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Full Transcript:
Justin Baeder (00:00):
Welcome everyone to the Teaching Show. I’m your host Justin Baeder, and I’m honored to be joined in this episode by Chris Munce. Chris, welcome to the Teaching Show.
Chris Munce (00:10):
Hey, thanks Justin. I’m a big fan. Thanks for having me.
Justin Baeder (00:13):
Well, I’m excited to be on your podcast and to trade airtime with you here a little bit, but I was very excited to speak with you because I saw you demoing a technique in a video for having students read music. So you are a choral music teacher and an ensemble music teacher, and I got to see some pedagogy that we very rarely get to see and hardly ever talk about. That was just very, very specific to your subject.
Chris Munce (00:41):
You’re going to get nothing but the starting pitch. We’re going to memorize phrases without singing them, and then test to see if our ideation skills allowed us to do that.
Justin Baeder (01:08):
So tell us a little bit about yourself and then take us into that practice that I saw in the video.
Chris Munce (01:14):
Yeah, I’m happy to do that. So my name’s Chris and I am a veteran, I guess you could say now because I’m old music teacher outside of the Kansas City area, and I’ve been teaching for over 20 years, and my entire career has been at the high school level in a large high school in Missouri, and my whole career has been in that world. So I don’t have any elementary school experience or anything like that, but very, very specific to what I do. Mostly ensemble music. I also teach a music appreciation class, and then of course I do the Choralosophy podcast, which is a music education professional development, but also current topics and issues we discuss on the show, including controversial ones, but also ones that are meaningful to the lives of teachers. And there are things that we deal with all the time.
(02:05):
So I do all of those things and I wear lots of hats. Now in the video you’re referencing, best way I could explain this to you would be like I am a huge believer. Not all choral s music teachers are, but this is one of my crusades, is that we are one of the best weapons that a school district has to advanced literacy because the same parts of the brain light up when a person is reading music as when they’re reading any other language. So I’m a big music as a language person, and that it is a language that is very complicated in comparison to almost all other human languages because of the specificity that you have to have in terms of exact frequencies and durations. So the frequency and duration of the pitch, the time, the rhythm, all those things are more specific than other languages, but at every other aspect of it, it’s the same.
(02:58):
So if you think if I read English, I open up a piece of paper or a computer or whatever it is, and I see a bunch of symbols and squiggles and lines, and I look at those squiggles and lines and I hear a sound in my head, and it might be the word the right, but I see it, and as soon as I see THE on the page, I hear that sound and I also can contextualize it. For example, if I ask you what does mean? Well, then you would be like, that doesn’t mean anything. I need context. But as soon as you put the after it, well, that’s the word, and here’s how I would use that. And so I teach students that music does the same thing and we’re going to learn to look at these symbols on the page and we’re going to learn to read it with as much fluency as we would if it were English or Mandarin Chinese or whatever language we’re learning to read, which is also a pitched language, by the way, Mandarin’s a language.
(03:55):
And so there’s very similar concepts there. And so in the video you saw, those were, in fairness, my advanced kids, because I teach in my program, we have beginning level music for kids who have never done music before. They can jump right in and start, and then they can get all the way up to advanced level, which you saw in that video where I passed out a piece of music, a relatively complicated piece of music for them that they had never seen before. And I had them open it. And because music requires specific pitch, I play a particular pitch which represents the key, the songs in, but that’s the only information they got. This is the key we’re in. And then I asked them to try to hear the music happening in their head by simply looking at it.
(04:42):
And then I asked them to memorize the music, but we had never sung it before, so they had to then close their eyes. And I said, okay, one, two, ready go. And they had to sing the music from memory that they had never sung and heard out loud at all. And what I was demonstrating to them and to other teachers in that video is that you can actually teach kids to do that with the music, which is mystifying to people, but if it was English, nobody would be mystified because you would look at it like, oh, well, they just read C Spot Run and they memorized it and they closed their eyes and they said, C Spot run. And everybody can do that. That’s easy. But the weird thing about my pedagogy I guess, is that I’m teaching kids to do that with music as well.
Justin Baeder (05:24):
I love it. And I love the opportunity for understanding that an observer gets from just kind of knowing what you’re going for, knowing what your instructional purpose is. And I think so often we second guess or we try to copy or we try to make some sort of decision about what we’re seeing without really understanding the internal logic of it. So you’re saying music is a language and is taught in many ways that are similar to teaching other languages?
Chris Munce (05:55):
Yeah, no, absolutely. And these are kind of innovations that through this platform on Oscopy that I’ve been developing, because again, this is not, what you saw is not normal, that’s not how most music classrooms operate, but we’re kind of creating a trend in the profession to go more towards this linguistic basis. So for example, when students are new in my program from the very beginning level, so ninth grade for us for the most part, or other kids who just decide to take it later, 11th graders even can take my class as a beginner. But what I do is I bring them into a private setting so that they’re not on the spot in about October of every school year. So when they’re brand new, we establish certain safety and trust In August, September and then early October, I bring them in and I screen them because by the high school level, nobody’s really taught them to read music before in my district for the most part.
(06:55):
And so I screen them very much like a young kindergarten teacher might screen a young student for literacy readiness and just like they might have leveled readers, for example, in a kindergarten class or a first grade class, I have a software that I use that is music reading by level. And so I determine, okay, this kid should be a level one reader right now. This kid should be a level two reader, and I assign them based on what I see in that evaluation. It’s like a pretest. And then their grade in my music class comes from their ability to progress through those levels by doing the practice assignments that I give them. And it gets to the point where in that video you saw those kids have all been through that process for three or four years. So they’re all reading at a level that would be considered professional level or collegiate level, but they’re doing it by 10th, 11th, and 12th grade because they’re doing it alone.
