Primarily, a music teachers task lies in the idea of effective and creative communication. Thus, credibility and reliability have always been an issue to academic institutions, their teaching and non-teaching personnel and even the student body.
Music teachers simultaneously motivate, inspire, and support their students through innovative music teachers resources. Whether these resources and tips are from the experiences of other teaching individuals, educators, academes or from the internet, what important is you are able to meet your goals and stay committed to your purpose.
When you make use of effective music teachers resources and tips, you are more likely to gain the interests of your students encouraging them to love music more. As you become good influences and examples to them, they not just tend to love music as one of their subjects but they also have come to love you as their mentors and icons.
I have here a list of different feedbacks, compliments and even suggestions of the students when a group of music educators have rendered effective music teaching strategies and have executed creative activities.
The students are able to cultivate their interest in music and realize their potentials through unique and creative activities regarding their music class and its programs.
Such music teachers resources allow them to learn about other aspects of music which are not covered in a specific course outline, syllabus or private music lessons.
Music teachers are able to encourage and give them such opportunity and exposure that they truly need to create and perform music creatively and independently yet effectively and promptly.
Students are able to learn music as well as the significance of academic freedom and independence. Thus, cooperative learning has played a vital role in this manner since they are tasked to work collaboratively with their co-students and meet a common set of objectives.
Creative activities, which seem unusual and innovative, have brought up fun and excitement among students making them more interested, hooked and eager to learn new things and eventually apply them in real life.
The enhanced program for music teaching has been remarked by the students as a way to boost self-confidence, establish camaraderie among classmates, and experience the fun of learning music all at the same time.
Such exposure to music technology and other relevant innovations have showcased more talents and have brought out the best in most of the students.
It really pays to regenerate more teaching resources and strategies that are more appealing to the kind of students we have in todays generation. Maximizing resources and efforts, music teachers would then realize that music education could be the most rewarding experience.
Most music teachers consider teaching music to their dear students both their profession and passion. Most of them have the heart for arts and music – making each student love learning music and music as a whole. With this kind of outlook and disposition in teaching music, the inspired and motivated music teacher tends to begin his search for consistent improvement in his teaching strategies as well as his effort for personal and professional growth.
Indeed, there is a wide variety of creative music teachers resources that students can certainly enjoy and get excited working on with. According to studies, the integration of audio and video recording in music education has been an effective technique to catch the attention and grab the interest of the learners. This is believed to be an effective tool in raising the level of interest and motivation among music learners.
Current practice in music teaching favors a practical and a hands-on approach in emphasizing performance and composition. The use of recorded music as a teaching resource has tended to take a back seat. However, recordings are the predominant vehicle of musical experience today. As the students are expert listeners to recorded sound, major developments in the access to and presentation of recorded music are opening up new educational possibilities to most of them.
Targeted to be implemented in most music classrooms, the production and engineering aspects of recorded sound to online music libraries and teachers’ experiences of using recordings in the classroom have been randomly practiced and taken into consideration.
When a classroom setting has a relaxed atmosphere, informal learning may take place yet anxiety, tension and pressure would neither rule the learning situation. Hence, when there is relaxed supervision with no teachers behind the desk, the students would be more eager and interested to learn music. Students may also work in groups – giving them more chances of friendship and peer support. In this case, cooperative learning is found effective. The music teacher may encourage the students choose various musical instruments of their choice and eventually master such.
After they finish recording, they may organize or set-up a short play or a mini-concert to show their rendition of songs and other performances. These activities can heighten the learning process as they get too excited in meeting their objectives and getting high grades. These can also help them boost enough self-confidence and self-esteem. Through these music teachers’ resources, the music teacher tends to meet most of his objectives all at the same time.
These creative techniques in music education intend to motivate the learners from different ages and with different lifestyles. So start your quest to amazingly creative music teachers resources now. Be inspired to share your knowledge as well as the joys of music to your students. Make them realize that learning music is fun so they have to do it all by heart. Happy teaching!
Being a music teacher can be a challenging task. It involves a dose of time and effort to be spent on research, enhancement and upgrade in terms of your teaching strategies and methods. Since teaching and learning are both dynamic in nature, you as an educator must know how to advance your music teaching resources and techniques so as to become efficient and effective at all times.
