Verse/Chorus/Lesson/Reflection

My experience teaching a ten-minute demo lesson on verse/chorus song form was hectic, but a lot of fun.

While I understood that the underlying process of the activity (assigning rewritten pop lyrics to a new melody and chords to create a new song) worked very well, I honestly had no idea if it as possible to do it in the time allotted. I'm extremely excited that it worked as well as it did, though I suspect it would be difficult to pull off in 10 minutes with 8th graders.

Before analyzing my lesson I should note that this activity did not come directly from my brain. There is a book I've had for years that I consider indispensable to anyone who has any interest in song writing- and you'll have to please excuse it's corny/flashy cover and cheesy title. You know what they say about books and covers...

Click the picture to see it on Amazon!

This was a book I've treasured for a while, and I only recently came back to it looking through a teaching lens- and I would honestly recommend it highly for anyone who thinks they might ever teach songwriting at all. The book contains all sorts of activities to prompt the reader to write songs more effectively (or at all...) and almost all of them can be easily adapted as activities for a general music class.

Ok, that being said on to the reflection:

What I think went well

• The students of my lesson were, more or less, engaged for the entire 10 minutes. This was my number one goal going in to the lesson and I think (though I would love to hear from the other side of the glass if I'm wrong...) that I achieved it.
• I think that everyone left the lesson with the main objective. It might be all they left with...but I think everyone could repeat back at the end that you can write a song any way you want so long as it has structure.
• I think that, for the time period allotted, I balanced student autonomy and teacher choice relatively well. I thought a lot about which decisions should be pre-determined and which not and I had to compromise on many such as the song choice (giving only two options instead of more) and deciding to pick the topic for everyone rather than brainstorming a list of topics. Ideally with more time I would have even more student autonomy, but hopefully everyone still felt as though they were in some control of the lesson from the beginning.
• I think the lesson culminated in a "moment." I don't exactly know if I can pinpoint the value of that (or if it even has true value at all) but I think there is something special about seeing disparate parts come together to form something at least menially interesting- especially if the students feel as though they directly contributed. This is one of the things that I thought was so powerful about Wesley's lesson on Bach, and I hope I attained some form of the "climactic ending" with mine.

What I think could improve

• Clearer, more scripted directions. I think that both lyric groups started out with a lot of questions as to what I wanted them to do. They certainly picked it up really quickly, but I think I could have done a better job explaining what they were going to see on their papers and what I wanted them to do before they got them.
• I think that time (because it is at such a premium in the lesson) should be posted the whole time. A simple countdown timer on the smartboard could have let groups better manage their time and understand the expectations.
• I want to give the piano group better direction that allows them to have a more concrete influence on the final product. In the time that it took the lyric groups to do their task, the piano group had enough time to tinker and rewrite their chord progression several times, and all of that could have been time spent creating rhythms, groove, or melody if I had better outlined their ability to do so.
• The premise of my lesson was "Verse Chorus Song Form" and I think that I could be slightly more ambitious with the objective. I definitely boiled the lesson down to my one main objective on purpose, because I think that in ten minutes it's fine if that's all you learn- but there is probably some room to introduce what the form is and how the verse leads into the chorus. Along these same lines I could explicitly tell the piano group to write an A and a B section (something they did anyway but I did not plan on until they finished early).

What I'm not sure about

• I hope that everyone felt like they contributed in some tangible way to the final product. If not, at least hope that everyone felt as though they could repeat the process themselves if given the time. Part of my goal was to show everyone how easy it can be to start the creative process of songwriting/composition- and I think most people probably left the lesson feeling like they could easily do what we did as a class if given the chance. I would love to hear anybody's thoughts on this.

In closing, I honestly I more look forward to hearing what you guys have to say, I would love to hear your ideas on a lesson like this, especially since you were the ones who sat through it! Please don't hold back thoughts and comments!

Lastly, this feels like an appropriate place to share a YouTube channel that is a great resource for songwriting stuff- below is a video series called Door To Door from the channel where the host (Judy Stakee) interviews famous songwriters. Definitely worth checking out!