(07:53):
They’re doing it by themselves. And they’re getting that feedback from me about very much like a reading student in any other language would get, which is that, oh, yeah, so your fluency is not quite there yet. You’re decoding just fine, but you’re not moving through the music fluently. And so I use a lot of the same language that a science of reading type approach would. And I use that same type of language with music instruction as well. And it helps the kids a lot because then they start to demystify the music instead of saying things like, oh, I’m bad at music, or I’m good at music. Like, oh, I just need to work on my fluency. My kids will say stuff like that. And it impacts, I guess their psychology about the learning. Even if they mess up, they feel like, oh, well, I just need to work on this, this and this and I’ll be fine. That kind of thing. And so it really helps.
Justin Baeder (08:46):
I love it. And it seems like probably the more typical thing to do would be to tell students to read the music and then sing it or play it, right. Would that be the more normal exercise for reading music?
Chris Munce (08:58):
Yeah, of course. And we do that too. What I try to do is I try to change the way they interact with the music as much as possible so that they’re having to come to it from different angles. So for example, again, I’ll just keep using metaphors for written language and other things. If you were to say, oh yeah, I’m totally fluent in English, but then I start talking to you and you can’t understand anything I’m saying, then I would question whether or not you’re literate. And then you say, or would there not? You’re fluent and you say, well, but I can read it off the page. Well, okay, but then you’re not really fluent because I was fluent in French when I was younger, but then I stopped speaking it, and I can still read it off the page because I can go at my own speed, but if someone starts talking to me, I can’t understand French anymore.
(09:49):
It goes by too fast. And so I would no longer claim to be fluent. I’m literate. I’m moderately literate in French, but I’m no longer conversationally fluent. Music operates in a similar way. So not only do we do activities like you saw in the video, but I also do things like where I will simply play a song for them on a piano and ask them to write down what they heard. So they then have to notate the music that they heard, which again, a language fluency person would have to be able to do that. If I say C spot run, you should be able to write down “see spot run.” And so we teach the kids to go from that angle too, or sometimes it’s just error detection where I’ll show them music and I’ll play something or sing something wrong on purpose and have them go through and find where the error was, those types of things.
(10:40):
And by approaching it in all those different ways, they’re getting what I call the whole language of music approach. And then when we try to learn music that we perform, because we are a performance based curriculum, ultimately the goal is to get up on stage and do a song. But what we then do is because they’re getting all that approach that when I hand them a song, they’re no longer scared of it. They have the tools to go learn it themselves. And one of my big philosophies is that I don’t want to be the high priest of music in my classroom. I don’t want them to have to go through me to get to the music. I want them to have the tools for me to hand them the music, and then they can go off and learn it and get as much of that from their own skills as possible. Their pride in the final product is greater. At that point too, I did that. Mr months didn’t do that for me. I did that. And that’s one of my big things.
Justin Baeder (11:33):
And you’re really adapting to some extent, but you’re really developing new pedagogy that is not out there already, it sounds like.
Chris Munce (11:42):
That is correct. Yeah. And it gets me, I have enemies as a result. I mean, I’m really challenging the profession because there are certain kind of tried and true methods that I’ve made certain arguments against based on the way that I do it, but also because many teachers now over the last seven years, I’ve been kind of preaching this curriculum. People are doing this all over the country now and it’s working, but one of the reasons that I’m preaching it is that I believe that there’s an old way that we used to do music, and I grew up under this old way, which is that you basically, we were unwittingly privileging the kids in public school music classes that were coming to those music classes with prior music knowledge, and then we were lifting them up as the most talented ones and also lifting ourselves up as really good teachers.
(12:42):
But really it was just because somebody had learned music outside of school and they had come and then made me look really good as the music teacher because they were in my group and I taught under that model. And so when I say that I’m not criticizing others, I did it too. When I was a young teacher, I essentially was talent scouting. I was looking in the school building for the kids who have the most natural ability, and I was trying to pull them into my class so that we could make this good choir. And now my pedagogical approach is so different. It’s more like I want every kid because I believe that I can teach every kid to know how to do this. And if we can all do this, then that means that the kid who doesn’t have piano lessons, the kid who doesn’t have a mom who’s a stage mom, who puts them on stage from age four and makes them do all these things, those kids have always been privileged in music classes. But the kid, I want the kid to be successful in my class who’s shy, who stands off to the side and is not the stage kid. I’m a father also of a special needs learner who she’s dyslexic and has all kinds of learning challenges. I want her to feel smart in my class, and she’s currently an 11th grader in my class, and she feels like she’s smart because she can do it, because I’ve figured out the pedagogy I’m approaching. But it’s basically we’re grading on growth. I don’t care where you start.
(14:11):
Every kid in my class is going to get an A based on whether or not they’re getting better at all these things. It’s not how good they get. It’s whether or not they’re getting better at those things. And I’ve developed a system for tracking that and for keeping data and proving it and all that kind of stuff too. So I’m getting animated. You can tell I’m very passionate about this, but you’re right, it is a new approach to pedagogy.
Justin Baeder (14:34):
Well, Chris, if people want to learn more about that approach or about your podcast, where can they go online to find you?
Chris Munce (14:40):
So Choralosophy.com is the website. I’m on TikTok. I’m on Instagram Choralosophy, and I’m on Facebook. A lot of it is pedagogy stuff. And so on my website, I’ve created a place somebody could go and just hear episodes about teaching kids to read music, and so I’ve got that all on a sub page. It’s just Choralosophy.com/musicliteracy
Justin Baeder (15:00):
Wonderful. Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the teaching show. It’s been a pleasure.
Chris Munce (15:05):
Thank you so much.
