Reading: Profiles in Successful Group Piano for Children: A Collective Case Study of Children’s Group-Piano Lessons

Pike, P. D. (2013). Profiles in Successful Group Piano for Children: A Collective Case Study of Children’s Group-Piano Lessons. Music Education Research, 15(1), 92-106.

From literature overview I get a confirmation that indeed, piano group lessons are very common in the States:

“Teaching adult piano students in groups is quite common throughout North America, particularly at colleges and universities where music majors, who are not pianists, enrol in group piano and theory concurrently. Typically, these students learn as much in 16 weeks as a child enrolled in private piano lessons for two years (Lyke 1996), /…/ Numerous articles have been written on the subject and many benefits of teaching beginning piano to adults using the group instructional approach have been documented (Enoch 1974; Fisher 2010). For children, inclusion of piano classes in public school curricula in the United States began in the early decades of the twentieth century. Historic class methods, materials and teacher instructional materials are the primary source of information about early group-piano endeavours in the United States.”
Further reading: Fisher, C. 2010. Teaching piano in groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Participants:
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 Materials for the group A:
  • The Music Tree: Time to Begin (Clark, Goss, and Holland 2000a),
  • The Music Tree: Writing (Clark, Goss, and Holland 2000b),
  • Alfred’s Premier Piano Performance book 1A (Alexander et al. 2005),
  • Alfred’s Ensemble book 1 (Kowalchyk and Lancaster 1994) and
  • Hal Leonard Ensemble level 1
“Activities included off-bench activities, group dictation at the whiteboard, group rhythm and movement exercises, group discovery at the keyboard, numerous ensemble experiences, performance, sight playing, technique, ear training, improvisation and critical listening activities. There was a balance between playing aloud with the group and playing over headphones, with the instructor being heard through headphones. This allowed students to compare themselves with the ideal performance of the music. Some MIDI accompaniments were used with solo repertoire performance to help students internalise the pulse.”
Everyone on group A were at the same level.
Materials for group B:
  • Piano Adventures level 1A or 1B (Faber and Faber 2011),
  • Theory Gymnastics: Animato (Zisette, Zundel, and Lloyd 2009),
  • Piano Adventures: Christmas book (Faber and Faber 1996) and
  • Hal Leonard Ensemble level 1 (Keveren 1996)
Two distinct levels in this group although everyone on their second year.
“When the teacher worked on technique, sight playing and repertoire, she divided the class into two groups (according to skill level). While one group worked together at the acoustic piano, the second group completed written

theory exercises or worked independently on digital keyboards. Ear training, games with manipulatives, and ensemble repertoire were experienced together as a larger group.”
Group C:
  • Hal Leonard Lesson, Theory, and Technique books, levels 4 and 5 (Keveren et al. 1996).
  • Each girl had a different repertoire book, various individual pieces of sheet music and
  • Hal Leonard Ensemble (Keveren 1996)

“When the students played individually, all of the girls gathered around the piano, spotting problems, assessing performance, offering helpful advice and supporting their peers. The students who were not quite as advanced were learning about what they would be doing soon and about upcoming technical requirements. There was a lot of discovery learning occurring during this portion of the lesson.”

Motivation ideas: ‘Technique Olympics’ at the end of the semester, ‘Music money':

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Group D:

  • Hal Leonard Lesson, Theory, and Technique books, levels 4 and 5 (Keveren et al. 1996)
  • Each student had a different repertoire book
“The in-class activities were more varied and included improvisation, composition, ear training, theory, performance, active listening and even general musicianship through games. /…/ Each of the students performed solo repertoire for 9 to 12 minutes of class time. Students in this class availed of performance with MIDI accompaniments. Each student heard a variety of repertoire throughout the lesson.”

 

Reading: Fogg. BJ, A Behavior Model For Persuasive Design

Persuasive ’09, Apr 26-29, Claremont, CA. www.behaviormodel.org

Main point

Fogg Behavior Model (FBM) says that behavior is a product of three factors: motivation, ability and trigger. These have to be present in the same moment.

The combination of motivation and ability defines the likeliness a person is to behave in a desired way. It is possible that if one of the factors is too low then the other can compensate it but most common case is that they are not at extremes.

