Using language as our metaphor for understanding the art of music, we will gain a bird’s eye view of the materials and pedagogy of a K-12 music program. We will lay the groundwork for our pedagogy by discussing the biblical and human foundations for music literacy and what to expect each level of student to be capable of before moving on to the next level. We will then explore the primary pedagogical principles of each level of skills acquisition and some of the primary pedagogical tools used as a result. This lesson will focus our attention for the work we will do in the upcoming workshops.

In this workshop participants will toggle between acting in the capacity of grammar students and music teachers. We will begin by analyzing two folk songs together to discover their best pedagogical uses for teaching rhythms and pitches. We will first learn the song by rote to get ideas for teaching new songs to grammar students.  We will then look at the sheet music together. Once we have analyzed the song, we will work through the process of teaching a new concept from the music and then practicing the new concept (preparation, making conscious, and practice). Once we have workshopped a new concept together participants will have the opportunity to teach a mini-lesson on the other song either on the preparation, making conscious, or practice portion.

This lesson will focus on various ways to prepare a concept through games, movement, and questions, and how to make the students conscious of a musical element (naming it and introducing its symbols).  We will begin with a discussion of the pedagogy generally, looking at the means by which students become aware of the isolated elements of sound.  Participants will receive tools to use in order to help their students navigate the topography of songs. During this portion of the lesson we will learn two new songs to analyze and use for “preparation/make conscious.” The last portion of this lesson will be a workshop wherein participants will have the opportunity to teach a mini-lesson either preparing a musical concept or making students conscious of it.  We will give constructive feedback after each lesson praising what was done well and giving suggestions for improvement.

In the “practice” lesson we will have the opportunity to explore upper school music classes in greater depth.  We will discuss the types of practice (reading a new song, aural skills, improvisation, part work), and work through a simple practice lesson and a more difficult one. We will discuss the skills required for musicianship and the paths to gain them. We will also take a piece of choral music and begin learning it by way of musicianship exercises derived from the score.  In this lesson, participants will gain some ideas on how to apply grammar skills to secondary classes, and how to keep performance groups improving their musicianship through their performance music.

In order to help facilitate ideas for how to draw musical elements into a cohesive system in the minds of our students this lesson will begin with laying out key signatures using a keyboard as our object and draw on the knowledge of intervals that Junior High students ought to possess after a solid grammar school music program. We will discuss what questions will facilitate their understanding and what objects we can use (either pictures or songs) to help them to gain an understanding of key signatures.  We will then use this object lesson to expand ideas into teaching basic harmony, counterpoint, and voice leading.  We will apply some of what we learn to analyse a piece of choral music in order to discover what we can learn about music theory in the process of preparing the song for performance.

Our final time together will be a question and answer round table based on what we have done thus far, and ranging to general concerns as they apply to Classical Christian music programs, and the classroom specifically.  We may switch between discussion and practical demonstration wherein either the instructor or a participant will play the role of the teacher for a time in order to gauge understanding or display the subtlety of a particular technique.