Thomas J. West Music

Today, on U.S. Independence Day, I find myself pondering "independence" and "freedom" and thought I'd share a few thoughts on that. The fact of the matter is, we are born free and we remain free. Freedom is a universal truth, but we create experiences for ourselves that limit our freedom in many ways for many reasons. Consider the following:

• You don't have to have a career. Society's common thought tells you that you have to contribute to the common good, but you really don't even need to use their money to live. If you want the security and resources that being a member of society brings, then you have to fit into that mold.
• You don't have to start a family or need a mate to "complete" yourself. Societal pressure is on all of us, especially women, to raise a family.
  
• You don't have to go to college to get in a line of work that will support you. I personally know several millionaires who flunked out of school.
• You don't have to measure your success or failure against anyone else, or take anyone else's opinion of you to heart.

Many of the choices we make to limit our own freedom are done for our own sense of security. We feel safer and more valuable when we "belong" to a group. It's all about how we tell our own story and define our role in the world we perceive. When you change your story about who you are and how you fit in, interesting things begin to happen. That's what the Founding Fathers did 224 years ago when they signed the Declaration of Independence - told their story a new way.

Self-Motivation With A Purpose

Yesterday, this engaging video came across the Music PLN website from Ken Pendergrass. It is a 10-minute lecture by author Daniel Pink on the topic of his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

The main points of Pink's position are:

1. A monitary incentive structure only produces results for basic menial tasks. When tasks become more complex, large monitary rewards attached to projects actually produced less results.
2. The best results occurred when people were allowed to self-regulate their activity
3. The best results occurred when people were engaged in activities that they perceived had a valuable purpose, either to themselves or to a larger body of people

I have seen this model working amazingly well this year in several areas this past school year. The cyber charter school that I work for has a self-regulated professional development model. It provides employees with a way of structuring their own professional development under four provided domains, self-evaluate their level of proficiency in each, and then design approaches to improve in the areas they are interested in. As with most written evaluations (which are checked on by supervisors in this case), an employee can simply meet the requirements of the PD program and give it little attention, or they can really take their own development into their own hands and produce amazing results.

But by far, the area I have seen this model of self-motivation work wonders this year is in the amazing community of music educators that I first encountered on Twitter. That community is now growing into the Music Professional Learning Network (now in beta), and it is a dynamic community of people who are doing exactly what Daniel Pink has outlined: professional experts working collaboratively with a purpose for free. The energy and enthusiasm among this group is palpable, and as the website rolls out of beta and becomes available to all, amazing things are going to happen.

The Music PLN is freedom personified.

Self-Directed Creativity in the Music Classroom

One of the other things that has come to my attention through the Music PLN and #musedchat on Twitter is that public education is in serious need of innovation and re-invention. In music education, the same is true. The vast majority of U.S. public school music programs are performing machines with little or no attention made to music composition or improvisation. This emphasis on performing ensembles has continually distanced school music programs further and further away from the musical culture of the nation. School music programs, like classical music, have become their own microcosm of what is actually going on in our country. We desperately need a return to an environment where students become music creators as well as music performers and consumers.

Daniel Pink's self-motivation model, coupled with a curriculum that provides student chances to learn music by performing, improvising, and composing, is the perfect marriage that will catapult young people into a life-long love of music - their own music.

So as we celebrate this Independence Day in the U.S., I plan to create just such a curriculum for all of my students for the 2010-2011 school year. My instrumental music classes will become musician workshops where students will design their own program within a guiding structure. I can't wait to get started.

I leave you today with a little gem from my childhood in honor of the holiday:

Happy Independence Day,

This article (c) 2010 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 republishing on or offline.