You’re visiting the site, but maybe you’re wondering about our name. What exactly is a dynamic music room?
A dynamic music room isn’t a teacher, classroom, or curriculum that follows any one method. Rather, a dynamic music room is a place for authentic, engaging, and cooperative learning at all levels.
Authentic
The authentic music classroom places an emphasis on using music material that has stood the test of time. Every class will have exercises and activities, sure, but the emphasis will still be on meaningful music-making using real musical examples.
Engaging
An engaging music classroom, at any level, will keep the students’ learning needs in mind. This takes two main ideas into consideration:
Appropriate Pacing – Students, especially of the modern-day, have a hard time paying attention (shocker!). By changing the energy level and types of learning the students engage in throughout a lesson, we can better keep students engaged and learning.
Multiple Intelligences – Students don’t learn the same way. Every musician has a different learning style and types of intelligences that need to be reached.
By varying our approaches to instruction and rehearsal, we not only reach all students better, but we also develop conceptual music understanding deeper for every student.
Cooperative
As we all know, the old model of “wise teacher giving knowledge to students who sit there and take it” is out.
Students need to take an active role in their learning. This can be done by:
Student-teacher cooperation – Where possible, students should be allowed input into their own learning. This will increase motivation and understanding of musical ideas.
Student-student cooperation – Students work together in structured ways to develop learning together and learn to recognize the value of each other and the worth of the ensemble as a whole.
Student-community cooperation – Students who engage with their families and home life regularly will value music more and help educate stakeholders and community members about the value of music on a broader level.
No Methods?
To be clear, a Dynamic Music Room is an intentional classroom. With this in mind, we strongly encourage all music teachers to get as much extra training as they can.
However, the goal of the Dynamic Music Room isn’t to push any one method over the other, but to provide helpful info, guides, and resources to make all music teachers better, regardless of their chosen philosophy.
The above elements apply to any method. Please consider your classroom a Dynamic Music Room and see the effect it has on your students and program.
