Brian Powell and Little Kids Rock

The most memorable thing for me about the workshop was that it was fun.  It was fun for university students, for teachers and TA’s and I could easily imagine it being fun for high school students and elementary students as well.  This seems like a small fact, but it touches on something important. Learning should be fun, and when it is fun, it works much better.  I really appreciated how Bryan Powell started with play-alongs almost immediately, as it kept people engaged and excited.  It was an effective simple way to get people to learn guitar.  For many of us, I think that learning new instruments comes with a feeling that we need to invest a lot of time and energy learning theory and technique and that we need to be perfect before we can play with or in front of others. I think this can come from more formal music teachings, especially in classes where we are being graded on everything, and where a bad grade can have real consequences on mental health. Bringing this music learning into a much safer space can help offset those fears.

I think that a challenge that this system faces is that it is still hard to teach a large group of students in an effective way.  Most schools face this issue, and not only in music classes, but music is a discipline where one-on-one teaching is especially prevalent and important.  We have discussed the importance of private teaching in music before, but this system of learning does not provide more teachers for students or allow students to have more in depth instruction on their instrument.  It does approach this issue in a different way, though.  All the students are learning the same instrument, with one or two students on a different but related instrument.  In the workshop, everyone was working on guitar, and when it came to learn bass or drums, we would all work on them at the same time.  Bryan Powell also discussed the use of scaffolding to provide more intensive teaching for more advanced students.  

I really liked the idea of scaffolding, but there was something about the idea that bothered me. It may have just been because of the time restraints, but he never actually explained how to do the higher levels of the scaffolding idea.  He said we could use barre chords, but didn’t explain what they were, or how to do them. Relying on scaffolding to work would mean he would have to take time to teach barre chords to the students who were ready for them, which would mean he would not be able to teach everyone at once.  With more time and more teachers, I can easily see this being a very effective way of teaching, but the logistics of this practice are lost to me.   

An experience I had that was really enlightening to me though, was at the 5-minute break time.  I was practicing some bass patterns on guitar, to pass the time and to see if I could remember how to do them.  My neighbor heard me playing them and asked me to teach them to her. For the few minutes of break we had left, we were teaching each other guitar skills we had learned outside of the class.  It was a perfect example of peer teaching, and I have been reflecting about what happened for a while.  Because I already had bass guitar skills we had not learned in class, and were already working together because of sharing guitars and how the workshop was run, the teaching and learning happened in a way that was much more organic than in other peer learning experiences I have been in.  It was more like showing someone how to make a paper crane, than showing them how to play in an orchestra.  The stakes were different.  If she couldn’t play the bass riff perfectly, it would have been alright.  She didn’t have to perform the riff in a masterclass, and she wasn’t being graded on it.  It was also different for me as a teacher. I learned the skill from my dad, and it was more of a case of me passing on a skill, than teaching someone how to be an artist. The relationship between student and teacher was very different, mainly because neither of us really saw each other in those roles. It was peer teaching, but in a very different format than any I'd seen before.  It was experiencing music in a way that I have never experienced in formal learning before, and it made me excited. 

One question I had was if we could apply these ideas to more traditional orchestra instruments.  I have played clarinet in situations like those before, usually improvising, but sometimes playing pre-written parts.  If we could combine the agency students had with the guitar learning with band instruments, then students could create things completely unique and fascinating.  Obviously not everyone would want to use band instruments in this situation, but those who did could work alongside guitar players and bass players in the composing.  They could incorporate winds and strings into pop music at a fundamental level. Pop music already uses these types of instruments on occasion, and whenever they do use strings or winds, it always makes me excited.  It would also allow the students to take ownership of their own playing in a way that isn’t possible in concert band settings.  We could also do this with students like who were at the workshop, university students who know how to play in orchestras, but not in modern bands.  I really appreciate what Bryan Powell has done through this workshop, because it has opened my eyes to some possibilities.