Student/Teacher Perspective Reflection
Going through this experience, I found some interesting connections between both the student and teacher interviews. Like I said before, I interviewed my high school vocals teacher, Mr. Fraser who positively influenced me and was one of the reasons I wanted to continue into music. For my student interview I talked to Joel, a current grade 11 student at my old high school. Before I go into comparing the two interviews, I would like to point out that Joel is a very good musician, playing the piano since he was four and playing the trumpet since grade 6. He currently is White Oaks’ co-chair for the music council and is in charge of our student ran brass ensemble. He is a student that loves classical and jazz music so the current focus of teaching has worked for him. This interview will only show one perspective in a student experience that is very broad.
The first thing I noticed is both of their perspectives on students with different playing/singing levels. In Fraser’s interview he mentioned how he likes basing his vocal classes mostly on a personal growth criteria so people with less experience won’t automatically have a bad mark compared to the experienced singers. This type of marking and way of teaching was not seen in Joel’s grade 9 experience for instrumental music. In his class since he was already an experienced trumpet player, his playing hit a stalemate. In order to challenge himself in the class he actually changed instruments and played the French Horn for the class and he could still sight read the summative. Joel told me how he was almost turned off by the music program and it was only his experience in extracurriculars that made hime stay. This shows the importance in having at least a portion of the marks being based on a growth mindset in order to keep students, experienced or not, interested in music.
Another thing that caught my eye was both of their perspectives on nationals. In both cases they thought that winning gold at nationals shouldn’t be the end goal of every school year. At WOSS there is a long standing tradition of going to nationals when they are in Ontario, however, both Joel and Fraser didn’t think we should have our focus there. In Fraser’s perspective, he thought that if a a choir starts excluding people in order to win gold, the teacher doesn’t get the point to what music education is about. He continues:
“It is so easy to get caught up in ego [but] you have to throw it out the door, it doesn’t matter how many gold plaques from
music fest you have on the wall. I always try to stress to the group that it doesn’t matter what the result was, it mattered how we felt about the performance and if we got the result, great. So I just think you can’t get trapped in the music fest win gold mantra and start letting that skew the way you should approach inclusion and all students having a place.”
In Joel’s perspective he thinks that the workshops we get at nationals aren’t worth it because of the time crunch and the fact that it is very piece driven; if they never play that piece again then the ensemble doesn’t get much out of it. These are two different reasons as to why nationals shouldn’t be the main goal of the year. Both of them thought that there should be more of a focus on performance and not the actual competition.
Finally, I noticed how Joel’s perspective on the challenges changed after he became the head of the brass ensemble. He said how he didn’t notice how much work and effort is put outside of rehearsal ignorer for the rehearsal to run smoothly. He also stated how he now appreciates the skill it takes in order to lead a big group of people from sight reading a piece to performance. This just made me happy because in Fraser’s interview he kept talking about how much work is put into teaching that students rarely realize so I’m glad at least a few students appreciate it.
Overall, do to Joel being an active member in the music council I think that they both had a very similar perspective on music education.
Student Interviews
Going through this experience, I found some interesting connections between both the student and teacher interviews. Like I said before, I interviewed my high school vocals teacher, Mr. Fraser who positively influenced me and was one of the reasons I wanted to continue into music. For my student interview I talked to Joel, a current grade 11 student at my old high school. Before I go into comparing the two interviews, I would like to point out that Joel is a very good musician, playing the piano since he was four and playing the trumpet since grade 6. He currently is White Oaks’ co-chair for the music council and is in charge of our student ran brass ensemble. He is a student that loves classical and jazz music so the current focus of teaching has worked for him. This interview will only show one perspective in a student experience that is very broad.