Trigger has to occur on time. Timing can often be the missing element.

Elements of motivation:

  • Pleasure/Pain
  • Hope/Fear
  • Social Acceptance/Rejection

Elements of simplicity (ability=simplicity because people don’t want to learn to increase their ability)

  • Time
  • Money
  • Physical effort
  • Brain Cycles (need to think)
  • Social deviance (am I “normal”?)
  • Non-routine (people like routine)

Types of triggers

  • Sparks (boosts motivation, can be annoying)
  • Facilitator (says that “your ability is enough for this”)
  • Signal (reminder, traffic light)

Triggers are more important than ever because in electronic world it is possible to act immidately.

FBM can also be used to prevent behavior but it is more difficult to do.

 

Reading: Chi, T., H., Active-Constructive-Interactive: A Conceptual Framework for Differentiating Learning Activities

Topics in Cognitive Science I (2009)

Main point:

Active, constructive and interactive are commonly used terms in the cognitive and learning sciences. But the definitions are not always clear except for constructive. This article provides a framework and proposes a way to differentiate those terms.

From best to worst: Interactive>constructive>active>(passive)

Interactive often describes a system rather than the interactions between a learner and a system. In this article active, constructive and interactive are viewed as types of overt learning activities (from learner’s side).

Taxonomy

Being active is doing something while learning (often involving physical movements). Examples:

  • steering and peddling a stationary bike while traveling through virtual environment
  • looking and searching some specific locations on a chessboard
  • pointing and gesturing at what one is reading or solving
  • copying and pasting some parts of a text
  • repeating sentences verbatim
  • manipulating video tapes (pausing and rewinding etc)
  • rotating objects
  • selecting from a menu of choices

Note: in memory literature repeating words is a passive learning strategy but in this taxonomy it is active

Being constructive is another set of overt activities that cause learners to produce additional output that can contain new relevant ideas that were not in the initial material. Being constructive includes being active. Examples:

  • self-explaining
  • drawing a concept map
  • taking notes
  • asking questions
  • posing problems
  • comparing cases
  • making plans
  • integrating text and diagram
  • reflecting and monitoring own understanding
  • inducing hypotheses
  • constructing timelines (history)

Being interactive is having a dialogue with a human or a machine. Not all dialogues are interactive. Dialogues that are interactive:

  • instructional dialogues with an expert (teacher)
  • joint dialogues with a peer

CLT and this framework are different but can complement each other: CLT can always reduce memory load whether the learning is active, constructive or interactive.

Using FB to Identify Gender

I have a large database (11 000 names) and needed to identify people’s gender by the name. Most of the time it is very easy but there are some uncommon names that can belong to a male or a female person.

That’s when I used Google and Facebook. The latter helped most of the time. There are about 400 000 FB users in Estonia. Pop of the country is 1.3 M, so pretty representative sample that FB has :)

1. Issue/problem of my case study

Beginning to fill the caps of the key choices of a case study as pointed out in Hamilton, L. (2011) Case studies in educational research, British Educational Research Association on-line resource.

The problem

We struggle to design better multimedia study materials using all contemporary learning theories. We evaluate the materials in laboratory settings. On the other hand we claim that the new study materials make education more accessible. It means that we expect people to be able to learn whoever they are or wherever they live. ‘Wherever’ means outside of lab, out of our control and sight.

Do we know how do they use our materials out there? Do they care if we have presented the information in a smart mixture by addressing different channels (Trying not to overload the learner’s cognitive capacities) or do they still learn while watching TV, keeping the FB chat window open or having other irrelevant noise around?

On the other hand, companies that create multimedia (learning) games know that the more blinking and flashing they can come up with, the easier it is to sell. OK, one thing is to sell something – I have also sold thousands of guitar method books – but the other thing is to get people to learn. Do those people who actually learn, appreciate the effective designs or is it just the information they care about?

Many people start online courses but only some of them gain results. Who are these people?

I have about 230 people who succeeded to learn some guitar using my multimedia study materials. They started from scratch and ended up actually playing something and even recording it. It means that they had everything that it takes to do it: a computer, the internet connection, possibility to record audio, a guitar and some free time. Is there anything else they have in common? Well, 68% of them are male and only 32% are female.