First Stretch of the Trip...What is the all boys class really like?

To fully understand how I have approached my driving question, a description of the all boys gender class must be provided.  The gender program at my school has been set up to provide students with an opportunity to be part of a single-gendered classroom.  The gender classes are open to students in grade 7 and 8 but not grade 6.  In grade 6 (or grade 7) teachers may recommend students to the gender program. The goal of the single gender class is to provide students with an alternative learning environment where the pressures of interacting with the other sex are eliminated and to provide lessons that better meet the needs of the students. There is no specific criteria to recommend students to the program, except that this type of learning environment would be best for them.  It has been reinforced though that these classes should not become a place where the challenging students are all placed.  Often, however, this has been the case.  In grade 7, the single gender classes are always a single gender class, whether they are in their homerooms, their switch classes, or on rotary (french and music).  In the past there has been many difficulties with the grade 8 boys on rotary so in their grade 8 year, the girls and boys will come to music as a mixed gender class.  Having taught in both scenarios, the mixed class in grade 8 has been a better experience over all.

The homeroom classrooms of the gender classes are very different.  Typically, the all girls classroom is very neat and organized and full of colour.  The boys classroom is usually very messy and by the end of the day it is always very dirty.  Another significant difference between the two classes is that in the boys classroom there are way less "regular" chairs and desks.  Many of the desks have been modified using plumbing equipment so that the boys can stand when completing their lessons.  There are also many exercise balls in the classroom so that the boys can be more active while learning.

Much research has shown that males and females learn in different ways.  Often boys are referred to special education programs for behaviour issues and this holds true at my school as well.  Research has started to show that single gender classes for the boys has improved their overall performance, increased homework and test results (Piechura-Couture, Heins & Tichenor, 2013). There has been much debate on single gender classes but one school of thought is that by having single gender classes for males, we can reduce the number of boys in special education classrooms. The Boy Factor: Can Single Gender Classes Reduce the Over Representation of Boys In Special Education.  Overall, the gender programs at our school have been quite successful and significant improvements have resulted for most students.  These results are typical as indicated in preliminary research at other schools in the USA.  Over two thirds of parents that completed surveys for an all boys program in the USA indicated that they saw increases in their child's self-confidence, independence and self-efficacy (Rex & Chadwell, 2009).  Single Gender Classrooms Having taught some students in grade 6 and seeing them in the gender class in grade 7, I would mostly agree with this statement.  There are, however, some students that the program did not work well for, and as a result, will not be part of the program in grade 8. 

This is what my classroom looks like after the all boys classroom - this is clean and orderly compared to what it usually looks like when they leave!

Rotary music lessons with last year's group of boys was often challenging, which was also noted by their rotary French teacher in discussions. After collaborating with their homeroom teachers we eventually devised a system that somewhat worked.  Before approaching the homeroom teachers I actually yelled at them one day (I NEVER yell).  They sat their silently and I reasoned with them as to what had to happen to have a class where I could actually teach for five minutes and what needed to happen so that I could trust them to work in groups and not have to worry that they would be rough housing with one another or lock each other in the practice rooms (you really can only be in so many places at once).  I made them write down on paper what I needed to do.  Their answers were mostly "yell at us" and "kick us out", two things that I try to never do.  I must note that I do not have a very loud voice so yelling really hurts! After this conversation and talking with their homeroom and switch

Waiting for the all boys class...

teacher, most lessons went a lot smoother.  They had their moments of weakness, and as a result lost out on classroom parties. I must say that as a group I did really enjoy working with this group.  The class was always very energetic.  If music was on, they were out of their seats (or dancing in their chairs).  They were usually enthusiastic to answer questions, but the problem was they all wanted to answer at the same time and had difficulties listening to one another. When given compositional activities to work on, the students that actually put an effort into what they were created, demonstrated a deeper understanding and had more creative performances than those from other classes. Overall, it was a very unique environment to be working and I want to be able to provide a program that is going to be more engaging for the boys.  My current thoughts on how to do this are by providing more self and peer assessment, having the students have more of a say in the rubrics used to assess them, and by integrating more technology into their daily lessons.  Another area where I plan to grow is in my leadership abilities, specifically in the gender program which will be discussed further in this blog.

Piechura-Couture, K., Heins, E., & Tichenor, M. (2013). The Boy Factor: Can Single-Gender Classes Reduce The Over-Representation of Boys in Special Education?. College Student Journal, 47(2), 235-243.

Rex, J., & Chadwell, D. (2009). Single-Gender Classrooms. School Administrator, 66(8), 28-33.

And We Are Off...Developing Solid Musical Understanding

Before considering how to better engage the gender classes, specifically the boys, through the use of technology, "musical understanding" in this context must be considered and avenues that should be explored to reach a better comprehension of "musical understanding".

I began this course with the understanding that to have musical understanding was to have some sort of comprehension of the elements of music (beat, pitch, rhythm, etc.), and how they are woven together to create music. I also believed that part of having a musical understanding was being able to recreate something that has been previously composed, as well as to compose on your own (usually with specific guidelines).

