How It Went is a series of anecdotes from teachers trying Musical Futures International resources in their own classrooms, in their own words.
Groove Your Classroom and “Locking In” with Year 7
After attending the Big Gig in Melbourne and completing Level 2 Groove Your Classroom in June, MF Champion Teacher Roz Wilson decided to go all in with three new Year 7 classes. Here’s how it went.
This week saw me meet three new Year 7 classes. After attending the Big Gig in Melbourne I thought, “right, I’m going all in”. Up until now I’ve been sort of dropping a few Musical Futures concepts into what I’ve already tried and tested for a million years, but this week, after doing the Level 2 Groove Your Classroom session using the song Flowers, I thought why not give it a try.
I chose the resource for Africa by Toto.
The first class settled in quickly. They’re chatty in all the right ways, keen to answer, and happy to follow me wherever I took them. So I was very happy to hand out loud percussion instruments for them to hit, scrape and shake to their hearts’ content.
I asked them to listen to the song, find a bit and play along. Then I went to the grid and showed how all the instruments could do different things, and kind of explicitly taught each rhythm to each instrument, and then we all played again to the play-along.
It went really well (despite me probably doing the explicit thing too much) but I wondered, what would I do with a more challenging bunch of teenagers!?
Then came today’s class, a group with a totally different energy. Big personalities, lots to say, always moving. Perfect, I thought. Out came the instruments and on went Africa.
Do you know what!? It wasn’t perfect.
BUT they listened, they played in time.
I let them go for longer than I maybe would have previously and on their own, they found the tempo, they “locked in”, as the kids say nowadays.
One student in particular played the cowbell with such respect for everyone around him. It made my day!
I think to preserve the sanity of music teachers everywhere, we need to stop running our classes like they are strict traditional western rehearsals and let kids listen, “lock in” and create as they see it, which may be something entirely different to how we see it as adults, teachers, musicians. They’re at the beginning of the journey. I just need to show them the vague route and how they could find the destination, but it’s up to them to get there in the end.
“We need to stop running our classes like they are strict traditional western rehearsals and let kids listen, ‘lock in’ and create as they see it, which may be something entirely different to how we see it as adults, teachers, musicians.”
The third class I was supposed to have were on an excursion, so they get their turn next week!
Groove Your Classroom is a whole class percussion resource created and published by Musical Futures International. It is available exclusively at musicalfuturesinternational.org as part of the Beats unit, alongside Styles and Chair Drumming. Groove Your Classroom is not available through any other Musical Futures website or provider.
If you’ve tried one of our resources with your students, we’d love to hear how it went. Get in touch with us if you have a ‘How It Went’ story that you’d like to share — simply drop us an email at info@musicalfuturesinternational.org.