The first thing I noticed is both of their perspectives on students with different playing/singing levels. In Fraser’s interview he mentioned how he likes basing his vocal classes mostly on a personal growth criteria so people with less experience won’t automatically have a bad mark compared to the experienced singers. This type of marking and way of teaching was not seen in Joel’s grade 9 experience for instrumental music. In his class since he was already an experienced trumpet player, his playing hit a stalemate. In order to challenge himself in the class he actually changed instruments and played the French Horn for the class and he could still sight read the summative. Joel told me how he was almost turned off by the music program and it was only his experience in extracurriculars that made hime stay. This shows the importance in having at least a portion of the marks being based on a growth mindset in order to keep students, experienced or not, interested in music.
Another thing that caught my eye was both of their perspectives on nationals. In both cases they thought that winning gold at nationals shouldn’t be the end goal of every school year. At WOSS there is a long standing tradition of going to nationals when they are in Ontario, however, both Joel and Fraser didn’t think we should have our focus there. In Fraser’s perspective, he thought that if a a choir starts excluding people in order to win gold, the teacher doesn’t get the point to what music education is about. He continues:
“It is so easy to get caught up in ego [but] you have to throw it out the door, it doesn’t matter how many gold plaques from
music fest you have on the wall. I always try to stress to the group that it doesn’t matter what the result was, it mattered how we felt about the performance and if we got the result, great. So I just think you can’t get trapped in the music fest win gold mantra and start letting that skew the way you should approach inclusion and all students having a place.”
In Joel’s perspective he thinks that the workshops we get at nationals aren’t worth it because of the time crunch and the fact that it is very piece driven; if they never play that piece again then the ensemble doesn’t get much out of it. These are two different reasons as to why nationals shouldn’t be the main goal of the year. Both of them thought that there should be more of a focus on performance and not the actual competition.
Finally, I noticed how Joel’s perspective on the challenges changed after he became the head of the brass ensemble. He said how he didn’t notice how much work and effort is put outside of rehearsal ignorer for the rehearsal to run smoothly. He also stated how he now appreciates the skill it takes in order to lead a big group of people from sight reading a piece to performance. This just made me happy because in Fraser’s interview he kept talking about how much work is put into teaching that students rarely realize so I’m glad at least a few students appreciate it.
Overall, do to Joel being an active member in the music council I think that they both had a very similar perspective on music education.
Student Interviews
Mr. Fraser’s Interview
For my teacher interview I decided to interview my high school vocals teacher, Mr. Fraser. Mr. Fraser, for me, was one of those teachers that I know will effect how I want to teach my classroom in the future and is one of the reasons I want to go into music education. Mr. Fraser was a low brass education major at Western and had to quickly learn how to conduct and teach vocals. Mr. Fraser came to White Oaks Secondary School in my grade 10 year and came into a vocal program that wasn’t in good shape. Before he came there was maybe 18 people in the choir and there wasn’t any fluency or common goals. There also wasn’t a level of respect given to the choir by the rest of the music program and the choir didn’t have a say in what happened to the music program. By the time I left high school in grade 12, there was around 60 members in the main choir, it had a similar amount of respect to the instrumental program, and had a lot of students that did both choir and band, giving the music program a feeling of family with no divide. Additionally, Mr. Fraser gave me multiple opportunities to develop my leadership skills, whether that was leading vocal warmups, running sectionals and even conducting a piece at the end concert.
Going into this interview, I thought I knew quite a bit about Fraser’s philosophies about teaching, due to my long conversations with him during high school. However, I feel like I learned quite a lot about how it has changed over the years. To start off, I asked him a very open ended question about his feelings about teaching. In response, he said how it was very rewarding but a lot of work. Through out the interview I learned about his evolving philosophies, his thoughts on lecture style teaching, what he loves, dislikes and finds challenging. Some of the most surprising things I learned was his stance on the ‘old traditional’ style of teaching which he called the sage on the stage earlier. He said:
“White Oaks has a very traditional approach to music education, and when I became a teacher I
thought I was going to reinvent the wheel and everything was going to be different. But I saw
that what we have at White Oaks works really well and the kids really like it and they buy into it
and its very engaging. So I guess I would say a couple of things, the first thing is that… we run
our classes…where it is very teacher focused, where you have that conductor at the front of the
room, everyone else is very quiet and getting information… That kind of went against everything
I was taught with the new age thinking about education, but then when you get in and hear and
see how engaged the students are, you see how much they enjoy the concert band and the level
they perform at and the choir. I am less and less convinced that [this style of teaching is] a bad
thing.”