Elements of Music: 
BEAT PITCH RHYTHM MELODY DYNAMICS TEMPO FORM

The first module of this course challenged everything that I thought I ever knew about music and through the readings, I was forced to reconstruct what "musical understanding" means. This reconstruction started with Renate Zenker's The Dynamic and Complex Nature of Musical Understanding.  Zenker begins to clarify the nature of musical understanding by examining what understanding is and how these characteristics are evident in musical understanding. Before reading this chapter I do not remember taking a time to think about and try to explain what understanding means. The characteristics that Zenker identifies helped shape my idea of what "understanding" is. Zenker's characteristics of understanding are as follows:

1. The word understanding is ambiguous in that it has different sense. That is, we say "We understand X", the statement has more than one possible meaning. 
2. Understanding, as a verb, belongs to a class of verbs that indicate an upshot or outcome, not an activity; we cannot "do it"; it results from us doing many activitieis. Understand as a noun is primarily a capacity to see connections and notice things that others do not, which results from having had many understanding "upshots". 
3. Understanding involves concepts and perception recipes. 
4. We can talk about internal/external understanding. 
5. Understanding is the basis of appreciation. 
6. Understanding is a matter of degree; different levels of sophistication are possible. 
7. Understanding has a "dynamic" quality; our understanding changes as our knowledge base and experiences change.

Zenker further elaborates her seven characteristics of understanding and applies them to musical understanding. Although all of these points helped to redefine my own perception of musical understanding in one way or another, a few of her points resonated stronger with me and had a more profound change on my thinking. In point number two, Zenker discusses the idea that understanding is something that happens when you have thought, studied or completed various tasks, and understanding can happen where no effort is involved. Understanding itself is not a task, yet instead various tasks, that need to be completed in order to understand.  There are sets or groups of techniques or tasks that need to be completed depending on the object of understanding. Zenker believes that when people have a good understanding  they have had a lot of upshots or outcomes through their engagement in various activities and as a result have developed many connections and "get it right". It is an epistemological state that people achieve and are able to see things that others may miss.  Relating this to musical understanding, Zenker believes that we must engage in "a wide variety of musical activities like playing, singing, listening, composing, performing, improvising, reading music, and learning musical concepts. There is no single type of "understanding-know-how" to music." (Zenker, p. 35).  Elaborating on this idea, our musical understanding develops through our own personal experiences with music and those with musical understanding can make connections in music and notice what they have been trained to notice.

Another point that resonated with me is Zenker's third point that understanding involves concepts and perception recipes. Zenker believes that to teach for understanding we can "make students aware of the concepts (ideas or general notions) they already possess and raise these to a reflective level" (Zenker, p.37).  Zenker further explains that we can teach students the correct musical terminology for concepts that they possess and then they can demonstrate their understanding. Often as teachers we assume that students have limited experience with new concepts and this is not necessarily the case.  Often students come to us with some understanding of these new concepts and our focus should focus more on providing and teaching students the correct musical terminology. This idea holds true when examining musical understanding between various cultures. The idea that students come to us with musical understanding is echoed by Carol P. Richardson in her article Eastern Ears in Western Classrooms.  Richardson says "Musical understanding does not really require our strenuous efforts as educators because students come to us with it already in place, though usually without the words or images with which to express it in our expert musical language" (Richardson, p. 198). As educators we provide students with the context to express their musical understanding and we specialize in teaching them to talk about music in "our way" aiming for analysis in  the language of musicians.

Another point that Zenker discusses is that understanding has a "dynamic" quality and our understanding changes as our knowledge base and experiences change. This makes me think about how entering university I felt like I knew almost everything there was to know about music and then in my last year feeling ignorant as it was at this point that I realized how much there was about music that I did not know about!  Zenker discusses how we construct our musical knowledge based on our interaction with music and our acquisition of musical knowledge.  We react to and interact with music based on patterns we recognize in the music and the social and cultural context of the music combined with our personal music history, experiences and theoretical knowledge. Another article that reinforces the importance of culture on musical understanding is Musical Understanding: Cognition and Enculturation by Harold Fiske and Matthew Royal. Fiske and Royal state that musical understanding means "understanding something about sound, where "something" means knowing how to produce and/or receive acoustically generated energy of a sort recognized and valued by a particular cultural community" (Fiske and Royal, p. 73). Fiske and Royal look at musical understanding in a more primitive way connected to the brain's first priority being safety and survival of its owner and survival is dependent on making sense of incoming sensory information which our comprehension is developed by identifying patterns and comparing them. This connects to the idea that different environments will produce different sounds that are specific to it like specific animal calls, geographical features (rivers, mountain, tundras, etc.), and weather conditions (rain, snow, hail, sleet, etc.), so as humans we learn to construct and identify many different environment-specific sound patterns and it is possible to view culture as the historical accretion of learned responses to environment-specific conditions followed by the subsequent altering of that environment. Therefore music from a specific culture are a response to a particular sonic or musical environment when shape and alter that environment.  "The brain needs to relate incoming information to previous experiences and their former consequences or outcomes, as well as to current beliefs about the immediate social and physical environment. Social and physical-environmental culture provides a context for musical comprehension and meaning, a frame of discourse within which cognitive processes occur" (Fiske and Royal, p. 84).

