Heidi Pridemore

MUS 162
4 December 2015
IMEA Workshop Write-Ups
Going Beyond the Notes: Developing Comprehensive Musicians Chris Gleason
This workshop was the best one I went to at the conference. Mr. Gleason was a really
engaging speaker, and he gave all the attendees a huge packet of resources and examples to take
home.
This talk was primarily about the Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance
Project (CMP), which is a planning process that helps music teachers integrate the elements of
music and music performance into student-centered teaching plans. Its a way to prioritize
everything that need to be taught for each piece of repertoire. The model focuses on music
selection, analysis, assessment, strategies, and outcomes. The handout packet that Gleason
provided includes examples of how he incorporates these points in his teaching. All of these
examples showed thoughtful, purposeful thinking for a long-term concert cycle.
I liked Gleasons approach to planning because the system allows teachers to start with
that spark of their own curiosity and passion for good music and then snowball it into all these
different things for students. For instance, one of the pieces his 7 th grade band played was
Moscow, 1941 by Brian Balmages. He was able to discuss what the world was like in 1941,
especially in Moscow, and turned their discussions of WWII and totalitarian regimes into ways
they could discuss group identity as it pertains to a band (like balance, working together, etc.)
and further stretched that into lessons on harmony and how musical lines come together to make
something more.
In performances, Gleason tends to favor an informance setting where students read
program notes and present supplementary projects they work on as they learn their music.
Overall, I think the CMP approach is a good way to incorporate all those skills and concepts and
Common Core Standards we have been talking about this semester. I can see myself
incorporating the CMP process with at least one piece every concert cycle. I think it gives
students multiple perspectives to use when learning their music.
Teaching for Transfer: Making Every Moment Count Dr. Robert L. Sinclair
I was very disappointed with this clinic. The title made me think that it would be about
linking processes and strategies used in the core classes like language arts and math to the music
room, which is something Im learning a lot about and very curious about. The slideshow notes
Dr. Sinclair handed out seemed that way at first. He presented some information on what transfer
is: for instance, transfer can link skills to other skills, content to other content, or content to skills
and vice versa. He also provided examples of activities and behaviors that enhance transfer. I
could relate these to this course because a lot of it was about getting students to make
associations and build on their skills so that they can become more independent thinkers.
However, I found that he was not as good at transferring all of this knowledge to usable
activities in the classroom. He would read a slide, and then have us sing a passage from some
music he had passed out. Sometimes we would sing it on doo, or do hiss-breathing through the
phrase. All of these were good techniques, but he never explained what he was trying to transfer,
or how he would implement this in the classroom, or what the end goal was.

Overall, I was hoping for more classroom applications for guiding student knowledge
transfer, but that is not what I got from this workshop. There are many untapped opportunities
for connecting music with reading, writing, science, and mathematics, and Im looking forward
to learning more about how to do that in the future.
Need Quantitative Data? Use SmartMusic Dr. Glenn Pohland, Loras College
This workshop was an overview of how SmartMusic works. What I found most helpful
was a short Q&A session where teachers voiced the successes and failures they have had with
the software and the SmartMusic representative helped them come up with solutions or new
ideas for using it.
The things that seemed most helpful about SmartMusic were the assessment tools. The
software helps create playing assessments and documentation that shows the results. This would
be good for providing evidence to administration or parents and students about a students
progress. It is also pretty customizable, so you as the teacher can put in what controls you do and
dont want your students to use on the playing test (like if they are allowed to play with the
metronome ticker, or with a track of the band). Additionally, there is a gradebook in SmartMusic
that can streamline the grading process so teachers dont have to manually insert the playing test
grade. It is also helpful because it gives students immediate feedback.
There is a caveat to SmartMusic, however, and that it can only listen so well. Teachers
still should listen to the tracks students submit because sometimes the computer makes mistakes.
One teacher in the seminar said that when she has her singers sight read dotted half notes using
the ta and ti-ti method, the computer counts them wrong for saying ta-a-a for the dotted half
note. This is the correct way to sing it, but SmartMusic counts each stress in the syllable as a new
attack, a new note. A band teacher had the opposite problem where his trumpet player had
realized that it only picks up attacks, so he would only hit the start of every note and SmartMusic
would give him a perfect score. So, while it is a helpful tool, it still cant replace the live, human,
well-educated music teacher.
One of the teachers in the audience said that he uses SmartMusic in the college methods
courses he teaches. That is a great idea for college professors to model uses for technology that
pre-service teachers can take with them into their future jobs. When I have my own gig, I could
see myself using SmartMusic to do mid-year or pre-concert playing tests. It would be a really
helpful tool for streamlining the playing test process in a large ensemble, since it gives the
students some flexibility about when and how they get to submit their test.