This quotation made me really think. Because on one side I see how this is kind of going against what we are learning in our class but I totally see where he is coming from. Even I, as a student, understand that there is a time and place for the teacher to be standing at the front and sometimes there just isn’t enough time in a school year to do everything with a new twist. This is to say that Fraser’s class was also the most creative and personalized course I took in all of high school; so he definitely isn’t just a lecture style teacher. This was mainly seen in a project we did every year called the passion project. In this project, every single person in the class gets to go a project on something they have always wanted to do in music. We get marked on our progress and not the final project and it gives a chance for people to grow as musicians how they want to. For example, I decided that I wanted to write a choral arrangement while another student did a beatbox arrangement on garage band. This quote as well as other parts of the interview also showed me on how much trial and error there is in teaching and how your great revolutionary idea to reinvent the classroom could flop with the group of students you are teaching. However, his point hit home for me in this next quotation where he continues:
“If you are taking this modern approach… you have these ideas and I got those ideas from the
course I took, Honours Specialists, and I came and I applied them and I found that kids really
like that kind of stuff but not if you do them all the time. So they like to do it and they like to do
those cool activities but they don’t like to do them every day or else they will get bored of the
drums and those activities”
I one hundred percent believe in what he is saying here. The more I learn from this interview and the reading in class, the more I understand the need for balance between different activities and the need for diversity in our teaching. Looking at how he taught me, I realized how many different techniques he has tried on us in order to get the most amount of people engaged and involved. This can be further seen when Fraser continues to explain his opinions on marking. He explains how there are three different ways to evaluate students: normative peer based, fixed criteria, or personal improvement. Although fixed criteria is most commonly used in other courses, vocal music is different because there isn’t a prerequisite so someone can go into grade 12 vocals with around a grade 9 sight singing ability. Having this difference in ability causes the need for another way to mark. He continues:
My philosophy comes from a slightly different place. I think that personal growth is extremely
important and I think that music is a subject that not everyone is going to study at university and
you have to realize that and music should be about helping everyone progress and grow and it's
not necessarily having everyone write their grade 3 rudiments exam in your grade 12 class or
have everyone sing German Lieder. So you allow people to explore different genres and styles
and have people sing at different abilities and you help everyone grow. That is my philosophy,
you are going to find this out if you haven’t already, that there is no consensus in education and
their is no consensus in music education.
In this quotation Fraser wraps together why diversity is so important. It is also important to realize that all the kids in your class already love music so it isn’t our job to make them all classically trained professionals but to grow their love and appreciation for music and give them new ways for them to express themselves. As a student who actually continued on in university I also felt his class helped me, even though I didn’t classical sing in it, for some major parts of University. Throughout the years I became much better at sight singing, learned solfege and learned different ways to approach a piece in order to get a whole ensemble to understand its meaning. Somehow Mr. Fraser figured out a pretty good model on how to keep a class challenging while having thirty students at different levels participating in his class.
Overall, I took a lot out of this interview and I have gotten further respect from my high school vocal teacher. I have learned how much thought and effort is put into every lesson, worksheet, rehearsal and project and I am even more excited for the challenges that will face me once I hopefully get into the classroom.
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Other Quotes from the Interview
"Concert choir, everyone is welcome, I have never turned away someone from concert choir regardless of their ability or their strengths or weaknesses as an individual learner so we have had individuals and we do have individuals in the ensembles that might have their own strengths and weaknesses but everyone is included"
"It is so easy to get caught up in ego and you have to throw it out the door, it doesn’t matter how many gold plaques from music fest you have on the wall, I always try to stress to the group that it doesn’t matter what the result was, it mattered how we felt about the performance and if we got the result, great. So I just think you can’t get trapped in the music fest win gold mantra and start letting that skew the way you should approach inclusion and all students having a place."
