comprehensive musicianship through performance Continued from page 28


are there, but not really THERE, we feel like it is a crisis.


write or record what you think will happen in the next two measures.”


• “Check out this piece and how the composer used this same pattern in eight different places! A pattern that moves is called a sequence. Take the last four lines of the Amanda Gorman poem that we read and create a melody that in- volves sequence.”


Since we weren’t getting that feeling of “We are all doing this together” by singing and playing in an ensemble, composition and mini-moments of creation became staples. The way that this created an ac- cess point for all students (and broke down the wall of “composer” as an elite job for some professional) is something that has to stick post-pandemic in our ensembles.


3. Engagement vs. Engagement


This word has been tossed around so much over the last decade, but in the last year, we have really started to interrogate it. What does it mean to “engage” students? If they are on the Zoom meeting, but the screen is blank and quiet and doesn’t respond to questions, many of us have started to see that it doesn’t really feel like “engage- ment.” How many of those blank screens have been sitting in our classes (but not getting in trouble, so all was good). When suddenly our kids can show us that they


It was always a crisis. Now we are rec- ognizing it as such. So we came up with more ways for all of the students to speak. “Let’s hear your voice read this, Anna. Anna, can you pick someone to answer the next question? Luca, explain what you heard and everyone else, show whether you heard the same thing or something different.” The empty boxes were so hard to take that we had to come up with “proof of life” strategies. How many of those ways of making sure everyone is still there – still following, still thinking, still sharing – can we keep once it is easy to fall back into old routines (those routines of assuming that I can just non-verbally sense engagement, by seeing that they are there and watching me?


4. Activities vs. Strategies


If you’ve been around the CMP block even once, you have probably heard the old saying, “If your strategy isn’t tied to an outcome, it’s just an activity.” In virtual teaching, it was really easy to get away with activity after activity. There are so many tech resources that give us a game, a quick video, a song to sing, buttons to press, and sounds to make that all sort of look vaguely like “music teaching.” But what are the big outcomes or goals? What should kids know in six weeks? By the end of the year? Quick assignments happened,


But we must. As music teachers are fight- ing to keep their place in the schedule and their allocation (not good things), it is forcing us to articulate what it is that the arts do in a bigger sense, search for ways to teach lessons and ideas that go deeper than surface and explore content that requires cohesive planning, and make sure that we are seen as more than just a pretty (but expendable) choice board. I don’t love that we have to fight for the existence of the arts in a school day, but we do need to keep examining everything – from the


all in the name of “Hey, it’s a pandemic! We’re just trying to survive!”


So clearly, survival teaching and panic is not the thing I want to hang on to when the pandemic is over. But a new awareness of the distinction between quick activi- ties vs. thoughtful strategies that point to richer, long-term outcomes. In my own teaching, and talking to my colleagues around the country, I see that lots of us were wrestling with this idea of “Activity vs. Strategy” and as the year wore on many of us were searching for more meaningful, longer term goals.


In principle, we all


value “building capacity” – students really learning something new vs. just accessing what they already know and can do. But the amount of thought, planning and scaf- folding to make that happen is...well, it’s hard work. And it’s easy to be seduced by quick and easy tech tricks.


30


April 2021


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