Student-centered curriculum
What does a student-centered music theory curriculum look like? This question has been posed to me a few times on Twitter by David Kulma. It has... »
More humanity in the humanities
We need more humanity in the humanities. I recently attended a conference at which the teaching of undergraduate music students was a core focus. I was... »
Education and discipline
To the growth of the [student] all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than... »
Starting off with critical pedagogy
A teacher’s first encounter with critical pedagogy can be overwhelming. The ideology is radically (pun intended) different from “traditional” approaches to education, and it can be... »
Educational fallacies: Age is a proxy for intellectual development
This is the third in my series of posts on educational fallacies. You can read all of them here. Almost all educational settings in the US... »
Educational fallacies: post hoc, propter hoc
This weekend, I read a recent blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education by Steven Conn on the “helicopter teacher.” Conn’s post is primarily a... »
Why grade?
I’ve been thinking about grading a lot lately. Not only am I doing a lot of it—way more than I would like—and supervising grad students who... »
Publishing with GitHub pages
This week, I helped the folks at Hybrid Pedagogy publish an ebook on open online learning. Like Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, and all of... »
A new way to do peer review
I recently published two articles with Hybrid Pedagogy, and I thoroughly enjoyed the peer-review process. I hope their model will be picked up by other academic... »
Promoting musical fluency -or- Why I de-emphasize sight-singing and dictation in class
Sight-singing and dictation are staples of university-level musical training. While it is a worthy ambition to “see what you hear and hear what you see,” as... »