Sing, Play, Dance, and Rejoice! Reflections on Orff Level 1

 

Earlier this summer I took my Orff Level 1 training through my local university. I took it for a few different reasons – I had decided I wanted to start working on my post-bacc diploma (which would bring me another step up on the pay scale), and luckily that can include up to 12 credit hours outside the Faculty of Education. 

Despite the fact that I’ve taught elementary music as part of every single job I’ve had in my teaching career, I’ve actually never had any formal education in elementary music pedagogy, nor had I worked with any students younger than Grade 6 when I took my first job out of university teaching K – 12. I figured it was about time I get some formal education in teaching those younger ones! So this Orff course was my first foray into formal elementary pedagogy. I thought I’d share a little reflection of my experience here, mostly as a tool for myself, but also in the hope it might provide clarity to anyone out there who may be in a situation like me (instrumental music trained but finds themselves teaching elementary) for if you should take your levels or not!

A walkthrough of my days:

I had heard from other people who had taken this course that it was intense. The course I took was 6 hours of class a day for 10 days. 3 hours a day were Basic Orff (learning about Orff pedagogy through experience playing instruments, singing, and moving), and then 1 hour each spent on Movement, Recorder, and Choral. There were a decent number of assignments to be completed outside of class time, but we also had two hours of lunch and study time each day where I found I was able to get a lot of work done for most assignments, which actually left my homework time at home not too bad. My brain was buzzing and full at the end of every day for sure. Our two weeks ended with a sharing session where we were able to put on a little concert for our friends and family of things we had learned through our two weeks together – it was a really fun way to end things off!

My biggest takeaways:

The biggest thing I want to change about my teaching after Level 1 is that I talk WAY too much! This is something I find true when I’m teaching band as well, and something mentors have commented on. The more time I’m talking, the more time kids have to disengage and the less time we’re experiencing music, having fun, and getting better! I see 2 main ways to work toward this goal. On one hand, I do think I’ll be able to be more concise and quick with my instructions or redirections the more I teach. Especially when I’m on the band podium, I find my comments between times the students play tend to be longer if I’m not laser focused on exactly what I want them to fix, and I talk around the idea myself enough until I get to the bottom of it. So that one’s an easy one to improve – just keep being thoughtful about my teaching and hopefully I’ll continue to get more focused and concise in my commentary! 

The second way I see to work toward this goal is using routine and predictable methods to get things done, so children can just trust and follow along without instructions being given at every step. I have taught songs by rote before many times, but on day 1 of the course the first time I saw our instructor teach us a song by rote all I could think is “WOW, I’m so much less efficient when I try to do this!” Imagine all the extra things we would have time for saving 5 minutes every time I’m teaching the kids a new song! I look forward to being more efficient with my rote teaching, but also taking a more general approach of leading by example and trusting that my students trust me enough to just follow along without me micromanaging every little instruction before they begin to sing or play!

Would I recommend this course to someone else?

Absolutely – it has been one of the most valuable PD opportunities I’ve ever taken, and even though it was expensive (altogether my cost ended up around $1300 CAD) and took a good chunk out of my summer I do think it was worth it. If you can, see if you can count it as part of some continuing education (post-bacc, Masters, etc) to make it more financially reasonable. This course ended up being 1/5 of my entire post-bacc diploma, which made the tuition easier to swallow! Many school divisions will also help pay for it as part of PD. The textbooks weren’t fun to pay for, but I do think all of the books I had to buy will be ones I come back to and use in my teaching in the future.

What would I say to someone else before they take this course?

In reverse order for increased drama…

3. There was a lot of partner and group work, so definitely spend a lot of time in the first day or two meeting people and trying to figure out who you might vibe well with teaching style wise. I was really lucky to happen to have a friend from undergrad who was taking the course at the same time, so we worked on most of our partner things together, but I definitely would’ve been stressed out if I didn’t have that built in partner relationship already.

2. If you are coming from a mostly instrumental background like I was, it might also be helpful to brush up on your solfege (sight singing melodies, singing while signing with Curwen hand signs, singing one thing while signing Curwen signs for another part, improvising melodies with solfege) before you go in. My singing (especially sight singing) has always been a musically weak point for me as a musician and teacher, and it was definitely the part of me that got the most tested and I had to work on the most for those two weeks.

1. The biggest advice I would give someone looking to take Orff Level 1 is to, if possible, take it after having already taught a few years. I feel like this was my biggest asset going into the course, and being able to relate everything I saw back to what had happened or what I wanted to happen in my own classroom with my own students was so helpful and helped me soak up so much more than I know I would have if I was an undergrad or hadn’t taught elementary music before. I know this can be difficult as many places have Orff Level 1 as almost a requirement if not an outright requirement to teach elementary music. But talking to others in the course, I think it was a universal feeling that having teaching experience coming in allowed for so much more learning and less of an overwhelmed feeling.

Would I do it again?

I would! In fact, I am next summer, when I take Kodaly Level 1 in the same format (hopefully as the final class of my post-bacc!) So, I’ll see you with another post like this next year!