Notes on the Page: Music in Education

Although state education budgets do not always reflect it, the value of music in education has been well documented in the scientific literature. Studies have shown that music training has beneficial effects for spatial reasoning, literacy, and verbal memory; recently, researchers have even developed a line of data in support of music education as a “creative and cost-effective” form of treatment for language-based learning disorders. The developing brains of young musicians benefit from the multi-modal nature of music: it involves precise physical coordination, emotional expression, and careful looking and listening, all at the same time. But it’s important to remember that there is plenty to value in music education that goes beyond these technical, cognitive gains.

One of the most important lessons in any student’s education, and one that is not explicitly taught in many school curricula, is how to be a smart and effective learner. For most students, learning to learn is something that happens over several years, in a relatively undirected, inefficient, and often frustrating process of trial and error. Taking on the challenge of a new instrument can provide a perfect learning laboratory for instilling the habits of great students that don’t come naturally to many: the discipline of daily practice, pride in easy to measure improvements (and those that are harder to quantify), knowing when and how to ask for help when encountering the unknown, struggling to get it right (and knowing that’s okay), and celebrating commitment and hard work, all in a fun and expressive environment. Much more than his or her new skill on the cello, these learning lessons will transfer over to the invaluable student skills that kids need to make the most of their education.

When students have the chance to play their new instrument as part of a young ensemble of musicians, they also develop an understanding of teamwork and collaboration that is not always on offer in the classroom. Many students dread group projects in school, and with good reason; coordinating the efforts of individuals in a group can be a social and academic nightmare. In the context of a school orchestra or band, however, collaboration and teamwork are the norm. Any ensemble experience involves learning to listen carefully and play in unison, balance different parts from the different sections, and achieve a group vision of how the piece should work, both technically and emotionally. There’s an opportunity here for students to develop leadership skills, and to support one another’s growth as members of the same section work to perfect their parts in small groups. 

Even apart from the cognitive benefits scientists have attributed to music education, trying out a new instrument provides invaluable learning experiences to young students. As a testing ground where they can learn to learn, and an inherently collaborative activity, music deserves a place in any child’s education. It’s also, importantly, a chance for kids to express themselves in a new and vital way, and to appreciate a human tradition of music that they will encounter every day for the rest of their lives. 

Learning to Learn

Our primary goal at Smarten Up is to help students become learners. We want them to learn how to read and do math, to learn about the history of our world and the science behind it, and to learn about themselves. To do this, we empower them with a robust set of tools and strategies that they can use to tackle the wide range of challenges they are likely to face in their academic careers and beyond. The key to making this happen is teaching students the difference between “knowing” and “understanding.”

Tests, quizzes, writing assignments, and classroom discussions are tools that teachers use to evaluate how effectively students have learned the material. As we know, assessments range from multiple choice and short answer questions to word problems and essays. The former evaluate a student’s rote knowledge—how well she can recall a definition or perform arithmetic; the latter gauge children’s ability to use information in order to answer a question or solve a problem. 

Genuine learning occurs when students can build their understanding of a given concept from the ground up, from knowledge through evaluation. It is the difference between cramming for an assessment by memorizing a collection of vocabulary terms, and learning those words in context, with the support of graphic organizers, outlines, mnemonic devices, and other memory aids. While the latter may take more time and effort before the test, that energy will pay off when it’s time to study for a midterm or final exam. Even if a child doesn’t remember everything, she will have an efficient set of familiar, useful resources to fill in the gaps. By taking the time to learn and understand the information the first time around, students can avoid the chaos and anxiety that comes with last-minute scrambles or disorganized efforts (or both).

This is where it becomes most important for us to teach our students about themselves as learners. We need students to understand the difference between working smart and working hard (or not so hard in some cases).  They’ve been told to create outlines before they begin writing an essay, though they often don’t do it. Teachers ask them to annotate as they read, but their books often show either pristinely clean pages or ones that are so filled with highlighted text and underlined sections that they are impossible to navigate. They have to study for a test or quiz, and often they simply reread the relevant information and declare themselves “prepared.” They are told to create a plan of attack for short-term and long-term assignments, and they simply open up their portal to look at what is due the next day. 

A large part of this disconnect is due to a lack of understanding. Students know what they should do, but they don’t always understand why or how to make those extra steps meaningful. The goal of Smarten Up’s March blog posts will be to share our favorite tips, tricks, and strategies for helping students learn how to become learners. 

Reading for Meaning

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By the time we reach middle and high school, what we learn is increasingly built on what we’ve learned before, reliant on the scaffolding of connections our brains have been constructing for us since we were crawling across colorful living-room carpets. But these connections, clusters of experience and information that help us make sense of the world, are still developing all the time — and the more that students can consciously access these categories of information and experience as they absorb new knowledge and master new tasks, the more confident and creative they will become. One of Smarten Up’s core messages to students is that learning itself is a learnable process: that the skill of being a student can be developed through a set of reflective habits and creative practices. 

