Flipping Out? Is Music the Original Flipped Classroom?

Wow ... the pendulum of educational technology is swinging wildly lately over the Flipped Classroom.

The concept is that you record your presentations for students to view at home, allowing teachers use class time for even more positive learning (thus flipping the usual order of lecture at school, homework at home).  The backlash suggests that if students won't put quality time into homework at home, will they watch videos?  What kind of engagement does watching a video entail?  If you are anti-homework, can you support the flipped classroom at all?  And of course, the biggest issue is that true flipped learning requires that you change what you do in your room with students, not just help them with homework in your presence.  I am not taking a pro- or anti-flipped model.  What I want to do is see how it relates to music education.

Is music the original flipped classroom?
Or is it impossible to flip the music classroom?

This takes us to the very heart of the study of music.  In music, you are either performing, creating (composing), or listening.  And these three are completely interwoven - one leads to another.  Your brain and your body are totally engaged whenever you are working on music.  Consider this scenario:

A 3rd grade recorder student must look at 5 lines and 4 spaces, decipher the letters of the treble clef, figure out the rhythmic values, turn the letters into numbers of fingers on their usually non-dominant left hand, tell the diaphragm and lungs to breathe in rhythm, listen to the resulting sound, adjust accordingly, hear what others are doing to play simultaneously, look at the next note while still playing the current note, and repeat the entire process over and over.  All of this must happen multiple times every second for the 3rd grade student.

It doesn't matter if the music student is in elementary music or high school orchestra.  The expectation is the same - performance - "doing" music.  Music teachers and students live under the deadline that a concert is looming.  The audience is waiting, and every moment is precious.  So students need to be engaged as much as possible - and that means in both the classroom and at home.

But what of the flipped classroom concept?  If the purpose to make best use of face-to-face time with students, how does that connect to music?  If one of the tenets of the flipped model is to have students "doing" or "performing" while in the presence of the teacher, we can say that has always been the goal of the music classroom.  Throughout history, music has meant working in the presence of an expert who can guide you to better performance.  And the expert convinces you that if you want to be truly great, you must go home and practice on your own.  Remember that recorder student?  We send that recorder home to the (ahem!) delight of parents all over.  In tech lingo, we could say music is "platform agnostic" since it doesn't matter where you are when you practice.  This might make music the original flipped classroom.

That means that musicians (and athletes, and so many other areas) are performing - are doing - both in school AND at home.  That's the best outcome of all.  In this scenario, flipping is not the question or the answer.  Engagement is.  And whatever you do to get kids engaged in your field of study - to get kids performing and achieving at a higher level - is the goal.

But I am not a fool - I know there are students who do not practice enough at home.  Just as I know there are students who can participate much more fully in the classroom.  The same happens in sports, math, music, and every other curricular area.  What I do know is that student engagement is the key to student achievement, and if the engagement is happening at both school and home, then achievement will (hopefully) increase.

Charlotte Danielson's framework says that "student engagement in learning is the centerpiece of the framework for teaching; all other components contribute to it." (domain 3c of the Framework for Teaching Evaluation Instrument)

Grant Wiggins recent article, entitled "Everything You Know About Curriculum May Be Wrong.  Really."  enshrines engagement and action as well:
"Suppose knowledge is not the goal of education.  Rather, suppose today's content knowledge is an offshoot of of successful ongoing learning in a changing world - in which 'learning' means 'learning to perform in the world."  We learn to perform, and we perform to learn.

It comes back to the basics of good teaching and learning - relationships, enthusiasm, and engagement.  There is no single recipe for the best way to accomplish them, and so the pendulum continues to swing.

Running the Course

I give myself 30 minutes every weekday morning for newspaper headlines and computer time.  About a week ago, an article by Grant Wiggins, the guru of educational curriculum, stopped me in my tracks.  When the leading voice in American education curriculum writes an article entitled "Everything you know about curriculum may be wrong," you know you better buckle up.

For those of us in music, the arts, physical education, tech ed, and the many other subjects that apply the core curriculum, we struggle whenever a new curriculum initiative is introduced.  For too long, the question we have asked ourselves has been, "How do we fit music/PE/art/etc. into this model?" when the question always should have been "How do our performances exemplify all that is right about curriculum?"  In reference to athletics, Wiggins says, "the game is the curriculum; the game is the teacher ... Knowledge about the game is secondary."  

The article opens with some transformational events in history - Copernicus's idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun and Einstein's idea that the speed of light, not time, is the constant.  Likewise revolutionary, Wiggins proposes "action, not knowledge, as the essence of an education".  Knowledge, Understanding, Transfer ... all serve a greater master - to move a student and humanity to action.  

The etymology of the word "curriculum" means a running course, like a race track for a chariot race.  We want students to be well-rounded and well-founded so they can run the course of life (curriculum vitae) successfully.  But this is scary for us as educators - we do not know what kind of action a student may take or what kind of action may be needed in the future.  Did anyone know what kind of action Michelangelo, Beethoven, or Einstein would take?  It is hard enough to equip students with knowledge to take them into the future - how do we prepare them for action?  By bringing the future into our classrooms now - by taking action now - by teaching them to act now on the knowledge they construct.

We live in a second renaissance.  Instead of a printing press, we have the internet.  How will we use knowledge of the past to spur students into future action?  For those of us who are music educators, we teach students to take action through music, since every piece of music is a problem to be solved and every performance is an action to be taken.  Taking action and performing is about creating something new - something never heard or seen before.  Performance is the curriculum; performance is the teacher.