Reflections on Week 1

This has been a crazy, busy week.  I spent it at a weeklong Salvation Army music camp in Keystone Heights, FL (near Starke) teaching 2nd year brass band classes, theory and a class in Beginning Brass Arranging.  Sandwiched in between those teaching responsibilities, I did my best to keep up with the work for this class. (Fortunately, there was good internet access at the camp to make that possible.)  We finished up the camp with our final concert and awards program Saturday morning and returned home to Naples by late Saturday night.

I was able to watch all the videos and read the Misconceptions about Scientific Research in Music Education pdf.  As I stated in my related discussion post, it helped to answer quite a number of the reservations I had previously held concerning "taking the mystery out of music".  Also, though, I still do have some lingering reservations about the possibility of some sort of a "Heisenberg uncertainty principle" effect - that the mere act of intense observation actually changes the behavior being observed.

In watching the videos, I was particularly struck by the second speaker Dr. Thompson.  Her short presentation helped me to realize that what we talking about here is not some esoteric study being conducted by mysterious men in lab coats in some ivory tower.  Rather, it is something that good teachers already do instinctively, if informally.  As I have taught in many different contexts over a 30+ year career, I have often found that the first time through any new class is the hardest.  You have ideas about what to try, but you don't know for sure if those ideas will actually work until you try them out.

I experienced a bit of that this past week with the Brass Arranging class I taught.  Although I have personally done brass arranging for nearly 25 years as a personal hobby, this is the first time I have actually taught a class to help students begin to learn how to do it themselves.  The first day was a bit rocky as I found myself talking way too much - trying to explain way too much information too quickly.  In reflecting on that after that first day was over, I realized that I had tried to dump too large of a chunk of information on them in one day.  I also had failed to allow them enough time to actually start working on writing music - the ostensible purpose of the class.  On the second day, I started by apologizing for trying to dump "25 years of lessons learned" on them in 25 minutes.  I then covered a much smaller chunk of information and gave them the rest of the time to actually start putting that bit into practice.  If I understand the concept correctly, this is an example of informal "action research."

When I was able to return home and found that my copy of Mertler's book had arrived, I was able to complete the reading from his first chapter and find that he was making much the same point.  I particularly appreciated how his introduction made the point by contrasting common mental images of "research" with a more practical understanding of what action research really is.  We have hopefully all been exposed to the scientific method in other contexts, but I had not really thought of how it might apply to music teaching.  We just have to learn how to more intelligently and systematically apply it to our own teaching.

Mertler's detailed explanations of the various possible approaches (inductive vs. deductive; experimental vs. non-experimental) is quite helpful to clarify the different possibilities.  The outlining of various research models also helps to begin the thought process for us as we try to start developing ideas for possible projects for this class.

Unfortunately, although my copy of Phillips' book has been ordered, it has not yet arrived.  Hopefully it will arrive in tomorrow's mail and I can quickly catch up on the assigned readings in it.