Thomas J. West Music

As my regular readers are aware, I teach at a unique school. It is a performing and fine arts center that is a program offering of a K-12 cyber charter school. Pennsylvania Leadership Charter School currently has about 2,300 students statewide. They receive their education on school provided PC's using primarily Moodle, Adobe Connect for class chats, online resources, and traditional textbooks and workbooks. The Center for Performing and Fine Arts is located in West Chester, PA and serves about 200 students who commute from all over Southeast PA to attend on-site classes in music, art, drama, or dance twice a week for a full school day.

We also have 13 students this year enrolled in our Remote Access program. These students are taking instrumental music, vocal music, piano, 2D art, and photography virtually. Music students complete asynchronous (at your own pace) lessons in music theory, sight-singing, and ear training and meet with their teacher four times each marking period for a 1:1 lesson on webcam.

Twice a year, we offer the Remote Access students a chance to travel to West Chester, stay with a host family or at a hotel, and attend classes at CPFA for several days. Our winter and spring residency programs are scheduled around our two big concert weeks in the winter and spring so that Remote Access students can learn concert repertoire on their own and join us for the final dress rehearsal and concert. This is our third year offering our Remote Access students this optional opportunity, and it works brilliantly.

For next week's concerts, we will have three Remote Access students participating in the instrumental music concert and two participating in the vocal concert. The three instrumentalists include a third-year flute student and two underclassmen percussionists. The flutist will be participating in a group woodwind number with about twelve other students. The percussionists will be performing a snare duet together. All three will be involved in our final number, which is a combined middle school and high school swing version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town".

For the vocal concert, our two Remote Access students will be involved in three songs, including a very heart-warming rendition of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" with the combineed middle school and high school voice classes to end the program.

Concert-goers will not be able to tell the difference between those who learned their parts live with the teacher and those who used a combination of study mp3's and Smart Music with teacher webcam sessions. My flutist/vocalist who has been with the program since its inception is developing as a performer and musician as completely as the students I see in person twice a week. The residency gives them an opportunity to perform live as part of an ensemble aned to interact with the on-site community at CPFA. The Remote Access students are always included and welcomed with open arms by our on-site students, since many of them interact online in class chats for their other subjects.

Hybrid instruction such as this is the wave of the future. I am confident that we will see other models for on-site/online education in both the arts and in hybrid STEM academies (science, technology, engineering, math).

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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