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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