Building A Listening List Into Your Teaching Practice

On Listening

Practice is a point of contention for all musicians, but there is no denying the fact that the only path to success in any field is the focused time put into honing your craft through it. Some approach it as a hard science, focused skills and drills over time in equals increased skills out. Others look at it as an art, by sitting down and immersing yourself in the culture of music you will get better in time. There is one aspect to practice that holds true for these two polar extreme views of practice, and that’s time. 

I believe that both camps have value, and depending on the type of musician you are training and what their goals are, having a balance of both camps in varying degrees will produce quality musicianship. A valuable aspect to music education that is often overlooked, in the 30-60 minute private instruction, is building a repertoire of listening. Factoring listening into daily practice, I argue, needs to be increased in all music programs. Here are a couple of ways that incorporating a basic listening journal can help your students.

1. Critically listening to music builds the musical vocabulary:When students spend time listening to songs they are able to start building their musical vocabulary. Carefully selected songs allow students to hear the tasks that they are working at artfully executed. Then through careful and critical reflection on that listening list, they will begin to start using the language needed to communicate their musical choices, not only in their performances, but in their skill building exercises. By being able to articulate why they are working on a skill building exercise, by tying it to an example of that skill being used in an artful way, students will continue to be inspired to put the time into that exercise. Sometimes we lose site of why we are doing an activity, but if the teacher carefully selects some songs to put on a listening list, a student will always have a clear picture of the objective goal they are trying to reach.
2. Co-creation of the listening list gives the student ownership: 
   When a teacher and a student explore songs together to create the listening list, students will be building the skills necessary to hear certain elements in songs, and in turn build the vocabulary to express those elements through their music. For the teacher, it gives them some insight into the musical taste of their students. This helps the teacher assess what songs will be an inspiring piece to listen to, so that when they assign listening lists, they will be assigning inspiring songs that match the students’ taste. Not only does it help the teacher design the listening portion of the daily practice, but will also help grow the teacher’s awareness of what repertoire will be inspiring to practice.

How do you set up a successful listening list and the activities around it?

By just having a journal that students write down their thoughts and personal reflections based on some songs that you have chosen together, you are not really reaping the benefits of critical examination. Examining several factors for each song is important to building knowledge through focused listening. I’ll make available a sample downloadable listening chart in the assessment package that I am building with the help of some other great music educators.

Moving forward, its important to first understand why we are listening to the song. In your lessons, you’ll be working on a number of tasks that lead to a certain objective that builds towards a big picture goal. Your listening list should incorporate all three levels. So in the first level, we are looking at how the task or exercise that you are exploring relates to the song, and where to find it. If there is a specific lick, melody, or idea that you are trying to lift out of a song, put down the time markings so that the student knows where extra focus is needed. In the reflection you can ask critical questions that ask about specific theoretical ideas that the student is working on expanding. What key is this song in? What is the time signature of the song? How is the artist modulating through a set of keys? What is the main chord progression of this specific section of the song? Whatever you may ask, it should directly relate to the task that you are working on. If you are asking questions based on the main objectives or big picture goal, make sure that your questions are related. 

Music is never done outside of the confines of culture. Knowing this, asking the student to do some research about the song, lyrical breakdowns, historical contexts, the biography of the artist and so on, helps the student understand why the song exists. These forms of questioning build a deeper understanding of the elements of music as they exist in certain contexts. Whether you are listening to a romantic piano sonata or a top 40’s hit, there is an important lesson to learn from the cultural context of the song. Helping your students break it down, by giving them resources to finding the research necessary to reflect on these questions, will help them build the cultural language behind the creative choices they make in their music. 

How much time you should you focus on listening?

I suggest that the listening expectations be set by you and your student together. The great thing is, everybody enjoys listening to music so this is an easy way to get into the flow state. Set up two types of listening exercises, focused reflection, and the background listening party. Ask the student to just include the songs on their list into their daily playlists. Students are using streaming services like rdio.com, songza.com, spotify.com, and grooveshark.com, that all allow for playlists to be saved. Encourage them to include the new songs in their playlists. 

Outside of the random listening parties, there should be at least one song a day where the student spends some time with the focus questions to critically listen to their songs. Some students will be able to do one ore more songs a day, others will really only be able to do one song a week. When you know your student and what priorities they place on practicing, you’ll be able to create the expectations that work for the student. You do not want to assign more than what the student is able to do because you’ll create a state of frustration, but at the same time, not challenging the student enough will create a state of boredom which will render your assignments useless. 

