Hoy 1

Sarah Hoy
Dr Veblen
Music 3852
October, 1 2017

Reflection on Sandra Stauffer Presentation

One of my favourite expressions that Sandra Stauffer used during her presentation about
listening and creating with young children, was that our duty, if we wish to see it this way, is to
celebrate and nurture the skills of our students. A point she came back to a few times during her
presentation was that as educators we should think less of engraining skills and rather, we should
think about what we want our students to be able to say that they can do. I found this very
important to share in context of the demographic of the workshop as it offered a reminder to
current teachers and acted as an important early lesson for future educators as a positive
perspective they can exercise during evaluation.

I found Stauffers methods were forward thinking and carefully considered developmental
learning. She structured her exercises to facilitate opportunities for independence and utilized
more sophisticated music to teach foundational concepts. For example, to touch on opportunities
of independence: all of the exercises that we did started by the students individually learning the
exercise by following instruction. More specifically, while doing the Kangaroo exercise we all
made kangaroos with our fingers and jumped up and down our arms to the melodic contour of
Saint-Saens, Kangaroos. Then we moved on to the next stage of the exercise and collaborated
with another student utilizing the beginning of the exercise to assist us in the next stage of the
lesson. This method of interlocking foundational exercises offered the opportunity of personal
expression and collaborative creativity while reinforcing knowledge via repetition.

As mentioned, Stauffers exercise used Saint-Saens Kangaroos as the musical excerpt to

which we did the exercise that taught us how to teach children about melodic contour. I think this
is forward thinking of Stauffer in that she is introducing her students to more complex music and
building a repertoire of pieces that they will become familiar with.

Further, in regards to developmental learning and more specifically, process: I appreciated that
during moments of personal/group creativity, she didnt verbally evaluate or rank the level of
creativity we were contributing. For instance, when we were asked to act out a rhythm with our
bodies and my group simply clapped the rhythm, while other groups incorporated hitting other
parts of their body, she didnt make anyone feel inferior for what they contributed. Although my
group wasnt as creative in our interpretation of the exercise, we still received a round of
applause after performing our interpretation, thus, validating our effort of creativity.

Stauffer elaborated on the point of process when she shared her story about her nephew. My
personal takeaway of this story is that we should focus less on what the stages of our learning are
lacking and rather, celebrate every new stage of what we can do. This story inspired me to
celebrate the process of my students learning whenever I can, displaying exercises of process
and celebrating each stage along the way.
 Hoy 2

Via careful consideration of developmental learning, reinforcing knowledge via repetition, and
being forward thinking, these exercises of listening and creating were most enlightening to
myself as a future educator. I learned a handful of skills and activities that assisted in
demystifying the task of building foundational of knowledge gradually and simultaneously
having fun.