Procedures Maximize Learning

Hello again! With the break underway and my student teaching around the corner, I've been wanting to reflect on the great experiences I gained from this past semester. I observed a great middle school teacher, worked with a small high school concert band, conducted the ASU Wind Ensemble, gave presentations to elementary kids, taught a few lessons, read a great book on teaching for recreation, and took a couple of education classes, one of which was specifically for middle and high school pedagogy and was very in depth (I read the text from cover to cover, which was not easy with the way it was printed and written). I learned quite a bit, and hopefully these reflections will help me to retain much of it, while also sharing it with anyone who might be interested. Great teachers already know the importance of today's topic - procedures.

This is an AMAZING book!

The recreational book I referenced is Mr. and Mrs. Wong's "The First Days of School", a book that transforms veteran teachers who have struggled and sets up rookie teachers for break out success. It covers four major areas of being a professional educator, with the most in-depth chapter covering Classroom Management. In this chapter they stress the importance of procedures: teaching them, rehearsing them, and reinforcing them until they become routines, or habits.

A procedure is basically a specific way of accomplishing a specific task. It is you explaining to the students exactly how you want them to do something. Why is this important?

Procedures are important to everyone. They allow us to get on about our business from day to day in an organized manner. Society has procedures for everything, from how to drive to what to do when people are getting on and off an elevator (wait for people to step out before entering, for example). If you don't tell the students how something should be done, you're creating a void which they will fill on their own. After all, you can't get upset when students do something you don't like if you didn't tell them how it should be done before hand. Why would a student remove their hat or iPod headphones if you didn't tell them that was your expectation? Do you see my point?

(Procedures are a simple concept. You can probably list
several procedures used by ensembles, conductors, and
audience members during public concerts. Remember how
we learned them? They were taught, rehearsed, and reinforced.)

Also important to note is that procedures are different from rules. Violating rules requires punishment. They tell you generally what is and is not acceptable behavior. Procedures are not punishable, only correctable. They explain how you do something. For example, how do you enter the room? How do you leave the room? How is attendance taken? Who dismisses the class (the bell or the teacher)? How do you fix certain problems in the music? What should students do when they're not playing? These are not classroom rules, but rather procedures that must be taught. If they are taught, rehearsed, and reinforced, then over time they become student habits. Teachers who are meticulous about establishing procedures for everything build classes that can eventually run themselves and maximize learning in the time you have, even in the event that you have a substitute teacher.

What I've noticed in my observations as well as in my reading and reflection of my own experiences is that there are two categories of procedures for band/music rehearsals: classroom procedures, and rehearsal procedures.

"The First Days of School" is a tremendous resource for Classroom Procedures. Classroom Procedures deal with how the class operates. How you enter and leave the room, how you transition from one activity to another, take attendance, pass in assignments (in core classes). In music there are specific things to consider, like what students should do when they're not playing, practicing raising the instruments when you raise the baton, how you get their attention, or get them to stop playing, and so on.

Rehearsal Procedures in some cases are very similar, but I like to think of them a little differently. I consider these the procedures we use regularly to fix problems. Many of these we wouldn't think about because we've done them so many times, but beginning band students must be taught how to do them, and then the procedures can be reinforced through repetition until graduation. For example, if they're playing wrong notes, you can have them "Note name and finger" rather than play. If it's a rhythm problem, we have them, "Count" or "Count and finger". Teachers calls these their "bag of tricks", but in most cases, we could call them procedures. And if you use them often and consistently, fixing problems can become an automatic response rather than something that requires a great deal of thought and explanation.

How does this maximize learning? Simple - it maximizes your time. It does require some up front investment to teach the procedures, but this always pays off. I'll go into more detail in parts two and three, but here is one example.

Most of us have been in bands that were great and bands that were what we would consider undisciplined. One of our biggest pet peeves (and surely for our teachers as well) is that when they asked for our attention, the people around us wasted so much time getting quiet. How long does it take for a teacher to get a group's attention when they're off task or even helping each other with the music and thus not focusing on the teacher? As much as thirty seconds? Perhaps more? What about when the band is playing and the conductor gives a cut off or raps the baton on their stand to get us to stop. How long does it take for the band to stop? In good groups, it is an immediate response. The conductor has conditioned the ensemble to stop immediately and focus on them. In mediocre and bad groups, this reaction (whether it's to stop talking or stop playing) can take 5-30 seconds. Multiply that by the number of times a conductor must get the group's attention in a 45-55 minute rehearsal, and suddenly it's not a stretch to think that the group has lost several minutes of rehearsal time that they will ultimately never get back. How many problems could have been fixed? How much more could you have taught them?

And isn't that a depressing waste of time?

Yet many teachers out there have not learned how to do this. They probably were never trained in how to do it correctly, and perhaps have not looked in the right places to get the information. Or perhaps they're one of those teachers who has read the material, but thinks they can modify and leave out certain steps and still get it to work, then get frustrated when it doesn't work and toss out the process all together, blaming the kids for not caring about learning.

Everyone suffers. The students miss out on a great or even good education and the teacher lives with daily anxiety and a general sense of failure, perhaps eventually leaving the profession they worked so hard to enter, and that promised to be so rewarding. I've already met several such folks in my time in college, who were excited to teach music and ultimately discovered "it was not for them".

This is why procedures are so important, and why having a procedure for everything is so important. The more procedures you create for anticipated needs, the more efficiently you can use the precious little time available to you, and thus maximize learning for the students, resulting in amazing ensembles with passionate and musical performances. Procedures also offer some routine and consistency for those who need it most, the children whose home lives are chaotic and unstable on a day to day basis. It doesn't just maximize your learning time, it contributes to a person's positive personal and emotional growth. Amazing, isn't it?

I'm obviously sold on procedures, and I think any master teacher is as well. I hope anyone else reading this who isn't saying, "Well, duh Chris" is now convinced as well. Please tune in next time for my second entry where I'll reflect on Classroom Procedures. It may seem more boring than the rehearsal procedures I mentioned, but classroom procedures are critical for reducing the amount of time wasted on things that have nothing to do with getting better. I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty enticing to me. Plus, I'll share the procedures that I've observed, experienced, or considered, and otherwise plan to use so that you have specific examples to work with.

Thanks for reading, and until next time, take care!

Musically yours,
Mr. Cooper

PS. Interested in reading "The First Days of School"? You can find that and many other great products by Harry and Marry Wong at EffectiveTeaching.com. But don't just read it... apply it!

Continue to Part II (Classroom Procedures)