This got me thinking about how I could encourage or develop cooperative structures in listening exercises (after the realisation that probably 90% of the time I had been treating listening as an exercise mainly for individuals).
I do try and encourage students to see the inter-connectedness of disciplines of composing, performing and listening and appraising, however in terms of my planning any successes in both combining the disciplines and encouraging cooperative listening especially have been implicit as a result of the learning activities planned, rather than something I have explicitly set out to achieve from the outset. On reflection I determined that students in my class do take a holistic approach to the disciplines, but that when they are specifically asked to carry out a "listening-centric activity", this is usually a "stop now, let's listen to something and answer some questions" approach. Of course there are ensuing class discussions, but the thinking that my students had been asked to do was usually internalised, and then only ever assessed or even made tangible by the answers they gave whether written or verbal, rather than the observation of any process.
So how could I set up an activity where I could actually observe the listening taking place and how could this type of activity further subject knowledge for my students and help them to learn how to listen better?
I started with the ideal, and though about the inner monologue of a great example of listening, i.e. the types of questions that students might ask themselves. I found this a bit difficult to approach without any context so I then put myself in the position of one of my students in their GCSE listening examination (AQA UK GCSE syllabus). This made things much clearer. Traditionally the question my students find most difficult is the same every year, from the orchestral landmarks area of study. It requires students to listen to four examples of music from the western classical tradition and place them into the correct period of time, giving reasons for their answer.
This might seem on the surface to be a question all about knowledge, which is true and as in any taxonomy the knowledge of these periods of musical history is the foundation for success, but the process that students would go through to answer the question is equally important, and is something that can be learned. Hopefully the cooperative structure at which I finally arrived might make it easier for them this year.
This can work with groups of two or three. In the instance I describe it does assume prior teaching of the periods of music history (I used it as a revision exercise) though I am sure it would be useful as a starting point to check initial knowledge and listening skills in any genre of music.
One member of the team is the listener (with headphones on). The other is the questioner/note taker. These final roles can be split in a group of three with the note taker not allowed to talk. All of the group are allowed to see the "WHODUNNIT?" aide memoire for two minutes before starting the task. I did tell my students what the roles would be and the mechanics of the cooperative structure before giving them the sheet, though it may be interesting in the future to give it to them cold as it were. I did however want to make it clear that they should be engaging with the "WHODUNNIT?" resource with a specific role in mind and therefore offer some motivation to try and digest what lay within. In fact I was pleasantly surprised to see some students immediately begin to sketch mind maps or Venn diagrams.
Once finished using the sheet students then rotated around a number of stations. Each station was set up with musical excerpts for them to identify. The listener, with the headphones but without the sheet, was allowed to hear the piece once before any questions were asked, then again at their leisure once dialogue had begun. The questioner then used the "WHODUNNIT?" sheet to ask questions about what the listener was hearing. The listener was allowed to answer only the question asked and was not allowed to lead the conversation. At the end of the allotted time the note taker then had to make a decision on what period of music the excerpt came from (without ever having heard the piece).
This lead to some fantastic conversations about the process of listening, both whilst the students were on the task and in the ensuing debrief. Students were able to second guess my purposes and spotted that in the listening exam, they should take both roles themselves. Some students swapped roles (I allowed this but did not mention it before the task), in fairness for some this was born of frustration (in terms of communication) but other groups did say it was because they wanted to experience both sides of the coin or that they had initially mis-examined their own strengths when assigning roles. We even got on to conversation about clarity of language and quality questioning which thrilled me no end.
As a result students worked toward an end through cooperative means, I was able to observe tangible listening taking place and students began to form an operating procedure for this specific question in the exam.
Next steps are to try and translate and transfer this activity to create a more generalised operating procedure for listening with the same group, which I had intended to do in the same lesson but alas ran out of time (isn't it always the case). I will probably get the students to sketch this operating procedure in flow chart form or something similar as we did start to get towards points like "you should ask skinny questions at first" because if you find yes/no answers quickly you might also quickly be able to rule out time periods within the first few seconds of the excerpt. My biggest sense of pleasure from the BLIND LISTENING approach is that students were helping each other to become better listeners and this was something I could physically see (and hear) happening.
I might also try allowing the listener to hear the clip only once to encourage students to internalise the sounds they hear. I am always banging on at my students about having a perfectly good audio recorder in their head and am always looking for ways to develop this.
Anyway, that's my first blog. Feedback would be appreciated both on the blog itself and if you give this a try. I feel like I've rambled on a bit but I hope that this may be useful.
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