Making Music Cooperatively: Using Cooperative Learning in Your Active Music-Making Classroom

by Carol Huffman

Overview

This guide to cooperative learning by an experienced music educator outlines how the method can lead to a happy, enthusiastic environment that benefits everyone. As author Carol Huffman explains, in the cooperative learning classroom, it is the students who become teachers of their fellow students, while the teacher becomes the facilitator of an interchange of ideas. As a result, students become more independent and responsible for their own learning, and are more capable of applying what they have learned to solve problems within the framework of the subject.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781622770106
Publisher:	Gia Publications
Publication date:	08/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Carol Huffman is an adjunct professor at Indiana University’s Jacob School of Music, where she teaches courses on early childhood and elementary general music education. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana.

Read an Excerpt

Making Music Cooperatively

Using Cooperative Learning in Your Active Music-Making Classroom

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By Carol Huffman

GIA Publications, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 GIA Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62277-010-6

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CHAPTER 1

Preparing for Success

One of the delights of cooperative learning is seeing your students become more musical, more knowledgeable, and more excited about their lessons. However, before that can happen, you as the teacher must understand how to create a cooperative learning environment, how to organize your classroom, and how to utilize strategies to promote group interaction and creativity.

Most teachers use groups in their classrooms, but this common approach to learning does not always produce good results. Elementary-age children do not inherently have the necessary cooperation, communication, skill sets, or comprehension to perform productively by themselves in groups. In my early teaching experiences, I myself mistakenly assumed that students automatically knew how to work in groups. I also made the mistake of assuming that each child possessed basic skills: the ability of each student to remember his or her assigned group, for example. I also mistakenly assumed that each student would be willing to spontaneously share his or her work within the group. This book will help you avoid some of my early mistakes and help prepare you for success.

As the teacher, you will need to create goals for your students, provide clear instructions, develop guidelines for group interaction, and monitor activities — all on top of teaching the lesson for the day. At first this can seem overwhelming, but you will discover, as I did, that students quickly see the benefits of working together. They are eager to begin working as soon as they enter the classroom, they develop group loyalty, and their enthusiasm for learning increases significantly. When each student is given an opportunity to contribute in the classroom, they never forget the feeling of accomplishment this brings. When all students expect to contribute individually during every lesson and know their contribution will be respected and valued, their delight in returning to the classroom will remain high. Even shy students will ultimately come to feel this pleasure if they feel unthreatened. But certainly, the teacher needs to reinforce all of this by teaching the students to cooperate.

Cooperative learning is a technique that uses groups or teams to problem-solve tasks to learn. It demands that the team spend adequate time together to develop a sense of community within the team. When this community atmosphere is achieved, each team member begins to experience a real feeling of shared responsibility. In order for this to occur, time spent together learning about each other is imperative. Following this achievement of communal sense, genuinely joyful music learning can be accomplished.

Ensure that the groups you assemble to learn together are truly cooperative. As Johnson and Johnson recommend: "Cooperative learning groups are characterized by positive interdependence, individual accountability, face-to-face promotive interaction, the appropriate use of interpersonal and small-group skills, and group processing. It is cooperative learning groups that promote higher achievement, more positive relationships among students, and greater psychological health."

In my teaching, I was fortunate to have a supportive staff that enabled me to develop my cooperative learning classroom with relatively few obstacles. But besides the nurturing support of staff and colleagues, a teacher may need to address other issues in a cooperative learning classroom. Once, a worried parent called me about the group in which I had placed her child. The parent was concerned about bullying. I tried to explain that cooperative learning was a teaching technique to help deal with problems such as bullying, and that her child would benefit from remaining in the particular group in which I had placed her. But the parent adamantly refused to see my point of view, and so I had to remove the student from the group and place her in another. In this situation, the bias of the parent had a direct impact on the child's learning experience. And, though the child still had a successful experience, I feel that her learning would have been deeper if she had remained in the original group. Cooperative learning can have a very positive impact on children who come from a biased home environment, because students discover that in cooperative grouping there are fewer differences between students and more similarities than they might have expected. I encourage you to give some thought about how to overcome the concerns that parents or staff may have about your cooperative learning approach. I recommend that before you begin using cooperative learning, you send a brief letter home explaining what cooperative learning is and how their student will benefit.

