DrumDojo2019's #MFLearn Blog

Looking ahead at the coming school year, I now have some incredible tools to engage my students in different ways.  I am hopeful that allowing for student-led creative music making will help to keep more students in the music programs all the way through school.  Most interesting from Mr. Humberstone's video were the stats of where we stand in the mind of kids - all of them want to do music, just not the traditional way we learned...  kind of a jolt to a teacher with 22 years under his belt.  I am going to make a goal to allow more creative assignments and opportunities that will develop composition and improvisation skills in my students, digitally and on paper, at all levels.  As a school, we have been plugging away at the traditional style of music ed - we keep a good number of students, but lose too many when they get to High School.  I see a benefit from a more creative aspect of melding styles that allows students to make music they like while learning to play and sing with

I have really enjoyed the fresh perspectives from the videos in this class.  I wanted to share my experiences with group work with music classes and also in technology classes.  My favorite way to assign groups is to choose students randomly, either by numbering off or pulling names out of a jar.  I have had great success with this method in music classes because it puts students together that may not work together very often.  One of the issues I've had with this method of assigning groups is that occasionally I will get a group of students that do not work together well.  This is where the discussion in the video changed my thinking on the value of Student Choice.  I tried this with my elementary music classes during the last week of school and had great results!  The assignment was to compose a song to accompany the reading of a poem - using the descriptive words in the poem as inspiration for the instruments the groups chose to create the music.  Students chose their groups and