9 minute read
Positive Behaviour - it's instrumental!
Laura Foster, Primary Music Consultant for Hertfordshire Music Service, discusses how to manage instruments in the classroom.
Does the set-up of musical instruments contribute to behaviour management in the music classroom? Is it explicitly taught for trainee music teachers, in a music teacher’s early career, or even at all? If you were a general classroom teacher, teaching music for the first time, where would you even begin when thinking of how to organise and give out boomwhackers, djembes or drumsticks with a very lively Year 6 class?
I work as a primary music curriculum teacher in six schools, teaching 30 classes a week from Nursery through to Year 6. A few of the schools are lucky and have enough drums for every child to have one each. However some of the schools only have a couple of drums, and the rest are percussion instruments which just allow for one per child, with no spares There is not always a dedicated ‘music room’; most of my lessons take place in school halls, some in classrooms, and the rest in music classrooms. I know well the challenges of transporting instruments around a school, setting up in different classrooms, and changing instruments around for the next lesson with only a couple of minutes (or no time at all) between classes!
I believe that the more thought and advanced-planning as to how instruments will be distributed, the smoother the lesson is likely to go – especially with trickier classes. For this reason, I would suggest that trainee teachers/EQTs should have a section of their lesson plan for ‘instrument/room set-up’, and more experienced teachers could make a note of it in their medium term plans.
A tip I was given as a trainee teacher in a school in Caerphilly, Wales, in 2008, was “It’s all in the preparation!” This was for a very lively class with a high number of SEND pupils and not enough additional adult support. The room was set up as much as physically possible – instruments ready, music sheets already handed out, and a task already on the board to start as soon as they entered the room. So ‘extreme preparation’ is still a technique which I continue to this day for any particularly lively class, although as it is time-consuming, so I only do it when absolutely necessary.
Another tip, from someone on my current team, was to “Always start with call and response – no matter what the instrument!” I have found this extremely helpful and use this from Nursery right through to Year 6. It means we can all play the instruments straight away, to ‘get it out of our systems’, as we all know how tempting it is to have an instrument in front of you but not play it!
Nursery copy very simple patterns, whilst Year 6 copy syncopated rhythms, dotted rhythms and triplets. They are then ready to listen and ready to learn.These rhythmic C&R patterns work fine on all percussion instruments including tuned percussion (you could just use one note to do C&R rhythmic patterns on xylophones), and boomwhackers of different notes are fine to be played all together if just doing rhythmic patterns. It is probably the one tip which has had the most significant impact on my behaviour management with instruments than any other.
Boomwhackers
Boomwhackers are fantastic, but also have the potential for musical chaos! When organising the room, I first line up the Boomwhackers in order – this only takes a few minutes if you have written down the ‘notes needed’ in your lesson plan (an absolutely essential part of boomwhacker lesson-planning. Boomwhacker YouTube videos also display the ‘notes needed’ in the introduction.
For example, I would set up boomwhackers on the classroom floor like this to be able to play the ‘chorus’ of Star Wars, checking that I have a minimum of 30 boomwhackers available using the required selection of notes. If not – I would use untuned percussion instruments like claves to fill the gaps,
As a class, we then discuss (EVERY lesson, briefly) the 3 rules of using Boomwhackers - keep within your personal space; where to bounce the boomwhacker (not at the very end – this will dent it!) and trying your very best not to lean or tread on them when moving around the room.
For ‘Star Wars’ I then separate the class into 6 groups (because there are 6 different notes in this piece) – then one group/colour at a time, they are asked to collect their boomwhackers. As soon as they take one back to their place in the circle – they have to make a ‘boomwhacker pipe’ on the floor and sit behind their own one. They also have to do this every single time we stop or have a break from playing and they soon learn to make this in less than one minute.
This is a quick and effective way of getting everyone to stop playing, and not pick up the boomwhacker again until the next instruction is given; I have found this to be an essential tool in all of my boomwhacker lessons.
