Innovative Practitioner
Guided Discussion
STEPHEN PAULUS' "THE ROAD HOME" WITH FORDSON HIGH SCHOOL'S CHAMBER CHOIR
While working through an SATB a cappella piece with Fordson's advanced choir, I had noticed that the ensemble was singing well but without passion. When preparing for my first observation for Student Teaching, I did a little digging on the meaning of the text as per the librettist and some prose from the composer of the piece. When reviewing, I thought it pertinent for the sake of the student's involvement to craft a lesson based around analysis of text, interpretation, and critical thinking.
What arose is the lesson plan below, with each section's work detailed on handouts that they returned to me after a group discussion. I was frankly caught by surprise at how deep and empathic many of the students were, for being between the ages of 16 and 18. Their interpretations of the text were beautiful and well thought out, with much of the conversation we had following to be quite accurate in what the librettist was attempting to portray. As we continued to work through the music itself, it was easy to draw a parallel between what the librettist was stating and how the composer chose to portray it. Once that connection was made, I found the group sang the piece with much more conviction, energy, and emotion than before while linking their created understandings of the text to the music.
Tongue Twister Warmups
UTILIZING CLASSIC TONGUE TWISTERS FOR DICTION AND FULL VOICE WARMUPS
During my time Student Teaching at Fordson High School in Dearborn, I was given the opportunity to experiment with a number of techniques within the choral setting. One of the things I had noticed and learned was that students here were mostly of Arabic descent (with wide diversity of ethnic background), ESL, and 1st Generation in the US.
Arabic, regardless of dialect, is a flowing and vowel-heavy language. Due to this, I found that many students had trouble pronouncing harder consonants (especially alveolar ones) which contributed to a sloppier diction in the choral classroom. One may also see modern Pop music as a factor, with many artists such as Billie Eilish having whispered and slurred tones.
Dwelling on this, I first thought to just have them sing the alphabet on a 5 note scale. This worked to a modest extent, but I still saw a lot of slurring and students who were less engaged than I would have liked. After some reflection, I took a page from my experience in music theatre and created a few vocal warmups that would target their diction and get them thinking about consonants in a fun and straight forward way!
I taught them by rote, first speaking each section in chunks and with the words written out on the board. After having them speak it fluently in rhythm, we then added the pitches and begun incorporating these into daily warmups!
