There are many benefits for music students who listen to recordings often. To name a just a few: Listening to music is essential for developing a keen ear. Listening to a recording can help a student understand the piece differently, helping with interpretation and style. The recording can also model good tone and expression.
When done with purpose and direction, listening can offer these and many other benefits to students. But, if students are not given direction and focus in their listening tasks, they may be missing out, and worse, it may become uninteresting and daunting to them.
How can we as teachers make listening more fun and interesting for our students? How can we make it have more purpose and direction? How do we help our students reap all the rewards of purposeful listening? Below are a few ideas that can help.
1. Ask yourself first what the purpose of the listening task is. If you don't know it yourself, don't expect your students to figure it out. Why would you like this particular student to listen to this particular piece? What do you want them to gain? The answer to this will guide a lot of your choices for how to direct the attention of the student.
2. For young students, and especially in group settings, limit listening excerpts to no longer than three minutes. If you'd like them to hear a longer excerpt, ask yourself what the value is of the longer excerpt, which couldn't be gained in a shorter one. Consider maybe breaking it up into smaller segments, with discussion and questions in between to help with wandering attention spans and to keep the focus on what you'd like them to learn.
3. Based on your answer to number one above, give the student something specific to listen for before you begin. Any discussion and questions afterward will be based on this.
4. Discuss what the student is hearing (giving prompts before listening can help them focus in on what you'd like them to hear). Ask specific questions based on what you asked them to listen to, and allow the student to discuss and ask questions as well.
5. Have the student draw while listening. They can draw their own interpretation of what they hear. This especially works well with young students, but can be used for all ages.
6. Move to the music. This eliminates boredom, and allows creative freedom to interpret the music in a new way. It can be as simple as marching around the room to the beat, or moving close to the ground when it is soft and standing tall when the music is loud. Allowing the student to interpret the music freely through impromptu body movements can be a lot of fun. The type of movement you choose will depend on your purpose for the listening task.
7. Give the student a specific task while listening, such as holding the instrument in perfect playing posture for the duration of the excerpt. Give them something specific to focus on, again based on what you want them to gain from the experience.
8. Follow along with the music, especially the full score. Ask the student to look for something specific, such as when the voices play similar parts simultaneously, or to find which voice has the melody at any given time.
These are some ideas that have worked well for me and my students. What other ideas have worked for you? Feel free to share in the comments below so everyone can benefit.
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