Choral

This is another technique presented by Doug Lemov in his collection of methods for classroom discipline that, to my mind, resonates strongly with his techniques for actual teaching. It’s quite simple, but very powerful: if you want someone to do something, tell them exactly what actions they need to take.

To elaborate: quite often if children (well, people) fail to follow an instruction, it’s not that they’re being deliberately obstructive, merely incompetent. An instruction such as ‘Behave yourself!’ is ambiguous; it tells the child they’re doing something wrong, but doesn’t state what’s actually required. Even the more specific, ‘Stop fidgeting!’ only makes it clear what’s wrong, not how to fix it.

‘Please sit down and face this way,’ gives a nice clear to-do list, and even a child who is in something of a bolshy mood might find it easier to just to get on with it than continue to resist in the face of such calm clarity.

As an addendum to my post from last week on Lemov’s principle that 100% compliance with instruction is fundamental to the achievements of a class (and by extension, in our context, a choir), I thought it worth going into a little more detail about some of the guidance he gives for how to achieve this. It does sound scarily draconian on first acquaintance, but the point of it is to make the culture of compliance invisible so that everyone just gets on with things without having to stop and belly-ache about it.

His first point is that we should always use the least invasive form of intervention. If you can get someone back on task using just eye contact, that’s all you should use. A reminder to the group as a whole can be a way to reinforce the universality of expectations while bringing attention to the fact they still need to be met. If it needs individualising, you can start this off anonymously - I particularly liked the formulation, ‘Still waiting for 3 people...1 person...and we’re ready to go’ as a way to make individuals accountable without drawing negative attention to them.

As I read through my last post on Lemov’s classroom techniques in preparation for starting this one, I noticed how certain central themes are already emerging. In particular, the principle that giving people the discretion to decide whether they commit their efforts and attention to the job in hand makes it harder for everyone to get on with it also lies at the heart of the two elements I’m going to look at today.

Lemov places ‘Right is Right’ and ‘100%’ in different sections of the book, the first in the section on setting high academic expectations, the second in the section about setting and maintaining high expectations for behaviour. Of course, both sections are about expectation-setting, so it is perhaps not surprising that their content resonates together. But it seemed to me that the two principles are much closer in the choral rehearsal than they are in the classroom, and it will be interesting to explore why.

One of the first techniques Doug Lemov introduces in his collection of classroom methods is the principle of No Opt Out - the notion that students don’t get to choose whether or not to participate, or indeed whether or not to succeed. It is interesting to consider, both because of the way it typifies his approach of finding practical ways to structure classroom interactions so as to embody a fundamental set of values, and therefore also as a case study for adaptation to the choral rehearsal. The specific form(s) of the interaction will change, but we can still find concrete, actionable steps to embody the principle.

So, the way this plays out in the classroom is as follows. The teacher asks a student a question. If they answer correctly, fine, carry on. If they struggle to answer, or try to slide out of trying to answer by saying ‘I don’t know’, the teacher finds a way to help them out of the impasse, but makes sure the interaction ends up with the student stating the right answer.

This is a spin-off from my current project of adapting ideas from Doug Lemov’s taxonomy of effective classroom methods to the rehearsal room. As I wrote my introductory post on the project, I had the following tangential thoughts on a subject that is a mainstay of choral discourse.

It is a widely-held truism that ‘leaners’ are a Bad Thing for a choir. Their failings may be treated as moral deficits: that they are lazy in letting other people do their learning for them. Or they may be seen as lacking in ‘talent’, and thus a drag on the choir’s progress. The literature tends to treat them quite impatiently, with the basic imperative that they just need to get a grip and learn to think for themselves. The very label ‘leaner’ places the blame for their condition squarely on their own shoulders.

But it occurred to me when writing about Lemov’s techniques that there are two kinds of leaning going on in choir, and they need quite different solutions.

I have recently been reading Doug Lemov’s book, Teach Like a Champion, which I have been aware of for some years but only just got around to buying. It is a book aimed at classroom teachers, with the specific aim of helping them develop their skills in how they prepare and deliver classes. It is intensely focused on ‘concrete, specific, and actionable advice’, i.e. stuff you can do immediately and then get fluent at through practice.

I am sure I will be wanting to reflect on some of his techniques in individual posts, but before I launch into the detail, I felt the need to mull in a more general sense on, first, his basic approach, and second, how the circumstances of the rehearsal room inflect the application of his techniques.

This is an addendum to my post on preparing music to direct. I had a response from a director saying that his section leaders are charged with demonstrating their parts in rehearsal, and that he thought his time would be better spent doing various analytical tasks such as harmonic or voicing analysis. Now, I’m not one to discourage harmonic or any other kind of analysis, so please do continue doing this. But his comment made me articulate to myself why you still need to be familiar enough with all the parts to be able to demonstrate them in rehearsal.

When I’ve asserted this before, it has been in the context of why you need to know all the parts, and the ability to demonstrate them has been the measure of when you know them well enough. But this comment focuses the attention on why you also need to be able to demonstrate anything your singers might have to sing as a distinct desideratum in its own right.

I wrote these notes for delegates at the Directors Weekend I am working on for Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers. Those delegates will all have a session of hands-on coaching with a chorus, and I wanted to give them the best chance to go into that session well-prepared and therefore able to get the most out of it. But once I’d written the notes, I thought I may as well share them here, since they are valid - and I hope useful - for general music-making, not just for this event.

This is a description of what experienced directors typically do on meeting new music, although they may do a lot of it intuitively without laying it out on a checklist. I am listing it out systematically as an aid particularly for newer directors, but it’s also good for the more experienced to review what they do from time to time.

There are two main types of preparation you need, the first to inform your practical work of supporting the singers in learning and performing the song, and the second to inform your artistic work of making and communicating interpretive decisions.