Duke- What to Teach Summary

When planning a lesson or a class, the goals must be decided beforehand. The goals
often consist of building on knowledge and skills that the student already has or learning
new knowledge. Declarative knowledge are things that you know and that you can state, for
example facts about a certain subject, and procedural knowledge is knowing how to do
something. An example of procedural knowledge is knowing how to ride a bike. You can’t
exactly explain how to ride a bike, but your body is able to make the necessary adjustments
to ride a bike. In music, this is similar to not being able to explain how to sing or play the
notes. You can talk about what notes to play, but you can’t really talk about how to play
them.
Every so often, the teacher education program is reevaluated and a new area of
content is deemed important for teaching. The problem with this is that every time this
happens, it adds another class, and takes away more and more importance for practicing
the skills needed for teaching. It becomes a more content-based curriculum, rather than a
skill-based curriculum.
Once you have become fluent on your instrument, it’s easy to think about a concept
like tone production as one big idea or movement. You’re no longer thinking about how to
move the bow or fingers, or how to place the mouth, or how to move your air. It’s more of
thinking, “play/sing more beautifully” or “bring out the melody”. It’s important, however, to
think about how you do these things, and what the many parts and little techniques are
that all build up to “playing beautifully”, so that we are able to teach these techniques to
our students. This is important in all aspects of musicianship as well.
Duke, the author of this book, has compiled a list of concepts that musicians do. We
need to think through these concepts to best teach our students. Each line in the list starts
with an action verb because it is something that is done with a knowledge or skill about
music. The next important thing to notice about Duke’s list is that each concept can be done
by a professional musician, or by a beginner. For example, playing the individual part along
with a given beat by the director or other ensemble members, is something that every
musician does. What changes with the growth in musicianship and experience are the
technical demands that go along with playing an individual part with a given beat. Another
important idea of the list is that each concept is part of a bigger whole. This goes along with
what was said earlier about thinking about each of the little techniques that go into one
overarching concept. More articulate instructions will benefit more of the students.
The remainder of this chapter shows Duke’s list of what musicians do. This list has
categories of performance skills, knowledge of the subject matter, and music appreciation.
Within these categories are subcategories which list more specific concepts. For example,
under the performance skills category, there are subcategories for social behavior in music
settings, psychomotor skills/performance technique, music literacy/aural analysis, etc.
Beneath these subcategories, are even more specific third-tier subcategories. Under these
third-tier subcategories are each of the concepts/ action words that Duke talks about.