Ages and stages: is that the same child I taught last year? The elementary-aged student - Pedagogy Saturday VI

American Music Teacher, Oct-Nov, 2002

Deciding where in your yard to plant is often determined by knowing where the sunlight falls. Musically, the sun and shade could be compared to the social development (music in interaction with significant others) and the support of the family or parents. Without this important source of energy and heat, nothing grows.

Color. Timing and Balance

In every landscape, there are numerous opportunities for selecting colors and for Choosing flowers for various blooming seasons.

As a teacher you are making these same aesthetic choices for color, timing and balance. In each lesson you adapt your teaching according to the individual differences of the students, often according to the learning style of the individual child.

When you teach, you select experiences for today and repertoire for long-range development, just as the gardener or landscaper chooses flowers to bloom in the spring ... to bloom in the summer, and to bloom in the fall.

And then there's balance--you can't have all tall plants or all short plants, all bushy plants or all spiky plants, all flowering and no green. Determining a balance is part of the aesthetic choices that every gardener makes.

Choose What to Plant

Shrubs? Flowers? Annuals? Perennials? A landscape artist is much like a teacher designing curriculum for music study. Selecting the core musicianship tasks is equivalent to those perennials--a staple of any garden. Shrubs are low-maintenance--once planted and carefully nurtured, they stay green and healthy with routine maintenance. I might compare them to scales and arpeggios of the musical landscape. They form a solid and stable outline for the color of the flowering plants (repertoire). The annuals might be this year's recital repertoire: learned, polished, presented and then left behind for another season.

Tending the Landscape

Every landscape needs nurturing, with water, nutrients and selective pruning; in an educational landscape, this involves motivation. What enhances motivation for young learners? Howard Gardner, in his 1999 book The Disciplined Mind, writes, "Creating an educational environment in which pleasure, stimulation, and challenge flourish is an important mission. Also, students are more likely to learn, remember and make subsequent use of those experiences with respect to which they had strong--and one hopes, positive--emotional reactions."

Gardner recommends these three ideas for enhancing motivation with children:

1. "Early pleasurable experiences of play, in which the exploration of materials and situations leads to deeper understanding"

2. A close identification with adults

3. "People may be most motivated to learn when they undertake activities for which they have some talent. It therefore behooves educators not simply to attempt to motivate students en masse but rather to identify activities that will rapidly become rewarding for a certain group of predisposed students."

This last point, a clear reference to Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, suggests the importance of individual difference, of differentiating instruction, of recognizing learning styles in our teaching strategies.