The Take Away

Whether you are training a concert pianist or a campfire guitar player, listening to music relevant to the skills you are building should be a key component in your educational planning. A well planned listening list will help build the oral language component of the study of music. A complete understanding of your student will help you build that list, and at the same time help you understand your student. With more understanding, you’ll be better able to bring your students through their tasks, their objectives and their big picture goals.

www.musicitup.com

Get In The Flow - Implicit Vs. Explicit Learning

To the inspired musician!

I want to explain, briefly, the idea of implicit vs. explicit learning. I hope this will help many people when it comes to understanding the value of different kinds of practicing.

First let me quickly sum up the definitions we are going to be working with.

1. Skills - the necessary abilities to accomplish a task. ex. You will need to have the skill of adding soap to the water in order to clean your dishes. 
2. Demands - the complexity or difficulty of a task. ex. It is much more demanding to clean a pan with baked on food than a spoon that was used for soup. 
3. Explicit - Openly shown
4. Implicit - Understood, although not clearly directed or shown
5. Reframing - the basic unit of learning. When a problem is solved or reframed, you come away with a new way to think of the world.

In terms of learning:

1. Explicit learning happens when the teacher or guide is working on increasing a skill or demand, through direct demonstration and exercise. Another way to look at it is, the teacher reframes an idea, or shows a new idea creating a new frame of reference.
2. Implicit learning happens when the student gets into the "flow" or the zone and has an ah ha insight or a number of insights. The student has a "cascade of insights" that leads to the reframing of problems thus leading to new learning and pattern recognition. 

Understanding the differences between these two types of learning, can really help keep students from the two major reasons for quitting on music, or any learning task for that matter. Those two major reasons for quitting or either too much anxiety, or too much boredom. 

Anxiety is occurs when one loses the ability to act on the world. It is very much different from fear, which is a direct result of a physical stimulus. There is a tiger in the room!! That's fear. Anxiety occurs when the demand overextend the skill level. The student with anxiety is unable to reframe a problem based on their current paradigms, and is no longer able to act. If you put a student in a state of anxiety, learning ceases to occur. 

Boredom is much easier to define. It is the state in which the skills a student has overextends the demands of the task. No learning can happen in this state because you are just operating in a static frame of reference, and its reframing that needs to occur for learning to be present. There is no ability here to find a problem to solve as you've already solved the problems. Its like getting stuck on level one of your video game after you have already beat the game. 

The place in between anxiety and boredom is the flow state, according to John Vervaeke and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I believe that the flow state is what musicians are always chasing after. Its a state where you are so fully engaged in a task that time stops mattering. You've made an intense connection with the art of sound. All musicians can get into this flow state, and I'm sure that if you are studying music, and reading this blog, you can relate to a time where you felt intensely connected to the creation of music. In these states, Csikszentmihalyi talks about a cascade of insights. You start taking all of the connections that you have found in music, and creatively arranging them, like solving little problems over and over again, which teaches you to implicitly predict the next set of problems and connections. This is a reframing that occurs in the flow state and for the artist or musician, is one of the most valuable learning experiences.

Practical Applications

There are several practical applications for applying this flow state as a musician or as a music teacher:

1. Helping students to understand how to get into a mindful flow state in practice will be one of the most valuable explicit lessons that can take place during instruction. The flow state naturally, or implicitly, teaches students to find patterns, recognize the patterns, sort the patterns and then apply the patterns. It is the application, or the testing of the new patterns that create the reframing that we are after in regards to learning. The big idea is to explicitly program some time for implicit learning in a lesson.
2. The flow state occurs only in a state that is balanced between anxiety and boredom. That means that as a teacher, or student, you need to recognize the demands of a task, and whether you have the skills to be able to meet the demands. What this should mean for teachers is getting to know your students. For learning objectives, its important to try and break them down into the skills necessary. Explicitly teach those skills, and then offer tasks in which the demands can be met in that flow state, so that the student will be able to practice them. The more these skills are broken down, the easier it is to be able to track and assess whether a student has the appropriate skills to meet the demands of the task. 
3. Sending students home to tackle a brand new task that is suppose to "build" on demands explicitly is going to cause the student to function alone in the state of anxiety. In that anxious state, no learning is going to be able to take place. If a student continues to be placed in this state, with the expectation that "practice makes perfect" success will not follow. In other terms, its best to say that "Perfect Practice makes Perfect."
4. The opposite can occur with homework to practice. Not recognizing when or how to increase the demands appropriately to the skill level will cause a perpetual state of boredom. If a student finds that practicing is "boring" (and I know that I have personally dealt with this) than as teachers, we need to reassess the objectives, the tasks, and the skills necessary, and the demands of the tasks. If you go to http://www.musicitup.com/#!resources/c1fzb  I have created an easy tracking chart for those objectives and tasks. I talk about the just right learning zone, which I believe is the concept of "flow" that Csikszentmihalyi advocates.

