Now, I don't want to have a race to the bottom, but I should tell you that you can buy drumsticks on Taobao for only 1RMB. That's $0.14 USD. Hey big-spender, go out and buy a class set for the price of $4.33! 

I'm telling you this because I learned about chair drum-sets at Musical Futures International this past weekend at a workshop in Hong Kong. You know when you learn something so fundamentally obvious that you just want to do a head-plant? That was me when I first learned about chair drum-sets. I tried to find a student video to show you, on YouTube, but there's none to be found. 

Basically, the kids play drums on their chairs. Yup. That's it. 

This is a screen capture from their tutorial PowerPoint. Your right foot steps up and down (pretending to be the bass). Your left hand hits the seat of the chair (snare drum) while your right hand hits the back of the chair (high hat). 

Then, you are given non-traditional notation - measures with pictures of the drum pieces, showing which are played on which beats. The files you get with MFI include cool rock favourites with the drums simplified and yet varied for the different sections of the song. It's harder than your typical, basic rock beat; it's much easier than intermediate drumming. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, it's just right! 

What if you don't have access to MFI files? Well, I made the salsa notation shown above. I simply Googled, "Salsa drums sheet music" and found an example from www.onlinedrummer.com.  Then I went to websites offering free clipart and quickly put together this picture. 
​
Here is an example from a workshop in Cyprus (you'll need a VPN, my China-based friends!) This is a teacher's workshop; however, when I was in Hong Kong, they had a grade 5 class learn this for the first time, and the kids picked it up really well. 

Why am I so impressed with chair drum-sets?
a) It's cheap and so you can get an entire class drumming immediately
b) It takes away the prestige of the drum set, in which only a few chosen kids get to play it. 
c) It gives the basic skills on drum set, so when the kids get into their creative cycle groups and start deciding on instruments, everybody in the group can already play
d) It's a great gateway to playing on a real set. It's a way of talking about proper hand positions, etc., before they get on a real kit

I should say, thought, that standing isn't very helpful. When we learned this in the workshop, the teachers all sat down. This was better because it was more comfortable, but also because it more closely mimicked a real drum set. (Drummers don't typically stand when they play a kit!)

I'm in the middle of the creative cycle right now, so it's too late to introduce this to my classes. However, next semester's grade 6s are definitely all going to try this. I'm excited and am getting ready NOW!

Yet another reason why I love Musical Futures International (MFI) - they get a whole class playing along. It's a perfect example of differentiation. 

Let me just start off by saying I fully believe in playing several instruments. As international school teachers, we expect our students to speak a minimum of two languages, but we know students who speak three or four quite well. Why not with instruments?

MFI has a 'Just Play' system in which students in a class rotate through instruments on the exact same song. Let's say you have a class of 24 students and your instruments are voice, chair drums (more on that in another post!), ukulele, keyboards (more on that in another post!), bass, and guitars. You are going to have four students on each section. The experienced guitarists will simply be given chords; beginners will have sponges placed in their lowest three strings and will play with simplified fingerings. The keyboardists (and note, these are kids who may not know how to play piano!) will be given crib sheets that show root position chords. On the screen, they'll see an animated lead sheet. As the students are learning the piece (discussing its structure, use of chords, improvising solos, etc.), the teacher keeps swapping groups.  "Everybody move to the group beside them and play those instruments!" This gives the kids a foundation on all the instruments found in the room, improves their listening skills because they always have to be focusing on the chord changes on their new instrument, and keeps them from getting complacent ("Sorry. I only play bass.")

Here's an explanation of how it works:

Why is this so helpful to the IB specifically? Well, at NIS, music is an elective. I have some, but not a lot, of choice in students. For example, if I get 10 drummers in one semester, the school takes pity on me and does some swaps. Otherwise, I get whomever I get.  When it comes to the creative cycle, it's sometimes hard to put together balanced groups because we don't want to end up with a pro group and then two groups with absolute beginners who can't play anything! Also, that's not really 'student voice and choice,' which is a strategy statement at my school.  Now imagine a class in which every single child has experience on voice, keyboard, ukulele, bass, drums and guitar. In this scenario, the kids have much more freedom in choosing their own groups and repertoire. Before, teachers might have said, "Well, that group has three guitarists, so I have to give you a pianist."  However, now there's much more flexibility. Now the question might simply be, "Will Bobby be on-task if he's working with Mike?" The question of feasibility in groupings has been solved. 

