Simpedia

Robin Keehn, Washington

There is so much flexibility in the Simply Music curriculum. I think that the main things for me are to always have multiple projects going and to be consistent every week. What I mean is, if I assign some comp and improv project, I need to be sure to follow up with it the next week. If I have shown a class part of an arrangement, I need to continue with it the next week. Especially when it comes to Reading Rhythm and Reading Notes, it is critical to keep the momentum going every single week.

I think that you should plan to teach some part of a Foundation piece most weeks but you should also be teaching Comp and Improv, Arrangements and Accompaniment in Level 1. As to the list that you have copied ….I think it is great to have some guidance but I love having the freedom to decide, every week when I am planning my lessons, what I want to do next. I do not have a prescribed list of what happens when. Every group is different, my mood changes (hopefully not excessively) and anything can and will happen in class. I might decide NOT to teach the arrangement I had planned for this week–maybe we have a discussion about some piece of music and suddenly it makes more sense to do a different arrangement.

With regard to hearing the playlist, you need to build the expectation that you will NOT be hearing everyone play everything each week. Play some games–let one child start a piece and another finish it. There are other ideas in Simpedia.

The Teacher Library has some recordings on these subjects that you may find helpful….

Time management is something we all have to practice. I’ve learned that I can do my best each week and, after all, it is a process and not an event. I get better the more I do it and so will you!

Mark M., New York

Neil does have that diagram where there’s a circle in the square, and the square is the total lesson time, and the circle is time spent on the Foundation piece, and the four corners are the time you give to other streams, the message being that Foundation is supposed to get most of the time every time. Remember Pi r squared? The circle is 78.5% of your time, and the corners are each just 5.375%.

I, though, hardly ever do that. Most weeks, I certainly do cover Foundation. Some weeks, I absolutely will leave it out, if I feel there is relevant work to do on enough other streams. Even in the weeks I do Foundation, though, it doesn’t usually get the majority proportion that Neil’s diagram suggests.

Some of this has to do with my own philosophical/pedagogical preferences. There is a tremendous amount of potential to wring out of the many streams, and I think it extraordinarily valuable to give students as full and deep an experience as possible, right from the start. I do not think that blazing through the Foundation program serves that goal.

Some of this, though, goes beyond that. The rural character of my area leads me to have only so many students enrolling at a time. Then, I still teach out of my home, where both space and municipal code limit the number of students I can have in the house at the same time. All of this combines to result in me teaching very small groups. I always try to start with three, but some groups do lose someone over time and end up at two. And I do have a handful of private lessons.

Look at the sample lesson schedule in the Shared Lessons training. It outlines a 50-minute lesson, and it provides a total of 20 minutes for presenting and processing new material. Following the circle-in-the-square ratios, that would mean 15 min 42 sec for Foundation, and just 1 min 4.5 (not 45, 4 and a half) sec for each of four other streams.

Even if you’re with beginner students covering only three streams — Foundation, Arrangements/Variations, Composition/Improvisation — you still end up with barely more than two minutes for each of the non-Foundation streams. With more advanced students, adding in Accompaniment and Reading, for example, to get up to four non-Foundation streams, most of the time it would not be possible to cover a minimally appropriate dose in the 1 min 4.5 sec allotted.

Cut the lesson length for smaller lessons, to 35 or 30 or even 25 minutes for a private, and that 20 minutes total goes down quite a bit. If circle-in-the-square was less than optimal for a 50-minute lesson, it quickly becomes entirely unrealistic for shorter lessons.

In any case, I have learned to not worry about how far along my students are in any particular stream compared to what I hear some teachers occasionally say. But I have also learned that it really is important to give due attention to every stream. Wherever it shakes out for each student/group, so be it.

Gordon Harvey, Australia

I’m not sure if Mark is expecting the circle-in-a-square diagram to be a proper mathematical representation of the time that should be apportioned to each component of the program, but I’d have to say that for me the circle is too big a proportion of the square, that is, the diagram over-represents the Foundation program and under-represents everything else. Over the years (and it’s been several years since Neil produced that diagram) I’ve spent less time on Foundation pieces and more on others, including the occasional lesson where I don’t teach a Foundation project (especially at later levels). I suspect Neil would agree that his diagram is simply meant to represent the principle that the Foundation program is at the core of the SM curriculum.

Here’s a proposal: how about we replace the square with a six-pointed star? What each point represents will vary according to where a class is at, but given that this is a discussion about time management in class, it should include everything you may cover in a class. For argument’s sake, they might be: Arrangements, Accompaniments, Comp & Imp, Review of last week, Playlist management, and Musicality and Expression. I just drew for myself a six-pointed star by laying two triangles over each other and drawing a circle inside the hexagon formed in the middle. I like the size that represented for the Foundation program.

I haven’t shown that diagram to Neil, but I suspect he’d be okay with it. Anyway, we could argue about what’s the best way to represent time proportions, but my experience is that it’s very easy to over-represent the Foundation program in a time sense. If you’ve trained your students well to use the SHM’s, you’ll need minimal repetition of new Foundation projects in class because they can so clearly reconstruct them at home. The main thing to remember is that, even if the Foundation program forms the core of our curriculum, no other component is less important. Commonsense and experience will be your best guide.

Sheri R., California

I simply ask students, “who remembers Night Arr. 1” and each student will say, I never learned it, or I forgot the second verse, or I know it well, or whatever. And then we go from there. I don’t keep formal track, it’s just looser and it works for me because even if everyone learned it doesn’t mean it’s time to go on because maybe some have forgotten. In which case, the students who know do the teaching and I might also teach something new that week. It’s all very in the moment for me–I like the flexibility of that.

I keep track mainly by taking a student’s notesbook and looking at the previous week’s homework. I base the content of the lesson on how the previous week’s lesson was processed.

Elaine F., South Carolina

I know we all need varying levels of detail re our lesson planning, to help us feel comfortable and confident in the lesson. That said, I have to acknowledge that sometimes I spend more time worrying about the forms and records I keep than my own playing and professional development. The pieces of paper are sometimes so much less challenging than mastering a new set of training materials.