Philosophy

A Personal Story

At an early October instrumental music department in-service meeting, I sat and listened to the music supervisor for my school district explain reciprocal teaching—an approach the district administration had mandated be applied in all subject areas. She explained that reciprocal teaching was a set of teaching techniques designed for students in language literacy classes to make meaning of the texts they were reading. There were four components: questioning, predicting, clarifying, and summarizing. The “reciprocal” aspect of the strategy stemmed from both teachers and their students posing and solving problems together by cycling through the four different techniques. The school district was implementing reciprocal teaching into all subject curriculums and music was not exempt. To help us apply reciprocal teaching to our own music classes and ensemble rehearsals, the supervisor distributed a chapter from a reading strategy book on the use of reciprocal teaching.

I read the chapter and was intrigued with the idea, not because the district thought it was important, but because I was already experimenting with a student-centered approach in my ensemble rehearsals. As the teachers in the room moaned and groaned over how they would incorporate a reading strategy into their rehearsals, I re-read the chapter. I decided to cross out the word “reading” and replace it with “music.” I re-read the chapter a third time and it made complete sense. Reciprocal teaching seemed applicable to the ways I envisioned a student-centered approach to teaching in my large instrumental ensembles.

 

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Reciprocal Teaching in Music Teaching and Learning​
I believe that students engage in musical activities inside and outside of school as listeners, composers or improvisers, and performers. Whatever the musical activity, they become members of a special community of practice. Such communities, situated in their own unique contexts or cultural capitals, shape the student’s identity, foster their personal agency, change the ways that they see themselves in the world, and add value to their lives. Reciprocal teaching, that is the asking and answering of questions, clarifying and summarizing ideas, predicting musical events, and constructing connections among and between each strategy, fosters musical understanding.​

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A Personal Vision​
Vygotsky (social constructivism), Lave and Wenger (communities of practice), and Palinscar and Brown (reciprocal teaching) influence my personal vision of music learning and music teaching. I believe that music students and their music teachers, in partnership with each other, construct individual and collaborative musical understandings resulting in multiple perspectives of musical concepts or events. I believe that the music classroom and the rehearsal hall are laboratories for musical imagination, where students can serve in an apprenticeship with master music teachers who can facilitate their personal musical growth and nurture their musicianship. Music teachers also grow in those laboratories and through those collaborations. For me, music learning is a valued opportunity to build contextually meaningful musical experiences for students and their teachers that are authentic as well as holistic and transform ordinary practices into reflective practice.​

Transforming Music Teaching and Music Learning with Ideas from Reciprocal Teaching

That school in-service session inspired me to implement reciprocal teaching into my ensemble rehearsals. Rehearsals transformed from teacher-directed to student-centered through predicting, questioning, clarifying, and summarizing. Students became engaged in learning with their peers and from me. Depending on the questions posed, our roles shifted. Sometimes they learned from me, while at other times I learned from them. The experiences in rehearsals centered on solving musical problems as a group where learning became a social-contextual holistic process. My role in the rehearsals became one of facilitator allowing students to think independently. It was not easy, as I had to relinquish control and transfer responsibility for learning to the students.

As a teacher-researcher, I decided to investigate the impact of reciprocal teaching on musical understanding through an action research. I wanted to assess the efficacy of reciprocal teaching to know if the success of my ensembles was truly due to the ways reciprocal teaching facilitated musical understanding. The study involved using reciprocal teaching with my string orchestra and an auditioned high school choral ensemble from New Jersey. Specifically, I wanted to see if reciprocal teaching fostered musical understanding in high school performing ensembles. During the course of the study, each conductor infused reciprocal teaching into the rehearsal process through dialoguing, graphic organizers, and cross-curricular activities. Students in each ensemble reflected on their experiences in structured journal writing and I videotaped each rehearsal. Analysis of the data confirmed that incorporating the elements of reciprocal teaching into the rehearsal experience fostered the abilities of students to learn music easier and faster, that the role of the teacher and student were in constant flux, and that students were continually searching for and making connections to prior musical knowledge as scaffolds to construct new knowledge.

As my style of teaching changed and my understanding of reciprocal teaching grew, I became a more constructivist educator. Looking for ways to bring multiple perspectives to my students, I respect and acknowledge the varying degrees of knowledge that students bring to the rehearsal, and on multiple occasions, I revisit ideas based on the viewpoints of my students.