After a Performance: Celebrate Student Success and Reflect
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…
Bringing More Out of the Music: Student Led Practice, Critique, and Active Listening
I write this as I and countless other teachers are in the throws of concert season. Teachers are tirelessly rehearsing, practicing, and striving to coax every bit of music out of their students. In our preparation, we have made clear…
Practice Routine Break Down and Feedback
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…
Developing A Student Practice Routine
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…
Improvisation in the Orchestra Classroom – Using Arpeggios – Part II
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…
Beginning Improvisation for Orchestra
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…
Composition in the Orchestra Classroom
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…
Assessment Ideas for the Instrumental Classroom
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…
Assessment in the Orchestra Classroom
I would venture to say that all teachers assess their students in some way or another. As music educators, I feel as if assessment comes hand in hand with what we do. We teach students a concept, skill, scale, fingering,…