I have found over my career that constructivism and "project" based education did more to cement the skills required to be successful in my classroom than any lecture I could deliver.(Laureate, 2009) To have a group of students work toward a goal, run into obstacles along the way, have to solve problems for those obstacles, then continue to perform them for evaluation, has catapulted many of my students to achieving their dreams. For these students, they learned to embrace the challenges that the world presented to them, especially music. Students that followed the path that I suggested, they became successful as performers and music educators. For the students that became successful in other career areas, they told me they had used many of the techniques we used in performance to become successful with their particular specialty.
Many years ago. I had a suspicion that the rating or score at music festival was related to the number of minutes spent on music making during rehearsal, versus the director speaking during that time. I tracked myself over a one month period using an excel sheet to calculate the number of minutes spent working together versus the number of minutes that I "taught" during the rehearsal. I found over time that the scores at an adjudicated event became surprisingly close to the percentage of student on task time in rehearsal, or the more time they played in rehearsal the better the score. With performance being a goal oriented activity that used collaboration, cooperation, and character development in each rehearsal, we were able to see the fruits of our labors. This is a concept that I still use today in my preparation for performances for my band students. It is also one I use for my general music classes as well.
Constructivism is another tool for an educator to use that will increase learning in the pupils we teach. The constructivist learning will do more to help these youngsters remember the "lesson" than anything else we can say. The concept can be summed up with this: Have students do more than you speak during a class.
References:
DVD: Laureate, 2009, Contructionism and Constructivist Learning Theories
My worst experiences as a student were in classes where the teacher just droned on and on and on; there were no engaging tasks, movies, sound clips, experiments, and so forth. Just blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or so it seemed to me. You're right in pointing out that teachers need to speak less during class. Instead, they need to provide more learning time through the use of hands on activities and technology. Including students in on the planning is also beneficial. They can take ownership of the lesson and make it meaningful to them.
ReplyDeleteJust recently, my students worked in small groups to build a trip wire burgler alarm. What was once thought of as boring (who wants to learn about electricity?) became fun when they were able to see why the alarm went off even after breaking the connection to the first wire (the trip wire). This activity made them understand the difference between parallel and series circuits. We followed up by drawing schematics of the alarm system. I had two calls from parents that night to tell me how excited their children were about the lesson.
A student driven classroom is definitely the way to go in today’s classroom. You present another great example of Excel as a learning tool that shows students “why we practice”. The correlation of practice time to scores at performances is hard to ignore. I think your research and results gives students even more motivation to practice for performances.
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