Quality School and Outstanding Teachers

How to choose a school...

I am often asked how a person can determine which school is better for their child to attend. I have often pondered that question and could provide a very detailed list of attributes, but that isn’t the sort of answer that is expected. How would one evaluate such a list either from the outside or inside? So I have answer by saying I would select the best teacher regardless of the school. Based on the idea good teachers and bad teachers can be found in most schools, making the selection of the teacher more important than the school. However, the standardization of schools, which has resulted in a standardization of teachers has caused me to rethink that answer. Mandated curriculums within school districts are meant to remove individual freedom so there may no longer be significant differences within schools themselves. This standardization of teachers, so to speak, reduces differences between teachers and sometimes increases differences between schools that choose significantly different ways for students to achieve the standards. Therefore, as teachers within a school system are more similar and schools become less similar with different curriculums, then I how else might we determine one school as better than another?

To investigate this idea I reviewed my list of attributes of good schools and good teachers. Thoughts on what is education and the kinds of interactions children need in their daily experiences to prepare them for limitless possibilities in their future. The one attribute I referenced more than any other was, motivation. It seems to me motivation is an essential key to an answer. How important is motivation and what motivates today’s children and adolescents?

The first idea that came to my mind was video games, but I rejected that idea because video games seem to be more motivational to males than females and I didn’t think I could relate to video games and feel the emotions related to them as strongly as I have seen my grandchildren relate to them. My next thoughts were television, movies, and then music. Music, that’s something with which I am familiar. Music has motivated me all my life. I have seen my own children and my grandchildren motivated by music during all stages of their lives. So, let me use music to reflect on motivation and how motivation relates to why people listen to music. Hopefully, the answer will provide insight as to what good schools and teachers are better at creating.

So how is music motivational to me, children, and adolescents? What causes us to turn on the music? To constantly seek more, appreciate variety, new pieces, and new musicians? What continues to fuel a desire to find quality music? I think it is the kind of response a listener has to a piece of music. If they think a piece is awesome, they want to listen to it again or find another piece to have a similar experience. I imagine people that continually listen to music have had positive kinds of experiences. Listening to really good music causes you to be wrapped up in a richness of many different sounds and pitches together in harmony pushing against you rhythmically from all directions with the feeling that you are floating in a river of sound as you are on a journey through thoughts and feelings you desire to experience. Experiences you eagerly anticipate and with the accompaniment of the music you’re confident of what feelings and experiences lie ahead.

These kinds of musical experiences are motivational. How can these experiences that motivate people to listen to music be described? And what might be a relationship to quality teachers and schools?

First, I would like to give this experience a name. A label to use that is descriptive of these kinds of musical experiences. A word whose definition is this experience. The first word that came to mind was appreciation. Which describes what I have for the experience and the music that is capable of providing it, but it doesn’t communicate the power of the experience itself or the emotional charge a person has from such an experience. This thought led me to think about athletes being in "the zone" when they have an incredible game and how athletes describe their experience as being in the "flow" of the game. Acting and reacting without conscious thought, doing what seemed right and what one has done so many times before that it is automatic. But, that would be more descriptive of musicians when they perform a piece of music rather than the experience of the listener. I really could not find a word so I decided to think of a phrase. I immediately though “appreciative experience”. Not very catchy and it doesn’t seem to convey the complete emotional aspect of the experience, but outstanding musical experiences are certainly appreciated and valued enough to continue to listen to music with the desire to discover music capable of providing new meaningful emotional experiences or selecting known pieces of music to relive or awaken previous emotional experiences so they might be enjoy again because previous experience have created an appreciation for that piece or type of music. So “appreciative experience” may not have the glitz that I had hoped for, but it will suffice so that I can continue to describe what I have discovered about appreciative experiences with music.