Like Zenker, and Fiske and Royal, Marian T. Dura also believes that there is a connection between culture and music, and explores this connection to movement. The reason Dura's work resonated so strongly with me and my musical understanding is because of my strong connection to dance. I subconsciously am always moving when there is music on. In many ways dance has always been my first love, but to me, dance and music have always been intertwined so Dura's work brings a theoretical aspect to what I have always known to be true to my own existence, and have also observed in my students, especially in the all boys class. I will return to this idea later. The three main ideas that Dura explores are:

1. Physical involvement as a component of the music listening experience.
2. The body, the mind, the brain and the musical experience.
3. Effects of musical elements on listeners.

Dura summarizes that "the kinesthetic dimension of the music listening experience can be described a s a product of various factors, including physical and neurological characteristics of the human nervous system, cognitive processes such as metaphor, and characteristics of tonality-based musical systems, in this case, specifically music of the European common practice period" (Dura, p. 129).  

Although all of the readings have helped to shape and form my knowledge of "musical understanding" these specific points resonated the most with me and had the largest impact on my thinking.

1. Dura, Marian T. Movement and Music: The Kinesthetic Dimension of the Music Listening Experience in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
2. Fiske, Harold and Matthew Royal.  Musical Understanding: Cognition and Enculturation in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
3. Richardson, Carol P. Eastern Ears in Western Classrooms in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.
4. Zenker, Renate, The Dynamic and Complex Nature of Musical Understanding in Hanley, B. & Goolsby, T (2002). Musical Understanding – Perspectives in Theory and Practice. C.M.E.A. Publication.

At the starting line...

Upon embarking on my honours specialist in music, I felt like I was starting to have a good handle on my teaching practice and that my understanding of teaching music and "the learner" were solid. Having completed my third year of teaching, the second year at my current school, things were starting to make sense. I have taught music at the middle school level for all three years, both in a band and non band program. The communities that I have worked in are both very challenging areas. Most families are working class families and students have very little guidance and support from their parents at home because often parents are working multiple jobs to make ends meet. Many families in my community are immigrant families comprised mostly of Indian, Pakistani, and Jamaican backgrounds. Rumour has it that a large portion of the community that I work in were actually families from Jane and Finch that were given a fresh start from the City of Brampton and the City of Toronto.

This past year I had the opportunity to be part of the school leadership committee and had the leadership role within the music department. Despite the political climate and difficulties that this year brought, it was a good year and my LTO teaching partner and I got a lot accomplished. I felt like I had this teaching gig under control, then I started this course and again, started to question everything I had believed in.  Musical understanding. Ya that means that you understand music right? But what does that REALLY mean? The first module tackled the ideas of "musical understanding" and I hit a dis-equilibrium in my own knowledge. I panicked.  

"To understand something is to have an intelligent relationship to it."

Carl Bereiter

"Understanding is to be judged according to its ability to produce further understanding."

Carl Bereiter,
Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

Have I done ANYTHING right in my first three years of teaching?  Well, of course I had, but I had not taken the time to reflect upon what I did and the value that it provided my students upon completing their year with me. I have had many successful teaching moments over the last three years.  I have had the unique opportunity to teach in a developmentally disabled class, an all-girls class, an all-boys class, a behaviour class, a general learning disability class and a mixed behaviour-general learning disability class. I consider myself to be very privileged to work in a school board where all schools will be wireless by September of this year and that has programs like Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) already implemented and concrete within its framework.  I am even more privileged to work in a school that is technology focused.

To provide you with a clearer understanding of where I started this course, these are some of the things that I felt I did well in my teaching practice:

• strong connection with my band classes - very engaged in their own learning and enthusiastic about playing
• strong bucket drumming program, especially for the extracurricular group
• decent guitar program for all grades
• through understanding of the importance of technology in the classroom from working on my masters program - thesis topic "Teacher's Attitudes Towards iPad Integration in the Middle School Classroom"
• encourage collaborative relationships with other teacher's to create music assignments that connect to other curriculum strands such as art and media literacy
• engaged most classes in various music related lessons
• tried to make units and lessons relevant to what the students wanted to learn about, provided it followed the curriculum

These are some of the ideas that I struggled with in my teaching practice:

• Gender class - specifically the boys - how do I get them engaged in their learning?
• What other activities can I try with the GLD and Intensive Behaviour Class if I teach them again?
• How can I establish a better teaching team for next year when we incorporate the LTO teacher as a permanent teacher and the teacher on maternity leave returns
• What technology can I start to integrate into my teaching practice besides what I already use?

Hopefully, this provides you with a clear idea on where I was upon embarking on this journey.