In this article, you would be informed and updated with the latest resources and strategies on music teaching – suitable for all students from different walks of life. This also includes their corresponding benefits, advantages and corresponding approaches. Here they are:
Brainstorming among Students
This is a process that is designed for generating multiple ideas/options in which judgment is suspended until a maximum number of ideas have been made. Following generation of ideas, options are typically analyzed; the best solution is identified; and, a plan of action is developed.
Its advantages include:
* the active involvement of learners in higher levels of thinking;
* the promotion of peer learning and critical thinking; and,
* the creation of synergy, teamwork and cooperation.
To meet their sets of objectives, music teachers must use methods that would stimulate thinking, creativity, inquiry, and consensus. They should also provide clear instructions on how the process exactly works – ensuring that all students adhere to the rules.
Computer Simulation
In this context, such specific and practical examination, procedural training and data interpretation skills in realistic situations through the use of highly realistic computerized dummies and multimedia are utilized and applied accordingly to further teach particular music lessons.
Advantages of computer simulation are the following:
* Students can portray realistic situations, provide immediate feedback and inquiry, and most of all, can make use of such learning and acquisition in real life experiences.
* This also allows the learners to stay focused on such topic – eliminating irrelevant and unnecessary aspects.
Music educators must choose learning objectives that involve hands-on experience that can allow the students to have direct control and access to music technology. However, the faculty must be trained and equipped with such simulation skills so as to instruct the learners correspondingly and facilitate experiences and feedbacks accordingly.
Interactive Demonstrations and Games
These strategies pave way to activities where learners can observe how they are being done and administered in preparation to practical application. These may involve competitions, participations, drills and feedbacks into the learning experience as a motivating factor and a ground for application of principles.
It is really beneficial to both music educators and students to integrate such demo and games in the learning process. These help boost their self-confidence and broaden their attention span – targeting questions and answers. Such techniques also actively involve learners, regenerate motivation, provide challenges and express oneself while creating a fun learning environment.
These may be just some of the many effective music teachers’ resources and teaching strategies that are readily available online to help all music educators around the globe spread this message: Learning music is a rewarding and fun experience that can change and touch lives.
When I ask parents, “Why do your children need music education?” I often get a generalized answer like, “My child studies for himself.” Drawing from my own life experience, I can tell you this with absolute confidence: the more clearly and more precisely we know what we want, the quicker and easier we get it.
To understand the advantage of musical education, let’s talk about the music lessons in more detail, beginning with the most simple and popular art – the art of singing.
The voice is given to a person from the moment he is born as the means of a congenital, unconditional, protective reflex. Later, the person learns to use the sounds produced to develop a speaking and then a singing voice. By singing songs or humming tunes, children have an opportunity to accumulate musical impressions and acoustical experience, develop an ear for music, and learn to use the natural musical instrument, the voice. The skilful use of a singing voice is one of the main advantages for the development of child’s musical abilities. Even simply singing for your own pleasure can bring a lot of positive moments into your life. Also, singing activates the functioning in the left (logic) and right (figurative) hemispheres of a brain. As a result, the working capacity of the child increases. Singing also promotes attention and improves the mood.
How can singing positively influence children’s health? Singing actively develops and strengthens the respiratory system, which is especially important at the early age. It also naturally trains the muscles of the throat and vocal chords. Because the respiratory system is closely connected with the cardiovascular system, the child, being engaged in respiratory gymnastics during singing, thereby strengthens his health. Singing also promotes the development of musical abilities such as hearing, memory, sense of rhythm, and time/tempo.
Many of you have probably heard that singing can cure such speech impediments such as stuttering. I can confirm this fact with confidence – by using my own techniques, I helped one of my daughters eliminate this problem within two years. The fact is that while singing, words are sounded lingeringly, which helps the child pronounce separate sounds and syllables more precisely. In other words, singing is the cure to many language and speech difficulties, such as stuttering! Well-chosen drills combined with a child’s desire to get rid of an unpleasant impediment are the keystone to success.
In addition, proper speech characterizes correct thinking. Thus, after eliminating a stutter, your child’s susceptibility to general studying and learning at public school will improve due to the resultant emotional liberation.
Children who sing regularly are also very focused. They easily learn foreign languages, they are more diligent in comparison to other children, and they are able to study and absorb any training much easier.