Percussion
Few schools will have access to 30 drums, so in schools which have between 10-15 drums, I would set up the room like this (alternating drums and claves/egg shakers). This also helps with overall volume so is a technique which can be used with more lively classes, even if there are 30 drums available. If there are fewer drums (even as few as five), you can still rotate a number of times so that over a couple of lessons, every pupil will get a turn on a drum.
Before children enter the room, I tell them – “Don’t worry if you don’t have a drum! We will move round half-way through the lesson”. We will then rotate one place round, and in some lessons, we rotate multiple times. Children like that this is fair, and it’s important they know this at the start, otherwise they may be very disappointed to have a small egg shaker all lesson when their partner has got a Tabla drum or Djembe!
For drumming using 30 pairs of drumsticks each, I keep them in the bag for the start of the lesson, recap the rules on using drumsticks, then do a body percussion piece to music whilst two pupils sensibly put a pair on the floor in front of every child. Before handing out we also do a very brief recap of the 3 rules – which helps even very lively classes stay safe whilst each having a pair of drumsticks.
Vintage
I have included this topic as I feel that allowing some pupils to make their own decisions about whether they want to play an animal skin/fur drum is a part of positive behaviour management and promoting respect for each other in the classroom.
I have mixed views around using these instruments, although I can’t really describe what is so different about them as opposed to wearing leather shoes. I think it’s that drums are inessential items, but also that some drums are ‘decorative’ with their real fur in a way that makes it quite visually obvious that it’s from an animal.
I don’t discuss this in depth with any classes, but I always allow children the choice to swap their drum if they are uncomfortable using it. I feel it is respectful to them to allow them this decision, for whatever reason (vegetarianism/veganism/religious) – and I deliberately don’t ask them why. If a child asks what they’re made from, I briefly say that they are real animal skin/fur, probably not instruments which we would buy now, but as they have already been made and are old instruments which have been in the school for years, in my opinion ‘the damage is already done’ and we may as well make use of them. I think that as long as student autonomy is respected, they could still be used (at the discretion of the teacher). Most pupils don’t mind playing them, and a couple do, so we just swap. I’m glad that I’ve had this approach, as recently I’ve had a pupil ask me about a drum because he was worried about this for Halal reasons; a valid and important reason.
I also sometimes draw children’s attention to the craftsmanship of some of the instruments their school has. For example, last lesson we briefly looked at this amazing drum, and spent a few minutes as a class wondering about the person who handmade it – and the beautiful carving which they had put so much work into, probably taking a number of weeks to complete. In this example, you can literally see marks inside the drum where it’s been hollowed out of a large piece of wood I think it’s important to occasionally talk about instruments in this way – many good quality instruments are made by hand and are sometimes ‘ one of a kind.’ Of course all of these brief classroom conversations need to be handled with cultural sensitivity (and in the UK we have plenty of examples of similar use of animal skin, but it just happens that we don’t have as many examples of animal skin/fur drums). I think we can still appreciate the beauty, craftmanship and labour that went into creating them. I am also honest with classes if I don’t know the name of a type of drum or the country it’s from – I’m not certain about the names or origins of either of these drums and I tell classes this. The second picture shows another example of a beautifully handmade drum with elaborate patterns – again which I feel is worth pointing out as something of real cultural value within the school. Many djembes also appear to have individually hand-painted designs, with each one looking different and unique
In conclusion, I believe that prior organisation and planning how instruments will be handed out/collected in is an absolutely essential part of behaviour management in music, and so should be taught explicitly when training new music teachers, or indeed any primary classroom teacher who is new to teaching music. It appears to be the part of music lessons which is the most daunting to non-specialists – so perhaps it might be helpful if it featured more in primary classroom teacher PGCE programs and on-going music CPD courses. Anything that makes a teacher find it easier and feel more confident about teaching music can only be a good thing!
