You are more than a music teacher. Regardless of whether you teach general music, band, choir, orchestra, or private kazoo lessons, you have a responsibility to teach more than music. This idea is at the heart of Social Emotional Learning and it has been gaining popularity in recent years due to its emphasis on using music to strengthen and build core skills like listening, understanding one’s feelings and emotions, and being able to read other people’s feelings and emotions. Music can be a great tool to help practice and build these skills because many of them are fundamental to musicianship: listening, self-expression, and understanding the feelings of others. There is no tried and true method of incorporating SEL strategies into your studio, but here are a couple of ideas to try:
1. Listening activities - The beginning of a lesson is a great opportunity to have students work on listening skills. I typically start lessons by playing music as the student exits the waiting room and enters the studio via Zoom. This can be a passive activity where the music is playing in the background as the student and teacher get settled, but it doesn't have to be limited to simply a passive activity. Having a student listen to a piece played on their major instrument and asking them “If you could describe the mood of this song/piece, what word would you choose?” or “What picture comes to mind as you’re listening to this piece?” is a great way to get students to strengthen their listening skills in recognizing mood and tone.
2. Playing activities - I like to incorporate improvisation into my lessons. Typically, I will assign a rhythm exercise every week and have the students improvise a melody around the rhythms once they finish clapping it. This is a great opportunity to give students guidelines like “Your key is G major and your first note is D.” It’s also a great opportunity to say “What would a happy melody sound like?” As the student shows progress, then you can increase the complexity of the emotions: “What would contemplative sound like?” Another twist on this activity would be to have students pick their own key based on a mood: “If I told you to improvise a happy melody, what key would you choose?” This variation on the activity works really well with students that are working on their major and minor scales for the first time.
Other resources:
Edgar, Scott N. Music Education and Social Emotional Learning. Chicago: Gia Publications, 2017.