Creative Process

What I learned about the creative process...

In this workshop, we employed a lot of different artistic techniques to achieve a well-rounded education in music sampling. We typically started each class with a warm-up, followed by the “sample of the week,” which demonstrated a variety of different examples of ways to sample in music. Sometimes this asked students to find songs that they enjoyed and share it with other students, sometimes they were asked to interpret and draw musical ideas, and sometimes they shared their homework compositions with their peers to receive commentary using the critical response process. Then, we moved into a lecture portion, which usually asked students to analyze the pieces presented in the form of a class guided discussion. Since it was more important to me for students to be actively engaged in each lesson, we quickly moved into an activity portion of the class, which usually consisted of a group project. These projects ranged from creating music that referenced a variety of atypical sampled genres, to finding sounds in their environment and looping these tracks to create a beat, to incorporating speech or sounds from protests into their sound projects to support an important social justice movement. Then, the class ended by letting students get started on their homework assignment for the week, which reviewed the skills that we learned in class while also connecting their new knowledge to their personal lives, giving them an idea of how to use these skills once the workshop is over.

Before each workshop session, each workshop leader participated in a practicum that provided us with skills to successfully carry out our workshop classes. We discussed how to write meaningful learning objectives to better assess student learning, facilitation techniques and how to structure lessons to be as engaging as possible, and other skills to help us guide students through the workshop. One of the most impactful concepts that we learned was how to create an active learning environment through simply moving the classroom around. In the journal article that we read in class, the authors discussed that students are more engaged in a classroom environment that is suited for active learning. Some strategies for achieving an active learning environment could include the teacher acting as a facilitator by removing the spatial barrier between students and the teacher, using white boards and word clouds for students to report their ideas or finings, or even using mobile chairs to easily change the classroom setup (Rands & Gansemer-Topf, 2017). In my own classroom, I used a lot of similar techniques; at the beginning of every class, my TA and I arranged the desks in a semi-circle so all students could face each other and we could have discussions more fluidly. We also arranged desks and chairs to face each other when students were doing peer reviews or feedback sessions, and we frequently switched up activities from listening to socializing to creating as class time progressed. As I began to apply these strategies with students, I definitely noticed more student engagement with each other and myself, and it also allowed me to complete rapid and frequent assessments of student learning.