At first, you may need to overcome the negative opinions and (seldom repressed) comments of other staff and teachers. Since most teachers utilize groups, they may have their own bias about how effective cooperative learning can be — and especially how it can be applied to a music classroom without chaos. So prepare to be challenged at times. When someone questions you, it's your opportunity to explain cooperative learning and its tremendous benefits for both students and teachers. Use the opportunity to share with any cynics your excitement in seeing your groups work together to achieve successfully not only the day's lesson, but in seeing them build their long-term confidence and enthusiasm. When you begin, you may have some skeptics, but eventually your results will speak for themselves.

Nearby classrooms will tolerate your "chaos" when you invite the skeptical teacher into your class to hear the creative results at the end of the lesson. Teachers are more likely to support cooperative learning when they see firsthand the creative way that students solve problems and get results. Visiting teachers also will notice that students are eager to come to music class and that the principal will need to manage fewer disruptive students. My experiences have produced amazing results with students who are severely emotionally disturbed. These students become excited to attend music class, and their social skills greatly improve after participating in cooperative learning teams. Finally, I have observed that students achieve better skills when they are involved in teaching each other. The inherent healthy competition within the team and between the teams gives impetus to get better and better at the musical skill being taught. This, too, will gradually become apparent the longer you use cooperative learning.

Throughout this book, I use the term "active music making," which will be familiar to teachers using Orff-Schulwerk, Kodály, Dalcroze, and Gordon approaches. A great resource concerning these teaching approaches is the Alliance for Active Music Making website at www.allianceamm.org. This website has valuable information that can point you in the right direction for any approach to active music making. And anyone using an active music making approach other than these four will still be able to adapt cooperative learning to his or her situation or expertise. I encourage you to think continually of new ways to incorporate cooperative learning structures in your daily lessons. Without a doubt, you will not regret the time you invest to plug cooperative learning into your own active music making classroom.

CHAPTER 2

Taking Time to Settle In

What is cooperative learning? "Cooperative learning is a successful teaching strategy in which small teams, each with students of different levels of ability, use a variety of learning activities to improve their understanding of a subject. Each member of a team is responsible not only for learning what is taught but also for helping teammates learn, thus creating an atmosphere of achievement. Students work through the assignment until all group members successfully understand and complete it."

Before using cooperative learning, it is important to share the goals with your students. Discuss how cooperative learning will benefit them. My reasons for using cooperative learning begin with the fact that we live in a global economy. It is rare today that a person works alone, even if he or she works at home. Most often, people work together to get results. Our nation — and our world — is such a wonderful mixture of ethnicity and religions, and a deeper understanding of different ethnicities and religions enables us to get along better despite our differences. When social skills are honed to make people kinder and more tolerant of differences, the results of our work improve. It makes sense for a teacher to introduce students to the real world within the classroom. Certainly, we teach our specific subject matter, but why not also teach skills that will help the students deal with the real world that they will become a part of through their work and life's contributions?

It seems that, as adults, many of us are not as successful as we could be dealing with our own anger management, physical and verbal abuse, relationship connections, and co-existing with others in civil ways. In order for our students to become more skillful in these areas, they need to practice their social skills again and again. Using cooperative learning techniques while students study concepts in music class allows them to practice healthy social skills that they will use in their future lives. By mixing students into heterogeneous teams, we give each student the experience of working with other students who are different from them. A teacher should explain this before beginning the actual experience. Discussing these ideas with the whole class prepares the students for the cooperative learning experience before it actually begins. It also alleviates potential problems that might result due to differences within each team. When students are prepared to try learning and working with different kinds of students for good reasons, they are more likely to try new things.

I begin my student's cooperative learning classroom experience with a demonstration. To the entire class, I pass out pictures that are almost (if not exactly) the same. I pass out colored swatches of fabric that are exactly the same. I ask the students to note things about these items. The students find that almost every response is the same as what another student would have said. Have each student describe the picture and the color swatch to see how many different observations are said about these same things.

Now, I repeat the activity with pictures and fabric swatches that are each entirely different from one another. Using these new sets, the students' observations will be entirely different from the pictures and fabric swatches of the first observation round. Record how many different responses you get. What did the students find out about things that are the same (or almost the same) and things that are different? Explain to them that when they get into their cooperative learning teams, there will be some teammates who are similar to them and others who will be vastly different, just as with the images and fabric swatches. They may experience more ideas and participate in situations that they really never considered before because of their differences. And their experiences will be richer for these differences.

