page to read more about what my project is about!
Please visit this Week of 3/24 – Find more sources and experimental studies about music and motivation. Re-read my literature review. Begin working on Part 1 of project (composing song #1). Week of 3/31 – Continue working on the paper; adding new sources and my own opinion. Edit rough draft. Think of potential people to interview and create questions. Week of 4/7 – Edit paper and finish the rough draft. Paper is due at the end of the week. Week of 4/14 – Spring Break – keep working on Part 1 of my project (start composing songs #2 and #3) Week of 4/21 – Interview people and receive feedback on my project idea. Keep working on Part 1. Week of 4/28 – Keep working on Part 1. Begin Part 2: teaching my internship class (7th grade orchestra) one of the three songs that I finished composing. Week of 5/5 – Make adjustments to the songs and perfect them until they are ready to be played by either my internship class or my class at GAHS. (This depends on when our spring concerts are. Right now, there is a major conflict). Edit paper. Week of 5/12 – Conducting/teaching my song to my class and prepare for the concert. Edit and finalize my final draft for the paper. Week of 5/19 – Week of the spring concert! Show time. :) The development for both my Capstone paper and project have been great lately. I have been focused on editing my literature review to accommodate my new, improved sources and research that I found that better explain the purpose of my Capstone's topic. Furthermore, I have been analyzing the information that I gathered and now I am formulating my opinion and the voice of my paper. I am working on tying my purpose in with the support of the authors' writings that I researched.
I also have been working a lot lately on the project portion of my Capstone. I created an action plan that highlights my main goals and deadlines that I made for myself. In addition, I created an overview of the different components of my final project. I began working on Part 1 of my project (which can be explained further by clicking here). I have almost finished composing my first song and I will move on to write my second song this week. It took me about two weeks to write my first song, so I am on schedule thus far. I am having a great time with the project portion of my Capstone because songwriting is a passion of mine. I can't wait to be implementing my songs in the classroom soon! Topic: Music Motivation
Essential Question: How do you motivate orchestra students to practice their music? Thesis: In order to motivate orchestra students, the teacher must incorporate diverse learning styles, methods, and strategies into instruction of music to generate motivation and prolonged interest among students. Since my first journal post, I have been in the critical research and information exploring stage of my capstone project. I have stumbled across many pivotal sources on the Internet, which include collegiate and doctorate level theses, experimental studies, and psychological research. Most of the information that I have found thus far has helped me rebuild my essential questions in order to construct my improved working thesis. At first, I had a lot of trouble with formulating a coherent essential question because I was not confident of the foundation for my topic, however, once I obtained numerous sources, I was able to have a clearer vision of my purpose for my capstone topic.
I think that the answer to my essential question “How do you motivate orchestra students to practice their music?” relies directly on the teacher’s efforts. Without a confident, dedicated, and passionate motivator, the majority of the students might not be intrinsically motivated to improve their musicianship. Through my own experience in my orchestra classes throughout the years, I have experienced and seen this epidemic (bad teacher = students lose interest in music, entirely). Depending on the age level of the students, there have been studies and research that proves how different teaching strategies work and their success of motivating students. I believe that the music educator must be optimistic, excited, and energetic in order to gain the interest of his or her students, and then he or she will be able to implement different teaching strategies. Over the past few weeks, I have been gathering research and information about my topic with respect to psychology, music, and motivation. I have found numerous helpful articles and published journals with important information about psychology and motivation. However, finding sources that correlate music and psychology is much a more difficult and challenging task. This is where I have to find information from two different topics and I have to tie them together myself. Right now, I have plenty of sources, so I am currently in the process of sorting through them and figuring out which ones are helpful for my topic and which are not beneficial at all. On the other hand, I have my final project in mind and I have begun to work on it during my free time; composing a song for orchestra while incorporating different musical styles and techniques. My goal of this is to captivate and motivate my internship students (7th grade orchestra) and make them more interested in playing their instrument.
How does the brain analyze and interpret certain pitches and rhythms to form new perceptions and stereotypes of a certain genre?
How do you motivate students to want to practice their music? |