After a performance students are excited and inspired. It is a great time to celebrate their successes as well as reflect upon their hard work, dedication, growth, and progress/ Often, I’ve found it very helpful to assign students some questions…
In my last post I wrote about the practice habits I am trying to develop with my students. The idea is that each week my students are going to plan a practice routine that consists of four areas of their…
Recently I have been thinking a lot about practicing. These thoughts jump between analyzing my own personal practice habits and the practice habits of my students. I have been thinking about what it means to practice effectively, to make tangible…
In my last post we discussed the benefits of creating opportunities for students to experiment with improvisation. We also explored some simple concepts to use with students to begin to encourage them to improvise. In this post, I will present…
The goal of the National Standards for Music Education, as outlined by NAfME, is to “cultivate a students ability to carry out the three Artistic Processes of creating, performing, and responding.” At the beginning level of the “Creating” standard, students…
I really enjoy incorporating student composition projects into my orchestra classroom for a number of reasons. Composition demonstrates mastery. If a student can create using a concept studied in class, they are demonstrating a higher level of thinking and application…
As we discussed in an earlier post, assessment is very helpful and informative and should help to guide our teaching. Assessment of our students can help us as educators determine students strengths and weaknesses and can hopefully lead us to…