at the expres- sive piece of music. The curriculum is comprised of authentic repertoire from folk music and was based on the vast
MARCH 2016
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