"So one of the things that comes down to your philosophy is, is the purpose of your choir, is it to go to festivals, compete, and win gold. if it is I would argue that you are missing the point of music education. If you manage to do that anyways, great. But, I don’t think that should be the goal of the program, I think that if your philosophy is to exclude students because you are not going to be known as the conductor that always gets gold at music fest then I think your philosophy is mistaken"
"I really really enjoy that and you will find out, you know this probably already, but music kids are amazing, they are a very small subset of the student population but they want to be there, they choose to be there and then the students who extra curricular display another level of involvement and dedication where they want to be there so you tend to get really amazing students who are extremely passionate and by into what they are doing. So you work with great great students and I guess as a music teacher, you get to see them grow 9,10,11,12 if you are a math teacher you see them in grade 10 math and thats it. So you I get to work with these students through 4 years which is awesome."
"Concert choir, everyone is welcome, I have never turned away someone from concert choir regardless of their ability or their strengths or weaknesses as an individual learner so we have had individuals and we do have individuals in the ensembles that might have their own strengths and weaknesses but everyone is included"
"It is so easy to get caught up in ego and you have to throw it out the door, it doesn’t matter how many gold plaques from music fest you have on the wall, I always try to stress to the group that it doesn’t matter what the result was, it mattered how we felt about the performance and if we got the result, great. So I just think you can’t get trapped in the music fest win gold mantra and start letting that skew the way you should approach inclusion and all students having a place."
"So one of the things that comes down to your philosophy is, is the purpose of your choir, is it to go to festivals, compete, and win gold. if it is I would argue that you are missing the point of music education. If you manage to do that anyways, great. But, I don’t think that should be the goal of the program, I think that if your philosophy is to exclude students because you are not going to be known as the conductor that always gets gold at music fest then I think your philosophy is mistaken"
"I really really enjoy that and you will find out, you know this probably already, but music kids are amazing, they are a very small subset of the student population but they want to be there, they choose to be there and then the students who extra curricular display another level of involvement and dedication where they want to be there so you tend to get really amazing students who are extremely passionate and by into what they are doing. So you work with great great students and I guess as a music teacher, you get to see them grow 9,10,11,12 if you are a math teacher you see them in grade 10 math and thats it. So you I get to work with these students through 4 years which is awesome."
Unenthusiastic Teaching Example
In this clip from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the teacher is excruciatingly boring. Although it is it hilarious to watch in a movie, the students in this movie are missing out in a good education. First of all, the teacher does nothing to engage the students. Even though lecture style teaching is the standard for high school and up, there is nothing the educator is doing to engage the students. He does not have inflection in his voice which makes it very easy to zone out. Furthermore, by him saying “anyone, anyone?”, there is no fluency in his teaching, making it hard to follow as a student. He then continues almost immediately after posing his question, not giving time for students to answer. Additionally, the questions he asked were only knowledge based and did not use the students critical thinking at all. For these reasons, this teacher doesn’t have the ability to obtain the students attention and isn’t stimulating. By looking at this clip you can tell that there is no passion in this teacher and that he doesn’t have the technique to teach his students hindering them from succeeding. This clip shows the issues in having a teacher with no passion and how it can turn students away from a subject they may have previously liked.
Teaching in Action Example
Teaching in Action Example
This is a sample lesson from an elementary school music teacher. In this clip the teacher is teaching the kids a hand game that can help with there ability to keep time, sing something different than what there hands are doing and body co-ordination. I thought that this was an effective lesson because it wasn’t just a teacher talking to students, this lesson gave a chance for students to get out energy and be engaged. I also thought that this was an effective example because the teacher gave a step by step buildable lesson, slowly added the next step when the students were ready. She started with just the hand game with a partner, then made the students switch partners and finally add the song to go along with the hand game. I found this very helpful. Finally, when the teacher finished going through all the steps she asked the students “talk to your partners, what did you struggle with?”. This is a way for students to realize what they have to work on and makes them start talking about elements of music even if they don’t know they are learning about it. Overall, I found this example effective in keeping the kids engaged and let them learn by doing.