Thomas J. West Music

This is the final post in a series. View the other entries here.

It's been a few exhausting days since the spring concert occurred, and I can officially declare the Experiment in Excellence a success. The spring concert was by far the highest quality performing across the board from every class and every grade level. Nearly every student rose to the occasion - not only the night of the concert, but in meeting the accountability challenges that I set forth for them throughout the third marking period.

Accountability That Works

After a winter concert that was of passable quality (at least in my mind - most everyone else seemed to think it was great), I knew that I needed to up the ante for my middle school students for the spring. I have tried several different forms of accountability in the past - from practice journals to recording assessments using Smart Music, Both of these methods worked well for what they were intended for - the journals were to help students learn how to practice effectively, not hold them accountable, and I have used Smart Music to test scale and rhythm proficiency, not as much for concert parts - mostly for logistical reasons.

I have not attempted to establish a chair challenge system. There are many reasons for this. First of all, philosophically it is counter-productive. The higher aptitude students tend to develop an ego as they duel each other for a chair, and the lower aptitude students know they can't compete, so they don't try. Also, my ensembles are far too small for a chair challenge system to work. When you only have two clarinetists, what's the point of challenging for chairs? Better to give them both a turn to play first parts.

The music check-off system was, as Bernstein wrote, "the best of all possible worlds". First, it created a relatively low-stress situation. Students could check-off music playing in small groups rather than alone and had as many opportunities as they needed to get it done up until the final deadline of one week before the concert. Check-off opportunities also helped them spread out their preparation over the entire preparation period, avoiding "cramming for the test".

The check-offs were particularly effective for my middle school strings students because of the nature of the repertoire they were performing. My beginner strings were given a series of three songs from the Suzuki method book one to memorize. When they checked-off the first song, they received a copy of the second to begin working on. All players were required to master and perform at least one song for the spring concert. While not true Suzuki in that the students read the notation, they definititely benefitted from working in this way and exceeded all my expectations. One of my older beginners actually learned all three of the beginner level songs and then went on to learn song one of the advanced students' songs.

For the ensemble pieces, check-offs were done by rehearsal number. Students could check off measures 1 to 18, 19 to 28, 29 to 37, etc. If they did not get that part checked off, they had to refrain from playing it in the concert.  The end result was that nearly all of the students reached a higher level of proficiency on all music. The only ones who didn't were the ones who put minimal effort into it, but they were in a negligable minority.

The music check-off system also gave the students something that simply playing in an ensemble by itself struggles to do - it gave them a sense of personal accomplishment. Students took pride in checking things off and feeling prepared.

The Other Ingredient - Repertoire Selection

There is no question that repertoire selection is one of the single most important set of decisions that a public school performing ensemble teacher has to make. Your students learn about whatever your repertoire contains. I wrote an extended article on my philosophy of repertoire selection that discusses the things I look for.

In addition to those things, the technical difficulty level of the repertoire is crucial. Finding pieces that are challenging enough to help students improve their technical skill without being insurmountable can be difficult. Add on top of that the fact that my 30-piece chamber orchestra has fifth grade beginners in the same ensemble with Suzuki strings who have been playing since age three and my senior cellist who has gone to the PMEA Region Orchestra Festival the past two years.

In the past, I had programmed a grade 2.5 or grade 3 piece for this group and simply rewritten parts for the beginners, watering them down as needed. While this does work from a musical standpoint to create the illusion that all of the students are playing the more technical aspects of the piece, my beginner students lack the ensemble experience to play any kind of polyphony. Even thought the beginners are playing a watered down rhythm that is superimposed on top of the full rhtyhm, they still struggle to play it accurately because they want to copy the older, more experienced students.

The answer to this challenge was in repertoire selection. This spring, we only did one piece with the fully combined 30-piece orchestra: the grade 1.5 Myers arrangement of Sibelius's Finlandia. This piece was achievable for my younger players and sight-readable for my high school students. With the music check-off system in place, it was still challenging for my beginners but not insurmountable.

The second ensemble piece we performed was the excellent setting of Irish folk music by Deborah Baker-Monday entitled For the Star of County Down (The Gallagher Gal). It is a grade 2.5 piece that is a perfect challenge for my advanced middle school students, who make up the majority of my strings section. They, along with the high school strings, played this piece together as our concert closer. The students absolutely adored playing this piece and it was a smashing success.

In addition to these two large ensemble pieces, the middle school strings performed the set of Suzuki songs from memory with piano accompaniment, the middle school wind instruments performed trios and quartets that I wrote for them, and my high school students played original solos with piano accompaniment that they wrote themselves, plus my top students performed a movement of a great Romantic era piano trio. Our senior cellist performed the second movement of the Haydn Cello Concerto Number 1 in C Major just before the closing large ensemble pieces.

The performances were not flawless. If I were scoring them as an adjudicator, they would have scored between an 85 and a 95 depending on the group. However, the performances are noticably improved from the winter concert, which I would score a good 10 points lower across the board. Quantifying the performances is not the point, however. The increase in quality has given the students a sense of accomplishment, increased the notoriety of our instrumental program among the parents and other staff members, and most importantly has resulted in students growing in both their love of music and their personal work ethic.

I intend to continue to use music check-offs to motivate and control the pacing of music proficiency among my middle school students. As the high school program continues to grow, I will use a less-structured approach to accountability along the same lines.

From now until the end of the school year, students are completing tonal and rhythm literacy assignments on Smart Music as well as composing their own instrumental solos and small ensembles. More on this in a future post. Thanks for following my journey this past few months. If you have any questions or comments, please contact me.

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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