Here's a visual representation that can help you visualize this concept:

In conclusion, assessment drives your ability to understand the students' objectives, skill levels, and interests. This helps you, as a teacher or student, understand that lessons and practice need to include explicit learning, and most importantly, the implicit learning that occurs in the flow state. 

If you'd like to know more about this approach, and have access to exclusive downloadable resources for free please fill out the form below, and I will send these resources directly to you. You can also find the majority of these articles at www.musicitup.com.

Thank you for reading, and I hope that if you find value in the information here you share it with people that will also find value.

Chris Eakins
www.musicitup.com

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The New Art Of Practice - Define Your Objectives

Hello Musicians!

I'm glad that you found this blog today, because I'm going to try and help you better understand why we practice and how to practice better. As musicians, we've all hit that wall when we are facing what seems to be an impossible challenge on our own. Our teacher has given us a task to practice at home independently, and our job is to be disciplined to get our weekly tasks completed.

What if I were to tell you there is a better way? A way where you won't have to face difficult challenges alone! A way where frustration won't get the better of you. Well...  brace yourself... there is a better way.

Practice shouldn't be the art of doing something you can't do until you can do. It should be the art of narrowing down your main goal, or goals, breaking up the goal into objectives and then breaking those objectives into tasks. Once you can see a main goal broken down into pieces, and then pieces of the pieces a game plan can take place.

Now this is the most important part! - If you get one thing out of this posting, this should be it:

Practice is the art of finding the just right learning level!

The goals, broken down into objectives, broken down into tasks can be ranked. You can use the form that I've attached in the resource page called "The Practice Guide" to rank the tasks by difficulty. There are three levels, New Skill, Just Right, and Independent. 

A New Skill is a task that you and your teacher are working on together. This task is difficult and causes a fair amount of frustration, and therefore should only be worked on when you are supported by your teacher. As you progress through your goals these New Skills will move into the next stage called, Just Right, when your teacher and you agree together.

A Just Right Level task is where you want to focus your practice on for about 80% of your practice time. These tasks you can do, but it doesn't feel natural. If you get it perfect sometimes, and still make little mistakes here and there that aren't consistent, you are playing at the Just Right Level. When you start playing the task a number of times where it feels natural and mistakes hardly pop up, you've moved into the Independent Level.

The Independent Level is where you are always aiming. Its feels great to play in this level, and it feels like play, not work. I always recommend my students start all of their practice in the Independent Level. The reason is simple...  if you start your routine with playing, it will make the work in the Just Right Level more rewarding because it will show you where you will be working towards. If this means you have to go back to a previous big picture goal and play some of the tasks, objectives, or goals in the Independent Level, I highly encourage it.

When bands sit down to work through songs, they don't often start with the hardest tasks first. At least, I've never been in a musical ensemble that works that way. Most often we start with a piece that we all love playing so that we can start on a happy and easy note. We warm up with play. Its similar to working out...  you can't just lift the heaviest thing first, you have to warm up your muscles and get the blood flowing. Get your creative juices flowing with playing in the Independent Level, then move to focusing in on tasks at the Just Right Level, and save the New Skills for when you sit down with your teacher. All the while, you and your teacher can be making little comments about what you are specifically focusing on in the Just Right Level.

I've created the Practice Guide for you...  all you have to do is download it and print it. Check it out here.

If you found value in this entry, please leave a comment in the feed and share it with someone who you feel this can help.

