PIANO
PEDAGOGY
FORUM
v. 10, No. 1/January 1, 2007
Grace Huang received her DMA and MM in Piano Performance from the University of Minnesota and her BM in Piano Performance from Vanderbilt University. Solo and collaborative performances have taken her throughout the United States as well as to festivals such as Aspen, Madeline Island, Eastern, and Hampden-Sydney. She is an active adjudicator and clinician, and recently published an article in the fall issue of Georgia Music News. She previously taught on the faculties of St. Cloud State University, St. Joseph's School of Music (Minnesota), and the University of Georgia, where she served as Class Piano Coordinator.
Grace Huang
School of Music
Millikin University
Decatur, IL 62522
217.424.3710
ghuang@millikin.edu
Conference Presentation: "Working Together to Learn: Cooperative Learning in the Group Piano Classroom"
Alejandro Cremaschi and Christopher Fisher, presenters
by Grace Huang
Presenters Alejandro Cremaschi (University of Colorado-Boulder) and Christopher Fisher (Ohio University) discussed essential principles of the cooperative learning approach and its application to the field of group piano teaching. Drs. Cremaschi and Fisher, who have utilized cooperative learning extensively in their own teaching, shared their research findings and provided numerous ideas for creative application in any group piano setting, for students at any level.
Cooperative Learning Defined
Developed in the 1970s and 1980s by educational theorists David and Roger Johnson (University of Minnesota), Spencer Kagan (University of California), and Robert Slavin (Johns Hopkins), cooperative learning can be defined as "the instructional use of small groups so that students work together to maximize their own and each other's learning" (Johnson, Johnson, and Holubec). Students are actively involved in every stage of the learning process, whether through collectively discovering concepts and principles, participating in research and teaching, or drilling and reviewing material. The instructor's role is transformed into one of facilitator and moderator.
Benefits of the cooperative learning approach were highlighted:
- Learning is not passive but participatory in nature.
- Cooperative learning allows for immediate application of the information learned.
- Students have the support and encouragement of their peers, a crucial factor in lowering anxiety and producing a safe learning environment.
- Cooperative learning utilizes higher level critical reasoning strategies.
- Students are challenged to view situations from several perspectives, to share information and resources, and to assist each other for the good of the group.
- Cooperative learning produces higher retention rates, resulting in higher achievement.
The presenters showed further proof of the latter by displaying the Learning Pyramid, which reports the average retention rates from various methods of teaching. Lectures resulted in a 5 percent rate of retention. Audio and Visual Aids increased student retention rate to 20 percent; Demonstration resulted in a 30 percent rate. Immediate Use of Learning (when students were asked to apply what they had just learned by teaching it to others) resulted in a 90 percent retention rate.
The Successful Cooperative Learning Activity
Cremaschi emphasized five important elements necessary in creating an effective cooperative learning activity:
- Face-to-face interaction: students must have the opportunity to interact with each other, whether through discussion, listening, or teaching each other.
- Cooperative skills: students should develop skills such as dealing with multiple viewpoints and accepting and giving constructive criticism.
- Group interdependence: students must realize that they need each other in order to complete the task. The instructor-s responsibility is to ensure that students share common responsibilities and goals and may choose to assign students specific roles within the group as well as provide the possibility of joint rewards.
- Individual accountability: in a group setting, it is still necessary to insure that individual work is done. Teachers should frequently assess students on an individual basis, at random times.
- Group processing and self-evaluation: the students are autonomous; at the end they must evaluate their own work (both the process and end result) and evaluate how well they worked together.
Cooperative Learning Structures
Some important cooperative learning structures for use in the classroom were described:
- Jigsaw: Each student within the group receives a task to learn or knowledge to master. Students then work individually to master the task and teach each other what they learned. One or more students from the group share the whole with the class.
- 3-Step Interview: Student A quizzes, coaches, or teaches Student B and vice versa. At the end, each student shares with the class the information received from his/her partner. (This is an effective way to polish repertoire, read new repertoire, find tricky spots within a piece, or do a flash card review of concepts.)
- Think-Pair-Share: Students first work individually on material presented by the teacher. They then pair up to discuss and come up with a single best solution (Interdependence). Each pair shares their answers with the rest of the class (Accountability). (This structure is well-suited for harmonization exercises where students can compare chord choices and decide on the best answer. This is also effective for reading a new piece, transposition exercises, and more.)
- Group Investigation: Designed by Sharan, another pioneer in the field of cooperative learning, this is an effective learning structure for long-term class projects. Students form groups based on a common interest or topic and devise strategies for how they'll approach their investigation. The group synthesizes the information they find and presents their findings to the entire class.
- Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD): The teacher presents the material. Students then study and review the material together, quizzing each other on the material taught. At the end, students are quizzed individually, receiving an improvement score according to how well they are performing compared to their usual level. Teams receive recognition for the sum of their improvement scores.
- Teams-Games-Tournaments (TGT): Similar to STAD but consisting of games instead of quizzes, team members work and study together. They then divide to compete in tournaments with members from other teams. Points are awarded for successful completion of a task.
A Few Specific Applications of Cooperative Learning Techniques for Group Piano
Several effective cooperative learning activities in group piano were illustrated, either through video clips of group piano classes in action or through active participant involvement. These activities are based on the structures described above.
- Note Reading Jigsaw: A video clip showed a teacher with a group of younger students engaged in the task of note reading, an activity that was described to the students as "a game where you're going to teach each other." The teacher assigned each student an acronym, asking the student to memorize it silently. Each student then taught the acronym to the group (EGBDF, for instance, was taught as "Every Grizzly Bear Digs Fish"). The acronym was repeated by the group as a whole, and the teacher tested individual students by asking them to review it out loud.
- Sight Reading Drill Pair with Eye-Check: Student A plays the role of Performer/Thinker/Observer, scanning through a new piece and verbally identifying any potential problems (accidentals, rhythms, articulations, etc.). Student B, as Coach/Motivator, then provides additional suggestions. Student A sight reads the excerpt. During the performance, Student B monitors accuracy and eye movement, making note of how many times Student A looked down at his/her hands. (This activity was demonstrated at the beginning of the presentation, when Cremaschi and Fisher divided participants into dyads to read through "Dance" by Michael Praetorius.)
- Technique Tournament: A video clip showed a group piano class engaging in a tournament where student teams worked together to help each other learn required technical skills (major and minor scales and arpeggios, Hanon exercises, etc.). Teams competed in a play-off tournament that consisted of various rounds with each round containing a specific required skill. Prizes such as candy or bonus points were awarded to the winning team. Fisher found this activity to be a great motivating tool for learning keyboard technique and was an enjoyable way for students to develop their skills. Students also developed a sense of camaraderie and team spirit in the process.
- Improvisation Investigation: A video clip was shown of a group piano project, "Group Improvisation," which involved student research on various genres of American music (jazz, swing, bebop). The clip showed one group of students playing sound clips of their group's selected genre, describing characteristics of that genre, and performing their ensemble improvisation in that particular style for the rest of the class. This proved to be a good introduction to the concept of improvisation in a stylistically appropriate manner.
Several detailed handouts were provided which contained further applications of cooperative learning techniques to group piano teaching, group project ideas, and a comprehensive list of resources. Resources included literature on cooperative learning theory, technique, and its application to the classroom, written by Johnson and Johnson, Kagan, Slavin, Sharan, Kaplan, as well as Drs. Cremaschi and Fisher themselves.
© 2007 University of South Carolina School of Music