Singing in vocal ensemble or choir is also beneficial. This way, children get to develop additional qualities as musicians. For example, harmonic hearing is a skill in which a person hears and distinguishes a number of tones that sound simultaneously, as well as the sense of ensemble. (Ensemble, from the French, means “together.”) By becoming part of a choir or vocal ensemble, the child starts to understand and feel his own importance and power. Besides, who would scoff at the ability to have a beautiful and well-trained voice? Let’s admit it: it would be very pleasant to talk with such a person – and hopefully, hear him sing,
(To be continued)
Music and arts education are valuable components of academic instruction. And they become even more valuable when they are used towards the resolution of crisis situations that affect and traumatized children around the globe. Creative expression has both educational and psychological significance for children that have suffered natural disasters, wars, and violent acts, serving as a way through which people of diverse cultures can interact and unite in their shared humanity.
Teachers use art and music to cultivate communication, social abilities and cognitive emotions to increase cooperation, self-confidence and self-esteem. Through the creation of singing, moving, and listening stimulus to music, a broad range of emotional, cognitive and physical abilities of children are brought out and help them to learn new skills.
Creative therapy can be expressed in a variety of forms including music and movement therapy, writing techniques and play therapies. Aiming to provide children with a means of expression that can help them express their emotions about their individual experiences while using their imagination and the creativity of the therapist, creative therapy offers a sense of accomplishment.
Music and movement therapies have a therapeutic effect on children. By addressing physical, psychological, cognitive and/or social functioning, music and movement act as a powerful medium that provides support and encouragement to each traumatized child in the effort to acquire new skills and abilities. Movement therapies transform feelings into movement that helps children release their stress and express their emotions. On the other hand, music, because of its ability to touch each person in a different way and often in many different ways, creates the grounds for new learning opportunities and most importantly, for leading a normal life.
Writing techniques have been researched widely regarding their physical and emotional benefits. They can be used as a means for stress relief because children can write down anything they think about or focus on unresolved feelings that have been created as a result of a traumatic experience.
Play therapies use the imagination of children as a means to communicate with them.
Psychologists suggest that children who experience a major traumatic event before the age of 11 are three times more likely to develop psychological symptoms that those children who experience their first traumatic event as teenagers or even at a later age. However, children’s ability to deal with their trauma is highly subject to the reaction of their parents or their care-takers, but also to the method used to overcome the trauma.
Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of children that have suffered traumatic events around the world over the past five years. A typical example of how arts are implemented to help them overcome their feelings of distress and anxiety is a study on the young victims of Hurricane Katrina. Children were gathered under large white tents to feel protected and taken care of and were asked by art therapists to draw their houses. What art therapists saw in almost all their drawings was that the place of safety in the drawing was not the house, but the roof. Besides, the children’s drawings included dead birds, snakes, alligators, helicopters and rescue boats, depicting quite accurate the magnitude of the disaster and their feelings of despair.
Focusing on the long-lasting effects of Hurricane Katrina on those children that included anxiety, learning difficulties or even suicidal impulses, psychologists concluded that only art could improve the children’s psychological and mental condition. Several months later, the art therapists returned to New Orleans to check on the children and their families. Children were asked to draw and express their feelings again. This time, most children drew scary water lines, which made the art therapists conclude that the trauma had not end with the Hurricane Katrina. Children were still afraid of water.
Similar examples are derived from the children of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Iran, and many other areas on the planet. The children’s participation in arts and music strengthens their identity and creates strong bonds within their communities. Using music and performing arts helps refugee children to integrate with the local community, while teachers address the need for social connection. In doing so, children are effectively assimilated into the education system, building relationships and gaining trust, while enhancing their self-esteem, confidence, and language skills.
The use of music and arts to the healing of traumatized children is not an easy task. It requires high competence in the knowledge and skills of teachers who need to be prepared to meet the diverse needs of each child. Besides, to educate children with arts and music and help them overcome their traumas, teachers need to have professional responsibilities and the ability to communicate knowledge and skills.
After having suffered extreme situations of crisis and having experienced severe traumas, children need a positive impact on their life. This motivation can only be driven through teamwork, appreciation for other cultures and community awareness. Interactive performance programs as well as strategic partnerships with arts-based and community-based organizations can offer those children education, personal development and community involvement. And all these attributes can be found in the creativity and self-expression provided in arts and music education.
