I’m sitting at my desk, looking at the board where there are pictures of a basketball, a door, pants, high heels and a toilet.  My student teacher says, ”Ok, I’ll be the toilet”, then  realizes what she said and laughs. The kids are performing a soundscape based on sounds they heard while doing a listening walk through the building.  And, well, this is a school, so the chances of hearing a toilet flush at some point during the walk were pretty high.  The students have instruments representing the pictures/sounds and are playing when the student conductor points to them, sometimes alone, sometimes two at a time.  It ends up being a pretty cool improvisational composition.

Most adults don’t realize that we’re doing these kinds of sophisticated exercises with young students in class, despite the fact that sometimes they include toilets. In fact, most adults are remembering the elementary music class that THEY had; one where they sat and sang or sat and played a recorder or sat and read notes in patterns.  Things have certainly changed and music teachers are having to change with it.

I’m going to step away from the music here for a minute to talk about something that may seem unrelated, but I promise, I will return in a moment.  Back in the day, when I was in high school, we had something called phase electives.  While there were advanced placement classes, which a lot of friends chose because they were advised to for college, there were also choices within each subject.  For instance, instead of American or World History, I chose to take a class called “The Roaring Twenties and Turbulent Thirties”.   I chose Shakespeare tragedies and a drama class about writing, and a logic class, among others.  I always chose things that were ranked pretty highly in terms of difficulty, but I also chose those things I wanted to learn.  And just like my friends in those advanced placement classes, I passed my ACT test, testing high enough in English to bypass the introductory college English class.  So maybe students choosing what they want to learn increases their actual learning?

Over the last decade or so, certain educators have been discussing something called student directed learning.  This doesn’t mean that students get to choose anything they want to learn, but, just like I had to choose classes placed within different disciplines, students have the ability to make their own choices in terms of how they want to learn concepts within the curriculum.  Classrooms haven’t changed much in a very long time, when it was the custom to put students in rows where the teacher lectured all day and the kids were expected to sit, listen, remember and regurgitate.  Unless a teacher has a degree in stand-up comedy along with his/her education degree, they aren’t going to “entertain” students well enough just standing and talking for 50 minutes to keep them engaged.  This is where student directed learning comes in, the theory being if students choose what they want to learn, they will be more engaged.

So, for teachers like me who were trained in the old school way, how do I take an elementary music class and create space for students to choose what and how they want to learn, especially when so much of it is skills based?  The soundscaping composition we did today isn’t really student directed because they had to choose among instruments picked for them and we only chose certain sounds from the walk.  Even for teachers trained in different methodologies like Orff, Kodaly or Dalcroze, much of it is still teacher led.  I do, we do. With student directed learning it’s really I do, we do, you do. Is it crazy that just as I’m seeing retirement in the not so distant future, that I’m intrigued by this?  What would it look like in my classroom for my kids to be teaching themselves and how would I structure that to make it happen?  It would be worth it to have my kids more engaged and really learning.  Without having to use toilets for attention getting purposes.