Most music lessons involve active responding – students singing, playing instruments, dancing or chanting. Lessons that keep students engaged throughout instruction lead to payoffs on their understanding and retention. This is also how teachers can continuously monitor learning and behaviour. For example, when you sing a five-note pattern and ask students to echo it back, you hear correct and incorrect responses, or there are no responses and inattentiveness. That immediate feedback helps you adjust your lesson – you might repeat instructions for the task, home in on a particular student or two to provide support, or modify the instruction altogether.
The challenge of listening to music
Just as important as producing music is listening to it and understanding what you're hearing. Listening exercises are critical for developing a student's musical skills. Unlike when a student plays a line of music on an instrument – where you can count errors or note points where they hesitate – there aren't any in-the-moment observable behaviours that tell you whether a student is getting it (or not) during a listening exercise. While listening to a piece of music, students could be overlooking the elements you've highlighted in your lesson or otherwise lack the prerequisite skills to absorb what they're hearing.
It's true that you can't see what your students are thinking during a listening exercise, but there are ways to get a glimpse into their attention and comprehension. Student performance while playing an instrument should be monitored by an instructor, and so should student listening. Let's look at some strategies you can implement to make this happen in the three phases of a listening exercise: before, during, and after. In each phase, it's possible to get students actively engaged and therefore to increase their likelihood of meeting learning objectives.
Before the listening exercise
- Preview the piece with students and teach them vocabulary that is relevant to what they are about to hear. Early on, when students are learning to effectively listen to music, they may have a limited or imprecise vocabulary for identifying and calling out elements (such as dynamics, rhythm, instrumentation). Having only a few words when approaching any subject or content makes it difficult to engage with and discuss it. Choose a few key vocabulary words that will help your students listen better and have a meaningful discussion afterwards. For example, you might focus on changes in dynamics and teach students piano and forte. Those two words will allow them to interact with the lesson in a deeper way, rather than at a passive, surface level.
- Create and review a listening or story map for the exercise. Priming students for the rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution of a musical piece gives them greater access to what they'll hear in the piece. A listening/story map can be a great way to show hard-to-describe concepts like timbre, layering of voices, and form.
- Set expectations for what students should do during the exercise. Rather than jump into a listening exercise without any preparation, set some expectations to make the experience go better. You want students to be quiet so they can benefit from the listening, but you might also ask them to do something during the piece that will prepare them for what they'll be doing after the exercise.
During the listening exercise
- Incorporate silent action responses to keep students engaged and let them demonstrate their attention to specific musical features. If you've primed students for a piece by showing them a listening map that highlights what they'll hear, add some action responses to check that they're attending. For example, if the trumpet section carries the main theme, ask students to give you a thumbs up when they hear that theme. Or they could give you finger numbers (1, 2, 3) to signal changes in dynamics—from forte (3) to piano (1). Students could also move their finger in the air to indicate the direction pitches are moving in a piece (up, down, or no change). There are many ways to increase active engagement that do not involve saying a word or disrupting others.
- Add a hear-write exercise. If students have a whiteboard, tablet/laptop, or piece of paper, ask them to write down things they hear while listening to the piece. They can make a short list of instrumentation, musical effects, dynamics, timbre, themes, and so forth. If you've presented a listening map at the start of the exercise, they might try redrawing that map as they listen to the piece.
- Play/listen ▸ pause ▸ ask a question ▸ continue/replay. During the first or subsequent listens of the recording, play a short segment, pause the recording, ask a comprehension question, and continue the recording or replay the segment if students need to hear it again. For example, if there are two themes repeated throughout a piece, pause after each theme and ask which one it was, and which instrument(s) played it.
After the listening exercise
- Pair up your students to discuss their observations. If you've followed some of the strategies from before and during the exercise, you'll be ready to put your students into pairs so they can calibrate their observations with each other. During the before and during phases, you've set them up to listen for specific musical features and identify what they're hearing as part of a musical narrative. Once partners have had a chance to discuss, solicit answers from each pair to gauge their attentiveness and connection to what they heard.
- Summarise the lesson and connect student responses to the listening map. Based on student pair responses, you'll know how to focus your lesson summary. Think about what students forgot to mention or get incorrect. If students didn't catch the way two instruments responded to each other in the listening segment, go back and review that segment to point it out. As with any lesson, your attention to content at any given moment should meet your instructional objectives for the exercise.
