Student-Led Instrument Recruitment

American String Teacher Vol. 69, No. 1, February 2019, pp. 70 –73 DOI: 10.1177/0003131318815862 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions Copyright © 2019, American String Teachers Association How do you recruit the next class of instrumentalists? Do you do all the talking or do you truly captivate students’ musical imagination and turn it into a reality? For many years, our middle school chamber orchestra visited our elementary school to perform an annual recruitment concert where I would speak briefly about each instrument and one middle school musician from each instrument section would play an excerpt of their solo piece to close the deal. My school district’s recruitment strategies reflected Brian Cole’s (2010), Mary Wagner’s (2013), and Maria Stafford’s (2016) teacher-led template, but only 35 percent to 45 percent of students enrolled year after year. To address this issue, I created a new studentled recruitment format that increased enrollment to 61 percent this past school year. In our traditional recruitment presentation, middle school students gained performance experience and elementary school students engaged as listeners. This interaction can be more engaging by turning performers and listeners into active participants. Another problem with my annual recruitment concert was that the middle school chamber orchestra was comprised of more advanced instrumentalists, which meant only a handful of middle school students actually performed for elementary school students. To be more inclusive, I invited all of my sixth-grade orchestra musicians to participate in the recruitment process. These are musicians in the fourth-year orchestra curriculum. The next interactive component was grouping middle and elementary school students together in a cooperative learning environment. Shlomo Sharan (1990) and Robert Slavin (1995) summarize cooperative learning as the idea of having students work in small groups to learn from each other. Robyn Gillies’ (2014) research shows that cooperative learning is an effective alternative to direct instruction. Noreen Webb (2008) also notes that small group learning increases students’ active interaction. Higher achievement and positive peer relationships were associated with cooperative learning (Roseth, Johnson, and Johnson 2008, 239). My students and I created a “musical petting zoo” where middle school students introduced elementary school students to string instruments through demonstration and trials. Potential recruits were encouraged to ask questions during this interaction. Under middle school student supervision, elementary school students held and plucked string instruments for an introductory experience. Elementary school students rotated from string bass, cello, viola, to violin stations. Bass and cello groups had more elementary student visitors per presentation because we had fewer bass and cello musicians presenting compared to viola and violin musicians. This event took place in the elementary school cafeteria, but can also take place in the classroom. Student-Led Lesson Plan In preparation for this event, middle school musicians created a miniature lesson plan by writing the music concept they wanted to share and teaching strategies to meet that goal. Planning prompts included the following: What do you want to show (new recruits)? What are you going to do? How do we know (new recruits) understand what you are presenting (Figure 1)? Part of this project allowed me to assess my students’ understanding as well. My essential question was as follows: can students articulate their own musical understanding and instrumental practice? Once my students completed the planning organizer, they practiced teaching each other in mentoring simulations. Students rotated between various instrument presentations, experienced the introductory lesson, and traded feedback. Because of time constraints, presentations were limited to six minutes each. Middle school students also created an infomercial-type video recording to practice and review their presentations. In reviewing their recordings, students and I further discussed their musical understanding in a debriefing assessment. We reviewed students’ translation of music vocabulary into layman terms, supporting beginning musician posture techniques, and pacing. In a way, students’ meta-teaching experience triggered flashbacks of personal curiosities from when they themselves were elementary school prospective recruits. The video presentations were useful because some elementary students were absent on the day that the middle school students visited the elementary school. I provided the elementary school general music teacher with the middle school video practice presentations, so the general music teacher could play the middle school presentations for students who were absent in lieu of in-person demonstrations.