Our goal as music educators needs to be to develop all of our students – not just those who play the melody parts in many arrangements. What can we do, then, to design our classes so that all of our students are given the opportunity to reach their highest potential?

Repertoire Choice

Concert repertoire is the primary vehicle we use to advance our curriculum in performance-based music classrooms. As such, picking repertoire might be the most important decision you make for ensuring that all of your students learn.

When I look at much of the literature for student-level string orchestra, there is one feature that repeatedly confronts me: The melody is in the 1st violin part, and everyone else plays a much simpler accompaniment. I have developed a simple rule of thumb: When I see a piece of music that features one instrument section and relegates all of the others to the background for the entire piece, I don’t program it!

Here are my steps for picking repertoire:

1. Is it good music?
   • Do you like it? Do you think your students will like it?
2. What do the bass and viola parts look like?
   • If the commonly neglected instruments are neglected, forget about it!
   • Sometimes if a part can be easily rewritten to include important thematic material, I will still pick the music and hand it out with modified parts.
3. Does it cover the technical skills that my students need at this time?
   • You will be spending a lot of time on this music for the next 2-3 months. Can you use it to teach your students what they need to learn during that time frame? If not, keep looking!

If a piece of music doesn’t pass all three of these tests, I won’t consider it. When shopping for new music for my library, I will often purchase a piece based on the first two questions. I then use the third question to narrow my choices for a particular ensemble on a particular concert.

Pick a small problem. Focus on it. Fix it. Declare victory! Rinse and repeat.

Setting goals is critically important, and you should start out each year with some kind of curriculum map. What are the skills that your students should be able to demonstrate by the end of the year? Which ones should be mastered by the fall concert, performance evaluation, the spring concert? The way you structure your approach to reaching those goals is critical to keeping your students engaged.

I think about setting goals on three levels:

1. Macro Goals
   • These are the big targets that I will work toward through an entire year or for a concert cycle.
2. Lesson Goals
   • How will I divide those large goals across my lessons on a weekly or daily basis?
3. Micro Goals
   • What do I want my students to accomplish for every 5-10 minute part of each individual lesson?

For keeping students motivated, the micro goals are the ones that really count! It’s in the minute-to-minute interactions where you either keep your students engaged or where you lose them. In every lesson, I want at least three times where I take my students from not being able to do something to being able to do that thing. Doing this keeps your students feeling encouraged, empowered, and excited to keep going.

The edu-speak name for this concept is the Zone of Proximal Development. This means your tasks should be just beyond what your students can currently do, but not so far beyond their skills that they can’t see a way to accomplish the task.

Keeping a lesson moving in the ZoPD, will really test your skill as a teacher. The trick is to break down a big problem into small enough components that your students can master the step in a short amount of time. Your micro goal might be a single part of a complicated technique, a single phrase, one measure, or perhaps just a sequence of three notes that’s causing a problem.

Pick a small problem. Focus on it. Fix it. Declare victory. Rinse and repeat.

Keep Everyone Playing With Theme Sheets

If everyone is going to learn, then everyone needs to be playing their instruments. My general rule of thumb is that no one should sit with their instrument in their lap for more than a minute or two while I work with a single section. I generally try to avoid having them sit that long.

For every piece of music I hand out, I also hand out a “theme sheet” that I’ve created to go along with it. To make the theme sheet, I go through the piece and identify every passage in every part that I think will need focused practice. I then transcribe those passages into Finale. From there, I can create a unison score with those passages transposed into the playable range for every instrument in my ensemble with a few clicks of the mouse.

When we get to that hard 1st violin part or that odd-sounding harmony that’s difficult to tune, the whole class switches to the theme sheet and we learn the hard parts as unison etudes. Everyone learns every main theme, every important harmony, and every tricky rhythm. Everyone advances together, and no one sits and gets left behind because some arranger has neglected to write a challenging part for their instrument. My basses really can play the 1st violin parts, and your trombones really can handle that flute lick!

An added benefit of this approach is that when we put the piece back together as written, everyone knows everyone else’s part. As a result, students listen across the ensemble better and play together more musically and responsively!

Valid Evaluations (SmartMusic to the Rescue)

I see this all the time: A teacher assigns a playing test. The 1st violin test is long, has several passages, and is difficult. The basses have one passage that is mostly half and quarter notes and does not challenge the players. By what measure is this a valid assessment of our students across an entire class?

By using the theme sheets, I can give everyone assessments that are appropriately challenging, and I can use technology to do much of the heavy lifting.

