"best practices"

during the long drive home from the california music educators (cmea) conference in ontario, the ever present saturday freeway traffic gave me a lot of time for contemplation. although only a few sessions are hits and most miss, all i need is one or two good ones for fuel until the next year.

this year i really enjoyed two sessions that were great presentations on new research and the practical applications in the classroom. frank heuser's session on instructional design and musicianship and particia o'herron's session on music modeling and language development. besides being top notch research, i really liked how they tied in their discussion within the realm of music educations "best practices". too often i have heard very interesting ideas torpedoed by a "take it or leave it" attitude. i really liked the idea of jumping ahead of the pedagogy wars by giving a short summary that encompasses our "best practices" and how a new idea can fit into it. maybe this strategy has been around for a while and i have just missed it, but some of the best ideas i have heard have come from the very stubborn and shortsighted. great teachers use a variety of methods, strategies and materials in their classroom.

a list of the best practices is a great place to start. (and endlessly repeat)

Seven Big Ideas About Teaching and Learning Music

1. Music is a NONVERBAL art form, and thus should be taught NONVERBALLY (gordon)
   
2. MELODY and RHYTHM and separate content areas, and should be taught separately (dalcroze)
   
3. Teach SOUND before SYMBOL (suzuki)
   
4. Music should be taught sequentially by learning to IMITATE, DISCRIMINATE, and then ASSOCIATE (gordon/froseth)
   
5. Music generally occurs in and thus should be taught in a HARMONIC and RHYTHMIC framework (kodaly, orff)
   
6. Music instruction can be delivered through CHAINING (i.e. teaching small step-by-small step to ensure success) (kodaly)
   
1. What do they have to be able to do first before they will be ready to do what you want them to do?
7. Students learn to AUDIATE (to hear musical phenomena in the absence of actual sound by developing vocabularies of melodic and rhythmic patterns) (gordon)
   
1. as students learn to audiate they become able to generalize, analyze, and synthesize musical phenomena
2. this leads to the ability to read music, improvise music, compose music,to interpret music to become musically independent and to attain higher levels of aesthetic perception and valuing (orff)