Let’s consider the best habits for reading, a skill whose importance in the life of a student is hard to overstate. All of the work that students have done in elementary school to master the technical building blocks of reading fluency pays off as reading becomes a critical skill across disciplines, from biology to history, and from foreign languages to English literature. By this time, the decoding process has become more automatic, and students can put a larger share of their brainpower toward constructing meaning, analyzing connections, and processing information. While many of us remember ‘learning to read’ as young children, it is at this stage in our academic careers that we learn to read critically and deeply. 

There are concrete steps that will improve students’ ability to go past knowledge into understanding — this active reading checklist is a good place to start, with habits for before, during, and after reading. This is also where reflecting on the way we read different types of texts can be useful.  There is a clear difference between reading and writing poetry, and reading biographies of historical figures. Students should be able to approach each task with a strategy that fits its specific needs, while also recognizing the connections between distinct tasks and subject areas so that they’re not reinventing the wheel every time they approach a reading or writing assignment. One starting place is to ask: How does this content relate to what I already know? Or: how does this assignment resemble other tasks I’ve tackled in the past?

When students consider these questions, they activate prior knowledge that will shape how they understand the new content. Students should also consider, as they read, other connections they can activate to enrich the perspective they’re bringing to the text, and make the information stickier in their memory. Consider text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections. How does Hamlet’s relationship with his uncle compare to the bonds in your own extended family? Hopefully, not too closely! Can you think of any links to the often melodramatic history of royal households in medieval Europe, or the family politics in your favorite television series? What songs would you put on a moody Hamlet playlist? Ultimately, the takeaway is simple: the more that we bring with us to the reading process, the more we get out of it.

Studying to Understand

For many students, quizzes and exams are a source of anxiety and, sometimes, disappointment. But with care, planning, and sustained effort, it is possible to prepare with confidence. What is the best way to study for a test? 

1. Treat every assignment and reading as a part of your preparation

The most important element of test preparation comes in the weeks (and sometimes months) before a test, as a student remains actively engaged with lectures and homework assignments, moving from knowing to understanding as they learn so that, when it comes time to study, they are already beginning from a place of confidence, rather than starting from scratch.  The test is not a separate, stress-charged event in this model, but the natural culmination of weeks of learning. In concrete terms, this means that students should be taking clear notes and creating study materials as they learn the content, keeping up with readings and assignments, and independently reviewing at the end of every shorter unit.

2. Distributed Practice: spread out your studying

Studies have shown that if you believe a test will require four hours of studying in the week of the exam, it is much more effective to split up this time into smaller chunks, spread out over multiple days, than to cram all four hours on the night before the exam. So…

3. Make a study plan

It isn’t always easy for students to manage the many tasks that are thrust upon them - to use time wisely, set up a study plan well in advance of the test, with a schedule for studying that splits up the content over multiple days and a specific plan for which study strategies to employ. 

4. Mix it up: use a variety of strategies

Different types of content (and different types of tests) will require different strategies - and students should also consider what strategies work best for their specific learning strengths. The more that you can approach a subject from different angles — with flashcards written in your own words, illustrated histories, timelines, online video resources, practice problems, poetic adaptations, mnemonics and memory aides, etc — the more you’ll move from knowing to understanding. Your goal should be to absorb new information with context, thinking about it as a story, rather than memorizing in isolation, by rote. Use a timer to focus for specific periods, and switch between strategies. Take active breaks, drink water, and eat healthy snacks!

5. Get a good night’s sleep

It is tempting to believe that staying up late to cram will help you conquer the test - but the truth is, giving your brain the rest it needs is more important. This is another reason why it’s important to distribute your studying across multiple days!

6. After the test, reflect!

Your job isn’t over when the test is done - take a well-deserved break, of course, but then take time to reflect on the study process and the test itself. Think about what worked, so that you can use it again next time. What areas can you identify for improvement next time?

This Smarten Up study strategies planning sheet is a great resource to create this sort of structure for students!

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Learning to Read

As children learn to read, the world around them takes on a whole new dimension; signs become meaningful, directions become more clear, and stories and books offer an entirely new world of fantasy, adventure, and discovery. While your child will certainly receive great instruction in school, there are tons of fun and simple ways to reinforce those lessons at home and on the go. Below you will find an overview of how great reading skills develop, and our favorite tools for supporting literacy growth.

The first building block of reading is phonemic awareness, which is a child's ability to hear and identify the sounds in spoken words.  This is a skill that can easily be developed on-the-go as you shuffle your child around the city by challenging her to think of rhyming words, or by playing I Spy with beginning or ending sounds (I spy with my little eye something that begins with a /d/ sound). 

Once your child is able to hear these individual phonemes (which is just a fancy word for sounds), she can begin to learn learn the letters that go with each one. This predictable sound-symbol association is called phonics. While this word is often synonymous with dull and repetitive exercises, it doesn't have to be. With hands-on games such as Alphabet Go Fish and Alphabet Bingo, you can spend quality time with your child and help her learn letter names and sounds. Digital resources also offer the opportunity for engaging independent practice, and the best of them allow you to monitor your child's progress as well. Some of our favorite phonics apps include Learn with Homer, Phonics Island, and Letter School, which also targets handwriting skills.