I take my theme sheet and upload it into SmartMusic. I then give playing test grades based on a pass-off system. Let’s say that a theme sheet has ten passages. I assign all ten passages to every student. To get 100%, they must pass every passage in SmartMusic. Personally, I count 85% or better as “passing.” Students do this on their own, so they know they can try to pass a section as many times as it takes, and that they should only submit the grade once they have achieved 85% or better. In this way, I encourage a mastery mindset and show students that if they keep practicing, they will keep improving.

Based on my school’s grading policy, a ten-passage theme sheet pass-off score would look like this:

As much as I appreciate that SmartMusic can give real-time, specific feedback to students on notes and rhythms, and that it can automate some of the most time-consuming parts of grading playing tests, I don’t really trust it to give actual grades that stick. This is why I settled on using it as part of a pass-off system with a reasonable threshold. If students think that they should have earned 85% or better on a recording, they are allowed to submit the assignment and request a review. On review, sometimes I will change their grade to passing, and sometimes I will reassign with a note explaining what they can do to improve.

Conclusion

Using the above pedagogical concepts and techniques helps me keep all of my students moving forward together. I don’t leave anyone behind because of what instrument they chose. The result after several years of implementing the theme sheet approach has been that my ensembles have developed a full and even sound, all students are engaged through the entirety of every lesson, discipline has improved since students never sit around, and students have internalized a growth mindset where they know that persistence and effort pays off.

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“What are the three most important things in music? Rhythm, rhythm, and rhythm.” 
– Jere Flint, Atlanta Symphony cellist & conductor

Rhythm is the most important thing in music. Consider this: If you miss a note, you will sound bad for a moment, but if you miss a rhythm, you will be in the wrong place and are now missing every note. Establishing a solid sense of rhythm for our students is one of the most important jobs we have as music teachers. Teaching rhythm effectively is teaching for transfer. Early in my career, it was all too common for me to spend a lot of time teaching a piece of music or an exercise from a method book and then go on to find that when it was time to apply the concepts from those pieces and exercises to new contexts, my students would fall apart, and we would have to start over. It turned out that most of the troubles my students were having were related to their ability to read rhythm. The following article goes over some of the things that I developed and discovered in my efforts to improve in this area.

Stay on the Same Concept for a Long Time

Effective learning requires repetition, but it has to be the right kind of repetition. If you take a rhythm exercise and just repeat it over and over with your students, they will eventually be able to perform it, but they will probably not be able to extract the broad rhythmic concepts from it that will allow them to quickly interpret unfamiliar passages, even if they contain the same basic rhythmic material. To build a base of knowledge that can be transferred to new settings, you have to give your students opportunities to use their knowledge in many different settings before adding new pieces to the puzzle.

One of the biggest problems I’ve found with teaching rhythmic fluency is that most method books – even those devoted exclusively to rhythm – move too fast. By the time you have gone over a couple of lines on a rhythmic concept, the book is on to the next concept without giving students the time to consolidate their understanding and really own it. Many times, they haven’t even really learned how to read the line they’re on. They’ve just memorized it. This is why I wrote Rhythmic Projections: Rhythm Exercises for Building Mastery. With over 400 exercises, it lets me keep students in the same place for a long time. By the time we’re ready to move to a new concept, they understand what we’ve been doing. Not only that, but they haven’t been able to memorize anything. They have to read it because there’s just too much of it!

It is also important to use all of your materials in a variety of ways. For instance, with my students I’ll take the first 6 pages of Rhythmic Projections, which focus only on 1/4 notes and 1/4 rests, and go through them all with students just clapping and counting. Then we’ll come back and do them again plucking open strings. Next we’ll do them again plucking a D scale. After that comes bowing open strings, bowing a D scale, and finally writing the rhythms out using the notes of a scale and putting in the counting. This lets us stay in the same place for a long time, but the students deepen their knowledge of this concept since every time they approach it, it’s in conjunction with a new skill on their instruments or with a deeper musical understanding.

Are you adding rhythm work to your lesson planning? Download our free template.

Count Out Loud – a Lot – All the Time

“If you’re not counting, you’re guessing, and if you’re guessing, you’re wrong.” – Andy Reiner

Vocalizing counting is one of the most critical skills for developing a solid sense of rhythm. Without it, students will not develop a sense of how a rhythm is broken down, and they will have trouble recreating musical rhythms that they see printed on the page.

