Overview:
Music education, like all academic subjects, has a teaching philosophy founded on a set of principles designed present the discipline with a unified body of pedagogy. The music methods or teaching approaches of Carl Orff, Jaques-Émile Dalcroze, Zoltán Kodály and Edwin Gordon have been researched and practiced for music educators for many decades. Each encourages active participate by the students and are systematic in design.
Objectives:
Students will be able to:
- Describe four of the most widely recognized music education approaches,
- Delineate the rationale underlying each approach,
- Identify and describe principles of each methodology,
- Identify methods or steps for implementing each of the approaches, and
- Identify teaching elements that are unique to each approach.
How is the Gordon Approach Taught?
The Music Learning Theory uses learning sequence activities to help students acquire music knowledge and skills in a systematic way. These are differentiated from classroom activities in that learning sequence activities usually occupy only about ten minutes of each class. The remainder of the class is devoted to classroom activities in which students experience music through listening, moving, singing, and playing instruments. In classroom activities students engage in experiences that combine all the dimensions of music.
The learning sequence activities are implemented using a three-step approach that is referred to as a total learning process, or a whole-part-whole learning model. The three-step approach consists of:
- Introduction
- Application
- Reinforcement
In the introduction phase, students engage in a classroom activity: learning a simple song by rote in a major tonality and duple meter.
The application phase is the learning sequence activity. The teacher teaches specific skills, simple duple rhythm patterns of quarter notes and eight notes, or two note tonal patterns, using an echo approach with students chanting the rhythms and singing the intervals. The rhythm patterns and the tonal patterns are never taught together, but alternated by the day or week to avoid confusion.
The students do not read the rhythm patterns or the tonal patterns but are operating at the lowest level of discrimination learning. Students distinguish aurally and orally between the different types of patterns in duple meter. It is what the students hear and feel that is of primary importance.
After several minutes of the application phase, the students are led through the third phase, reinforcement, by learning another song in duple meter and major tonality and one in triple meter and major tonality.
Succeeding class sessions can now focus on songs and learning sequence activities using rhythm patterns or tonal patterns in duple meter or triple meter in a major tonality. The teacher continues to teach through the three-step process implementing new songs and reviewing previous ones, while guiding students through a 10 minute portion of learning sequence activities of rhythmic and tonal patterns and engaging students through reinforcement activities of listening, singing, moving and playing instruments. It is in step three, reinforcement, that the student begins to acquire a greater understanding of the whole of music.
If implemented properly, the three-step process can be used with any content. The learning sequence activities become sequentially higher levels of experience and not simply repetitions of the same material. The steps continue to be recycled and reinforced, thus ensuring that repeated musical experiences through classroom activities become more sophisticated. The step three activities are of primary importance because the focus is on teaching students to infer characteristics of music qualities from information they have already learned through previous lessons.