On Note-Tab Reminders in Music Lessons

I'm sure that I'm not the only music teacher out there to bemoan the fact that many of their students do not read their assignment books. Or, that they do but only just before their lesson. Post-it flags work as bookmarks for songs, but I've had limited success with regular post-it notes. Until now.

Last week, I found Post-it Note Tabs at Staples. I decided to try them with students who do not check their homework book (the ones who don't check off their goal list to show what they worked on).

When I showed them to my Monday and Tuesday students, they got a bit excited. "That's really neat!" one said. "Yeah, that should work," said another.

I've started writing short phrases to jog their memory. If the student writes quickly enough, I ask them to write the reminders. We post it on one of their pieces that they are sure to practice. The little tab sticking out says, "Reminders", so it's hard to miss.

Seeing as they don't read their assignment books often, I simply jot down the song or exercise titles. Fingers crossed that this works!

Using Practicing Personalities in Music Lessons

When I was at the CFMTA Convention this summer, I spied Practice Personalities: What's Your Type? by Thornton Cline in Long & McQuade's trade show booth. The idea of determining students' practice type and working with that sounded intriguing.

About Practice Personalities: What's Your Type?

Mr. Cline identifies nine practice personalities:

1. The Perfectionistic Type Student

2. The Not-So-Detailed Type Student

3. The Unmotivated Type Student

4. The Fragile, Easily Discouraged Type of Student

5. The Overscheduled Way-Too-Busy Type of Student

6. The Dramatic Type of Student

7. The Exucse Making, Blaming Type Student

8. The Over-Exhuberant, Highly Confident Type of Student

9. Build Your Own Personatily Type of Student

Cline introduces each type before going into more detail for each practice type. Next, he gives a brief (too brief!) chapter with some teaching suggestions for each type. Interspersed throughout the book are interviews with a variety of music educators.

He also dedicates a chapter to motivational rewards and prizes. There is even a chapter on motivational games. Finally, there is a CD in the back, which outlines some of the practice strategies Cline recommends. The back of the book has a handy assessment chart for music teachers to use.

Music Teaching with Practice Personalities

I actually didn't need a full month to complete my assessment. All of my students are a combination of two or more types. To help keep me organized my teaching approaches, I've kept track of how many students are in each group:

1. The Perfectionist Type Student: 36%

2. The Not-So-Detailed Type Student: 52%

3. The Unmotivated Type Student: 24%

4. The Fragile, Easily Discouraged Type of Student: 24%

5. The Overscheduled Way-Too-Busy Type of Student: 40%

6. The Dramatic Type of Student: 20%

7. The Exucse Making, Blaming Type Student: 16%

8. The Over-Exhuberant, Highly Confident Type of Student: 20%

I decided to tackle one strategy at a time.

First off: showing students various practice drills to help them fix trouble spots more quickly. To do that, I simply asked my students to pull out their Bag of Tricks and have them choose a couple of appropriate drills to use from their deck, based on what needed to be fixed.

Many of my students have commented that it's fun to pull out their Bag of Tricks that I made for them. I spent the first two to three weeks doing that just to help reinforce how to practice, but also to appeal to everyone's state of busy-ness. "You want to fix this as quickly as you can so you can move onto other stuff, right?" I'd ask.

With the majority of my students being some combination of the Not-So-Detailed, I decided to increase the frequency of doing Record & Review. You can read about that experience in my post on Active Listening.

This week, I'm employing another technique that's good for several practice types, but especially for the Dramatic and the Not-So-Detailed: roleplaying with a bit of dramatic exaggeration thrown in. This tests my aural memory, let me tell you!

I try to play back what they played incorrectly and ask them to tell me what I did wrong. A few students get it right away, "You didn't hold that note long enough," or "You sped up in that line." My reply is, "Well, that's what I heard you do. Now you show me that you can play it better than me."

The other thing I've launched this week is a Sight-Reading Challenge (more on that later). In addition to increasing my students' music literacy, it's also an exercise to challenge my Perfectionist students.

I'll give my students some time to get get used to these approaches. Then, I'll tackle the Excuse-Making and Blaming Students Fragile, Easily Discouraged ones.