I find that it is very important as a teacher to use vocal rhythm counting frequently. I use it as my default modeling voice. That is, when I sing a part for my students, I use rhythm syllables to do it unless I have a reason that other syllables would be better for getting across the point at hand. Similarly, when students sing something back to me, they use rhythm syllables to do it, and I make them sing a lot. They sing when trying to get better tuning. They sing while silent fingering. They sing while air bowing. They sing along with themselves while they play (since I teach strings, we can actually do that!).

Use a Variety of Methods to Teach Each Concept

Teaching rhythm effectively requires a very deep bag of tricks. There is no one thing that you will do that will solve all of the rhythm challenges for your students. Also, having a lot of materials to pull from helps you move horizontally with your students. That is, you can stay on the same concept while keeping it fresh for your students. I usually start a new rhythmic concept with rhythm-only exercises from Rhythmic Projections, but then I move on to other things that use those rhythms in melodic and harmonic contexts.

To develop strong reading skills, you have to keep something new in front of them all of the time. To help with this, I have class sets of several method books and collections of supplemental short pieces. I call these “one week pieces.” I pick pieces and exercises that fit in with the rhythmic and harmonic concepts we need at the moment. When I’ve finished what one of the books has to offer, I move to the same section in a different book trying to never spend more than a few days on a particular exercise.

Where Am I?

One of the most important things that students need to have to accurately perform rhythms is the ability to quickly and accurately identify the placement of every note in a measure. This is usually the biggest problem that students have with dotted rhythms. It’s not that they don’t know how long to hold a dotted half note. It’s that they don’t accurately identify the quarter note as being on beat 4 and then wait for it. Similarly, problems with dotted quarter notes can usually be solved by focusing on where exactly in time and in the measure the &of2 and the &of4 live. This is also really important in addressing problems that come along with accurately counting rests.

There are a couple of games I like to play with my students to help with building a strong sense of “where am I.” The first is one with Rhythmic Projections that I call “What Beat Is This?” I will put up a page of rhythms on the projector screen and use a pointer to identify a single note or rest. The class then answers with what beat of the measure I’m pointing at. I jump all around the page pointing at different notes and rests until everyone can quickly and accurately name the beats.

The next one I like to do is called “Melody Pass-arounds.” For this, we use a unison melody (taken from a “one week piece”) and split the ensemble into several groups. We play through the piece, but each group takes turns playing while the others wait for their turn to come around. We start with each group getting one measure, then down to half a measure, then to one beat, and then to one note per group. To be able to do this, everyone has to pay close attention to where they are in the piece at all times.

Another one I use a lot is “Clap Once on…” This is especially helpful for problems coming off of sustained notes or after rests. For instance, if the problem is the 1/8^th note following a dotted quarter, we “clap once on the &of2.” Students count out loud while clapping only on the specified beat. We will keep that going until the whole class can accurately hit the problem beat.

Work Rhythm Exercises into Your Rehearsals

Finally, it is important to recognize that rhythm exercises are not just for warm ups. It is alright to interrupt your main rehearsal time for a mini lesson on a rhythmic problem. If there is a rhythmic problem in one section of your piece, have the whole group play a scale on the problem rhythm. Stop for a moment and have your entire ensemble do a few measures of “Clap Once on…” Have part of your ensemble count out loud for another part of the group who is having trouble with a rhythm spot. After that, then come back to the rehearsal. In this way, you can solve problems for a section that needs it without leaving the rest of your students to do nothing while you focus on a small group of students.

If you want students to be good at reading, then you have to do a lot of reading. Don’t be fooled into thinking that only working on your main concert repertoire counts, though. Like I mentioned before, if you read the same thing over and over, many of your students are probably memorizing rather than actually reading. By using some of the above strategies, you can keep your students interested and feeling like they’re moving forward even though you know that you’re really just staying in one place and giving them the depth of knowledge they need to transfer their skills into any setting.

Seth Gamba is the orchestra director at Elkins Pointe Middle School in Fulton County, GA. A well-known composer, clinician, and adjudicator, Mr. Gamba has presented many sessions at state and national conferences including GMEA, ASTA, NAfME, and the Midwest Clinic. Mr. Gamba’s orchestra has had featured performances at state conferences and his compositions have frequently been played by groups performing at the annual GMEA conference. He currently has two compositions on the GMEA approved list for level 3 Orchestra. His book Rhythmic Projections: Rhythm Exercises for Building Mastery and his composition Rock On! for level 1 string orchestra are available from Ludwig Masters Publishing. Other compositions are available from www.gambamusic.com. This post was adapted from his 2015 Midwest Clinic presentation.

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