After these foundations have been laid, it will be time for your child to work on developing her fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. The first is a question of practice makes perfect. The more your child reads, the better she will be able to quickly identify words; and the more your child hears a fluent reader model how to read with expression (pausing at punctuation, showing excitement at exclamation marks, etc.) the better she will learn to do this herself. The last two building blocks of literacy will develop as a result of talking with your child about books. It is important to not only ask about who, where and what is involved in a chapter or story, but to also think about bigger picture concepts and connections that can be made. What motivates a character? What are some of the problems or challenges she faced? How did she overcome them? How was the book similar or different to your child's real-life experiences? 

Most importantly, though, reading should be fun. The more you, as a parent, are able to express and share excitement and enthusiasm for stories and books, the more likely your child is to embrace the exciting possibilities of written language!

Executive Function: How School Fits In

Tests, quizzes, writing assignments, and classroom discussions are tools that teachers use to evaluate just how neatly and deeply students have stored content knowledge in their brains. They range from multiple choice and short answer questions to word problems and essays. The former assess a student’s rote knowledge - how well he or she can recall a definition or perform arithmetic; the latter gauge children’s ability to actually use information in order to answer a question or solve a problem.

Genuine learning occurs when someone can build their understanding of a given concept from the ground up, from knowledge through evaluation; it is the difference between cramming for an assessment by memorizing a collection of vocabulary terms, and giving your mind time to learn those words in context, with the support of graphic organizers, outlines, mnemonic devices, and other memory aids. While the latter may take more time and effort in the short term, that energy will pay off when it comes time to study for a mid-term or final exam because even if you don’t remember everything, you have an efficient set of familiar, useful resources to fill in the gaps. By taking the time to build a strong, connected, sticky schema the first time around, students can avoid the chaos and anxiety that comes with last-minute academic efforts.

“But I have too much reading to do, too many assignments to finish, too many exams to study for. I just don’t have enough time.” Sound familiar? It does to me. And the truth is, students do have a lot on their plate. Balancing studies with extra curricular activities, family responsibilities, and fun is hard. Effective time management strategies will make it easier, but it will never be easy. That is what separates the diligent, neurotic A students from their peers, brainiacs aside.

So then students must ask themselves if they are ready to commit to building positive learning behaviors.  Are they willing to put in the time and energy to build their executive function skills, so that they can become better students? Are they ready to more consciously identify learning goals, and then plan and follow-through with a strategy for their accomplishment?  Are they prepared to think flexibly about their progress, and reflect more thoughtfully on their achievements? The choice is theirs ...

Executive Function and Learning 101

While learning seems like a fairly automatic process, it is actually a pretty complicated one.  That’s because in order for a piece of information to really stick in the brain, and stay stuck, we have to make sure that it gets to the right “place.”  That way, when we need it to answer a question on a test, connect a string of ideas in an essay, or find our way from school back home, our mind knows where to find that piece of data in order to help us solve the problem at hand.  So the question is, how to we make knowledge more sticky?

You can think of your brain like a giant closet, and yourself like a shopaholic.  All of the items you see in the store are like the data coming into your sensory memory.  You will purchase what looks good, and pass on the rest.  Then, your working memory will kick in to either decide if you want to return an item you are not so hot on, or if it is appealing enough to place in a pile with other similar articles or objects.  Last, once you have sorted through your purchases and identified “the keepers,” it is time for you to put everything away some place safe where you will be able to find it again.  This is like your long-term memory building schema.  Whether you sort your items by color, use, size, or shape doesn’t matter, so long as there is an organized system that you can rely on to track them down whenever necessary.  The stronger and more thoughtful that organizational strategy is the better.

When we learn, our brains are constantly working through this process.  Whether in a classroom, or sitting at home, we tune out distractions and extraneous information, focus on identifying the main ideas and supporting details or explanations, and create a strategy for building that information into a sticky schema.

For the brainiacs this happens fairly automatically; their minds are like a giant gob of super glue - everything just sticks.  The process isn’t quite so simple for those hard-working A students; instead, this group knows how to use subject-appropriate mnemonic devices, graphic organizers, and other processing tools to sort their knowledge into well-defined, easily accessible chunks. Lacking an organized system for schema development, the last group of students, will try really hard to remember everything, but lose most of it in the process.  Some bits of knowledge will be passed over by the sensory memory as unimportant, other ideas won’t make it past the confines of working memory, and the parts that stick in long-term memory just won’t be enough to build a useful schema come test time.

That's why it is so important for instructors and parents to teacher their child how to learn.  Any successful person has developed a repertoire of organizational and study skills over the years. Some are super efficient, others are less useful.  But, the point is to have a "toolbox" full of strategies, and to understand when, where, and how to apply each one.