"Yes, Amy, but what if you get 5 drummers in one group?" Well, that's a comment for the next blog post. See you next week!

I used to be a purist. I used to hate TAB because I wanted students reading bass clef notation. Even kids who barely spoke English, had no music background, and were only going to be in my class for a trimester once in a three year period. Then I realised that was just not going to happen. That's when I started moving to meeting their needs. For example, If kids were 100% beginners on the bass, I'd just have them playing open strings and simple roots. If they had some experience, I moved them to TAB. Once they were intermediates, I started moving them to traditional notation. Musical Futures International advocates something very similar. In fact, they have these really cool Power Points in which animated chord chords show the piano, bass, ukulele, and guitar chords moving with the lyrics. 

Here's something that was controversial (to me), but once I wrapped my mind around it I really liked it. I have a guitar student who is a purist. He believes that students need to start off with the proper chords on full sized instruments because they need to stretch their hands and get used to quick changes. That's definitely true... for guitarists who love to practice for hours a day and will probably take grades 9 -> music. However, for my grade 6 who is taking music as an elective, and only has two classes available, learning the guitar in that short amount of time is very challenging. Musical Futures International advocates putting a piece of sponge under the first three strings of the guitar, then teaching the students the simplified chords. At first, this bothered me because I didn't want to teach the students something incorrect and then have to fix their hand positions later on (a.k.a. perfect practice makes perfect, right?). However, I realised that if the students still used the correct fingers in the simplified chords, then it'd be easier to move to the real chords later. ​

I could literally go on and on about how much I love Musical Futures International. In fact, I'm hoping to get them to run a workshop at Nanjing International School next year! However, I'm going to save that for another blog post (or ten).

At the same job alike (that I discussed below), the same amazing teacher was telling us about Musical Futures. She said she ran all her classes like workshops and they were extremely hands-on. One of the common complaints about the MYP is that class have the potential to turn into music appreciation classes about music instead of being hands-on classes doing music. Thus, I was really interested in what she was saying and immediately looked online to see what was what.

There are two Musical Futures and they are both from the UK. However, I got the low-down on this from one of the representatives, so I'll share as much as I can remember. The original Musical Futures was started as a grant-based organisation in the UK that was trying to motivate students in music classes. They found that students liked music but didn't like music classes and they were trying to reverse this trend. While focusing on UK students, they also started branching out throughout the world. When the grant came to an end, the UK branch now had to fund themselves, while the international branch wanted to remain open-source. This is why there are two Musical Futures right now; one caters specifically to the UK while the other has more of an international focus.  

This past week, I attended the introduction to Musical Futures International workshop in Hong Kong and was completely enthralled with what I discovered. Imagine if a group of IB educators sat down and said, "Let's make a really good music pedagogy to go with our assessment framework."  Imagine if Nanjing International School then looked at it and said, "Let's tweak it to fit our strategy / educational philosophy."  The result would be Musical Futures International.  Let me give you a few examples. At the workshop, they showed us the three types of knowledge that each student should learn. I found myself looking at slightly-differently-worded Criterion Ai, ii, and iii. Wow. A great IB fit.  Next, they showed us their five principles and I saw one of them was, "Student Voice and Choice."  Well, that's one of NIS' strategies. Meanwhile, the entire workshop was based on differentiation and inclusion, which are also part of NIS' strategy and mission statement. Even hear of, "Preaching to the choir?" That was my experience this weekend. Everything the workshop leaders said simply re-enforced the IB assessment framework with the NIS mission statement. Matches made in heaven. 

Now, why am I so excited about Musical Futures International? Because as a pedagogy, it really makes sense for international teachers with a high student turnover rate. Have you read my differentiation description on this blog? Stop for a second and go read it. It's a fun challenge to meet the needs of such a diverse student body, especially when music is an elective and kids pop in and out as they like throughout the the middle years. How do you have continuity of skills when one child has been with me for three years, one child is brand new, doesn't know music, and can't speak English, and one child took music in grade 5 and then not again until the last semester of grade 8? I had been doing the equivalent of music triage, or what I thought was music triage. Instead of focusing on music notation and moving towards performance, I was starting with performance and then working in music notation when appropriate. I had lots of little tricks and strategies to get kids on instruments as fast as possible. I was so happy when Musical Futures International also used a lot of strategies I was using, but tweaking them even further. I felt validated. It was a relief, to be honest. The workshop was really fun and engaging, and it made me want to do more, more, more. And in the midst of this, I knew, "Hey. I already do some of this stuff... I'm okay."