It's a neat book. Mr. Cline is a strong writer and the CD is useful.

However, I was disappointed with how few strategies he offered. Let me re-phrase that: I was disappointed in how little new information I gleaned from it. The majority of the strategies are ones that I've already employed.

In short, I'd say that Practice Personalities: What's Your Type? is ideal for a music teacher just starting out. It would also be good for a teacher just looking for some fresh ideas, especially if they don't already use technology in the studio.

Mr. Cline's suggestions simply reinforced for me some of the strategies that I'm already using in my teaching. The main difference is that now that I know which practice type my students are, I can switch strategies more quickly. When combined with knowing my students' VARK learning preferences, it's a powerful combination.

Practice Personalities Publication Details

Author: Thornton Cline

Title: Practice Personalities: What's Your Type

Paperback: 88 pages

Publisher: Centerstream

Publication Date: July 1, 2012

ISBN-10: 1574242814

ISBN-13: 978-1574242812

Price Range: $16.62 - $27.95 CAD

I purchased my copy from Long & McQuade. You may need to special order this book through your local bookstore. Practice Personalies: What's Your Type? is also available online on Amazon, Alibris and Sheetmusicplus.

Using Waveforms in Music Lessons

Summer lessons give me a chance to try out new ideas with students. One of my students doesn't pay attention to the rhythm and tempo as carefully as he should. I wanted to find a different way to show him that "steady" and "unsteady" are two different things. Last week, I decided to show him what "steady playing" and "unsteady playing" looks like. Not with the webcams but with the waveforms.

Using Audacity, I recorded both of us playing the same passage. I synchronized them and first asked him to study how well our waveforms lined up. Then, I hit Play.

When I asked him to repeat the passage, he was much steadier!

Piano Teacher's Resource Kit

I picked up the Piano Teacher's Resource Kit a few months ago. For years, I've been using  some of Alfred Music's reproducible sheets, but needed some new teaching materials. When my music students go away on vacation, I usually give them "airplane homework" to do while they are away. I am always on the look out for music crossword puzzles, word searches, music sudoku and composer reading and comprehension. The Piano Teacher's Resource Kit is handy for these situations (along for those who need remedial work in a particular area, such as rhythm).

It contains 88 pages of reproducible worksheets, cheat sheets and music games. There are five levels of difficulty.

For us music teachers, there is a handy answer key in the back. I love how the pages are perforated so we can take them out and photocopy them in batches. However, that creates another challenge - how to store theme without getting them mixed up, but that's a challenge for another day.

The Keynote Writer has been a handy cheat sheet for my students struggling with keyboard geography.

It's available at your local music store as well as Sheet Music Plus (below):

look inside

Piano Teacher's Resource Kit Reproducible Worksheets, Games, Puzzles, and More!. Educational Piano Library. Teacher Resource. Softcover. 88 pages. Published by Hal Leonard (HL.296802).

and Amazon: Piano Teacher's Resource Kit.

Piano Pedagogy Links

I haven't started lesson planning for the 2007/08 year yet. I planned to catch up on my bookkeeping and registrations this week before moving onto to lesson plans; but I am taking longer than I thought I would on updating my address book. Of course, it doesn't help that this is the worst month for me and allergies. I refuse to do any bookkeeping when my head is in a perpetual foggy, sniffly, snivelly and sneezy state. However, I'm almost done my address book project and I think I finally found an allergy/sinus combination that is breaking through that fog; so I'll have no more excuses. I will have to do my bookkeeping.

For my colleagues who are doing their lesson planning now (or plan to do so soon), here are a few online resources I've stumbled upon. Hopefully, we can gleam some gems from these:

1. Piano Pedagogy Forum

2. Can-Pno-Ped

3. Music Pedagogy

I may have posted a couple of these in a previous entry, but it would have been a while back.My apologies for the list being piano heavy. Feel free to write submit websites, book titles, periodicals that you use to help with lesson planning - all instruments welcome.

(c) 2007 by Musespeak(tm), Calgary, AB, Canada. All rights reserved.~