Practicing Cooperative Learning Skills

Conflict Resolution

A great way to start practicing cooperative learning skills is by teaching conflict resolution. On a piece of paper or a chalkboard, list the following tools that students can use to resolve any conflict:

• Compromise

• Voting

• Rock, paper, scissors game

• Flipping a coin

• Another idea

Then, write two rhythms that begin the same way but end in two different ways. The two rhythms should present the students with conflicting results for which they as a team need to determine one solution. Ask each team to decide on their one preferred resolution for the rhythm. In making this decision, each team can use any of your listed conflict resolution tools for its resolution.

When it is time to share the rhythms that each team chose, ask how each team resolved their conflict. Have them explain to the class the method they used to resolve their conflict and whether everyone was happy with the resolution.

Students can practice these kinds of activities over and over with different musical concepts and experiences. Finding resolutions to conflicts in a game situation teaches skills that gradually will make arguing in class a thing of the past. The students like to be able to solve problems in a quick and easy manner.

Kindness

Students find role-playing to be both fun and informative — and a good way for a teacher to demonstrate kindness. For example, whenever a student says something rude to another student, I always echo the rude remark in class. I usually exaggerate the way the student inflected their rude remark so they know my imitation was done in jest. When the students hear their teacher mimicking them being unkind, they laugh and realize what they sound like when they are rude. They learn that they must then speak more kindly to the other students. But, it is important for a teacher to be careful with this strategy, so that the students know that you are not criticizing anyone, but rather correcting their behavior.

To practice kind interaction, distribute scenarios to each team and ask them first to perform each scenario using unkind remarks, and then to repeat the same scenario using kinder remarks. For example, have the teams create a sound piece depicting a rainstorm. The piece must have a beginning, middle, and an end section. How will each student practice kindness in deciding which instruments the team will use? How long will each section of the piece be? How will the team decide, using kind words, which student will play which instrument? When each team shares its piece for the class, they also should share the kind words that the team used to get the task accomplished.

Body Language

It is important that students become aware of how body language can impact others. To demonstrate for the class, I begin with my body in a posture that shows distaste without using words. Then, I grow into angry body language without using words, and then I change so that ultimately my body language shows happiness. I ask the class to discuss with a partner nearby how they knew how I felt without using any words.

For my next demonstration, I distribute pictures depicting emotions to each team. I ask them to display the emotion in the pictures without using words. First, within each team, each team member should have a chance to depict the emotion of the picture given to the team, without words. Then, each team should take a turn all at once in front of the other teams. Have the other teams decide what emotion each team was showing with its body language.

A particularly important time to teach body language skills is when a teacher first assigns students to their new teams. Before we assign new teams, we practice showing emotions with our faces to show disappointment, anger, happiness, and neutrality. Using our faces to show how we feel can make each student feel accepted or rejected when they discover who else is in their new teams. We don't even need to use words to show these feelings. Then, we discuss which face shows the best way not to hurt anyone else's feelings during this emotional time. The students usually decide that neutrality is the best way not to offend anyone. In this way, no one else is aware whether a person is disappointed or happy when they learn who else is in their new team. The students thus learn that it is all right to have feelings about each other, but that during this important time they should keep their feelings inside so as not to hurt the feelings of other people on their team.

Getting Settled into a New Team

The first day of team assignments is exciting — it can be either joyful or disappointing for the new teammates. Before and during the time I assign the students to teams, I remind them of their body language, kindness, sharing, conflict resolution skills, appropriate listening behaviors, responsibility to work equally, the richness of their differences, the need for politeness, and their knowledge of how to get the job done. These are all things we have talked about, experienced, and practiced before I first assigned teams. Once the students are in their new teams, it is time to get to know each other before we try musical tasks together.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Making Music Cooperatively by Carol Huffman. Copyright © 2012 GIA Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of GIA Publications, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments,
Introduction,
Share with Me a Dream,
How I Got Started,
Chapter One: Preparing for Success,
Chapter Two: Taking Time to Settle In,
Chapter Three: Getting Started,
Chapter Four: Setting The Stage,
Chapter Five: Team-Building Activities,
Chapter Six: Teaching Through Modeling,
Chapter Seven: Taking Off,
Chapter Eight: Types of Cooperative Learning Structures,
Chapter Nine: Student Assessment,
Chapter Ten: Cooperative Learning Research,
Chapter Eleven: Lesson Suggestions,
Coda: A Great Act to Follow by Jenna Kirk,
Wildflower Cover,
Index,
About the Author,