Thank you for Reading and Happy Music Making

Chris Eakins

What Is Music It Up? - The New Art of Music Education

Hi readers and welcome to the first Enlightened Music Educators Blog!

This will be a quick post, but I want to thank you for coming by and having a little read through it. In this post I am going to just introduce myself and give you a little backstory so that you can understand where Music It Up is coming from.

Most people start their stories with the day they were born, but I'm going to take it a little further back. The two people who I need to credit my love for music are my parents. They were the ones that really invested in the idea of Music It Up well over thirty years ago.

My parents met a couple of years before I was born. My mom had just finished her university degree, and my dad was a working to afford is one true passion at the time, and that was riding motorcycles. At a party, that was supposedly a set up, my folks took the first step to creating music it up. With the tunes cranked they road off on the motorcycle together until the sun started coming up. I've never really got a clear story on anything, but that's the story they tell.

If I do the math correctly, within a year they had planned on starting a family and I was conceived. My parents, being avid lovers of music, would put on the records of Abba, Supertramp and Alice Cooper nice and loud, making sure that I could hear them clearly from within the womb. When I was born, the only thing that would put me to sleep was Michael Jackson's Thriller album. So the second person I might have to attribute Music It Up to is the ever reigning king of pop.

As soon as you enter the front door of my parents' house you'll see all the family photos. In the first few frames are the pictures of my youth, and in a number of the pictures you'll see a very young version of me sitting at the piano, or with my Dad's huge 80's headphones on. I grew an amazing passion for music. A passion that would drive me to learn how to operate the turntable before I could hold a fork properly! A passion to learn all of dance moves and words to Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bad albums! A passion to learn how to read musical notation before I could read english! The one thing that I can't thank my parents' enough for was the constant encouragement that fanned that musical spark into a flame.

I was enrolled in music lessons before I was enrolled in public school, and when things got tough, my parents taught me about dedication and determination. As I grew up, most every decision I made was to follow my dream as a musician. In elementary school I played the role of the little drummer boy for the Christmas pageant. I played piano for all of the talent shows. In high school I would spend all of my time hanging out either in the music room or just outside. I played in all of the school bands. I put together my first band with the great people I met in that music room. When I graduated from high school I attempted computer science at York University, but within the first year I had transfered over to the music program. I got my first real job working at a music store in Toronto. I taught piano and drums privately to help pay for my education.

It was during the year right after my undergrad that I thought about Music It Up. I put together a business plan, and I started a little website. Back then I called it "Live Through Music," and I started networking like crazy to find people just like me, dedicated to helping others achieve their musical dreams. It was too early for Music It Up to become a reality because the internet was still in development and creating a website took some programing knowledge that I lacked. I put that business idea on the back burner and had to come up with another way to keep pushing through to achieve my dreams.

The second best way for me to reach students of music, I thought, was to get my degree in Education and become a music teacher. I did just that and for the past seven years I have been working very hard at becoming a skilled music educator. My dreams for Music It Up have stayed with me throughout the past seven years. When I finished my school year in June of 2013, I had realized that I was struggling with my passion for music. Teaching in the public school system had brought me away from my dreams and into a world that couldn't allow me to really teach music the way that I wanted to. While cleaning out my computer the following September to start the new school year I came across the business plan I had written over seven years ago and it was like the lights came back on. A spark of electricity started running through my veins, and I knew that Music It Up was what I had to do.

Its the beginning of March 2014, and I've been working really hard at designing the website, buying the domain names, recording podcasts, filming videos and reading everything I can get my hands on that will help Music It Up become a reality. That's my story. The fire that started in utero, fueled by sound, and a lot by the funky grooves of Michael Jackson, has given birth to a new way to help people achieve their musical dreams.

 www.musicitup.com will be launching at the end of March 2014!

That's right, its just around the corner. It's going to be a platform that offers you tons of free resources to keep your musical fire burning. I will be slowly launching different programs through Music It Up, that will help anyone, whether you're just turning 4 or if you've turned 4 for the twentieth time.

Do you want to be the first person to visit the site!? The first person to see how Music It Up is going to help you bring forth your song? It easy. Sign up below for exclusive rights to the Music It Up club. I'll send you first crack at signing up for any of the workshops and classes as well as send you links to all the cool podcasts, videos and articles as they are published.

www.musicitup.com - Your Music. Your Inspiration.

Chris Eakins

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