What is an example of an appreciative experience. There are many pieces of music, but I will pick a classic that most people are familiar - Tschaikowsky’s 1812 Overture. Most everyone who has listened to a live performance of this masterpiece or a good recording of it has had the hairs on the back of their neck stand up when the cymbals crash and the cannon fires. You just want to stand, throw your arms in the air, and experience the joy that comes from being so close to a performance of such an outstanding piece of music. You are not listening to any one particular instrument. You recognize the cymbal crash and the cannon boom, but if you think about either too long the musical high from the appreciative experience will stop. If you stop thinking about the cannon and return to the full blast of the Overture you can climb back to the musical high and float with the music until the vibration of the final note dies away. I think we all agree that quality music provides appreciative experiences, but what about other kinds of music? I find it rare that a solo artist or a small group of musicians, less than a handful, are able to perform at a level to induce appreciative experiences. I do find some popular music is able to achieve this, but to do so the lyrics, arrangement, and quality of instrumentation must support each other optimally for the music be an appreciative experience. When this happens there is enough going on so the listeners’ senses are activated for maximum input. He or she becomes excited and stimulated to a high degree to listen and hear everything. Yet during this mental stimulation the body becomes relaxed. The brain may flash the identity of different instruments, but only in the briefest of communication so as not to distract from listening to everything by focusing on one particular instrument or singer. Flashes of recognition for sounds being made by violins, flutes, a saxophone, snare drum, base guitar, tom drums, high-hat, rhythm guitar, trumpets, and maybe a lead singer and background singers. Once the different sources of sound are recognized it becomes possible to hear each different sound simultaneously among all the different sources within the piece of music. Whether a listener can actually identify what is going on or not isn’t always necessary for a person to have an appreciative experience. It is possible for a person to have an appreciative experience and not know how it was achieved. So to test an idea I ask you to try an experiment. Think of a type of music that you like or at least find a bit better than tolerable and select from it a piece of music that has a variety of instrumentation or combination of vocals and instrumentation. Find a good set of head phones or a location where you can sit, relax, and really listen to your selection without interruption. Adjust the volume and balance of the head set so that it sounds as if the music is inside the center of your head. No, it doesn’t have to be loud to achieve this. In fact if the music is too loud it will detract from the effect. Start the selected piece of music, relax and listen. You may want to close your eyes for better concentration and listening enjoyment. Try to identify what instrument or singer is making which sound, but as soon as you identify the sound or instrument stop focusing on it and let it blend back in with all the other sounds. Keep identifying sources of different sounds until you have identified five to ten. Then listen to the song and try to hear them all together. Relax, enjoy, and an uplifting feeling will come over you. That is the feeling of “appreciative experience”. Does it become stronger when the quality of the music gets better? Yes!

Recently, one of the most played pieces of music on radio was American Idiot by Green Day. It has within it short runs where the artists created and performed a piece of music that achieves, for a large number of listeners, a musical appreciative experience. Listen to this piece and see how the appreciative experience rises and falls during the song.
During the summer of 2006 the Dixie Chicks had a music video My Way. On VH1 it surpassed all previous records for consecutive weeks as the number one video. The lyrics, orchestration, and singing in that piece has enough power and emotional appeal to create an appreciative experience for many listeners. Without the power that is created by quality musicians, a quality composition, or the communication of a powerful message there can not be appreciative experiences and without appreciative experiences children and adolescents wouldn’t listen to music. Think about it?

Within American culture music consumption is way out of whack with the promotion of music. There are very few cultural pressures on children and adolescents telling them to study music, that music is important in their lives, that more music needs to be taught in schools, or that America needs to be number one in the world in music. There is no national agenda stating that all children by third grade need to be able to music. Yet almost every adolescent is fluent in popular music.

Could it be that schools today are trying too hard to teach? Has the information taught in schools evolved to a point that it can not create for students appreciative experiences?
The first years that I taught in a public elementary school school I taught reading with reading groups, had students review vocabulary for a story in a basil read, read the story in a basil reader, and discuss or write answers to questions about the story. All to help students build vocabulary, be better readers, and improve their literal and interpretive comprehension. In skill groups students worked skills that accompanied the basil series through practice sheets in a workbook and skill maintenance packages. As the years rolled by and distractions from reading increased I actually decreased the amount of time I spent on “teaching reading” while maintaining the same amount of actual time for reading class. During that time students chose what they wanted to read. Most chose chapter books over stories in the basil reader. Skills were still taught, but students could pick and chose different activities and ways of learning and practicing those skills. On average students read more, the selections of what they read included literary structures that were more advanced than what was in the basil reader, I saw more application of reading skills learned in reading class being applied outside of reading class, and the class average on achievement tests edged up from year to year. The more the students were able to chose an appreciative experience the more they read and the better they were able to read.

So how does this help to answer what is the better teacher or the better school? I now believe that the better school is the one that empowers teachers to provide students opportunities to make choices, choices that teachers use as opportunities to encourage and facilitate student learning to higher achievement through appreciative experiences that can incrementally build understanding of important powerful ideas while maintaining a child’s curiosity and building a passion for learning that will be sustained for a life of learning.

It is the appreciative experiences that motivates. Schools and teachers that understand this will have the highest rates of achievement. They will seek to understand the needs of their students, provide appropriate experiences, and motivate through encouragement, success, and appreciative experiences. This combination over time will develop the intrinsic motivation needed for students to achieve their potential. Nothing more powerful in motivating students will ever be found.

I have always enjoyed learning and reading is a big part of that. I couldn’t imagine that people would choose not to learn or not to read. However, I do know people who claim they have never had an appreciative experience in reading. Or if they have, the total number of those experiences needed to become an active reader was less than the number of appreciative experiences required for that individual to be motivated to continually choose or seek reading experiences. To remedy this problem I believe we need to encourage students through more choices in their reading to increase the likelihood of them having a critical mass of appreciative experiences so they might reach their magic number to become self motivated to read and learn. The more we “teach” reading than allow reading to happen, the less likely a number will be reached to activate a love of reading and learning.