Music Teaching Tips For Producting Better Trained StudentsOne of the breakthroughs in educational research was the realization that people learn in different ways, with different senses. Some people are visual learners, some people are auditory learners and some people learn by physical experience. The best music teacher will understand this and develop classes that convey musical ideas in different ways using all three ways – the eyes, the ears and experience or movement. When you can present concepts to music students in ways that let them take advantage of these three methods of learning, two things will happen. The first is that the material in the class is more likely to be grasped completely since most people learn with a mixture of these methods, and in addition, certain groups that would have been left out will be able to grasp the concepts more easily. This is because certain people are dominant in one aspect of learning. Of course in nearly all cases, students learned music best by participating and actually creating music in some way whether by song or by percussion using their bodies of perhaps by dancing and eventually by playing a specific instruments. A good teacher will also be aware of their own preferred method of learning. Nearly every music teacher will naturally concentrate on one method of learning that serves them best and they will have a natural tendency to emphasize that particular style. A good teacher will be aware of this and therefore be able to present material independently of their own personal bias. For example, there is one particular teacher who has poor eyesight and relies on her auditory skills to learn music. When she became a teacher, she had a way of de-emphasizing the visual aspects of music to her students. Finally, she became aware of this made sure that she created learning experiences that helps her visually orientated students. One of the classic methods of visual teaching of music involves using a whiteboard. In the past this have been typically used to demonstrate scales or notation. Now, a new tool that teachers are using is the interactive whiteboard. Interactive whiteboards can combine the visual, oral and also experiential aspects of teaching music. For example, students can compose their own music with software and this music can be incorporated into these new interactive whiteboards. While the music plays, the students are able to hear it and are also able to see a visual representation, via the notation shown on the whiteboard. This allows the teacher to impart the principles of musical composition while the students gain instant feedback, which is a form of experience. Using the whiteboard, teachers are able to impart important musical ideas such as repeat scales and harmonies, which are also displayed on a whiteboard. These whiteboards can also connected to music theory programs like musicthoery.net or similar. While playing through student’s compositions displayed visually on the whiteboard, the music teacher can also add notes or commentary to what the program is displaying to the students. This way he is able to give students immediate feedback, which everyone in the class can pick up. Of course this kind of whiteboard is not going to be suitable for children of all ages, and this technology will not replace the time tested and effective methods of visual and oral and experiential teaching such as singing, dancing, reading, clapping or asking students to write musical notation. As long as the music teacher is aware that a student will use several different methods of learning, or largely one in particular he will have a much better chance of teaching music effectively. |