Abstract
Mini-concerts are regularly occurring, low-stakes curricular events in the classroom where students perform music of their choice for their peers. An idea generated by music educators in domestic and international K–12 schools who strive to meet the needs of diverse student populations, mini-concerts have helped generate student excitement and cultural awareness in general music, bands, orchestras, and choirs in large and small programs alike. By creating a curricular space for students to share school-appropriate music that interests them in an informal and fun environment, mini-concerts can also help build student confidence through the active support of peers. This article includes resources and weekly schedules and describes ways that mini-concerts offer a platform for developing performance skill, music literacy, audience etiquette, and innovative thinking.
Keywords
Your classroom or ensemble rehearsal can become a low-stress performance space for all students to share the music they love.
Halfway through lunch at Happy Valley School, practice rooms are filling up as students get ready for Friday mini-concerts. Joanne, Louise, Liz, and Pip check the sign-up sheet on the music bulletin board before scrambling to a practice room. They can’t wait to perform the song they’ve been practicing for two weeks, complete with choreography and matching accessories. Now they have a few minutes to run through it again before class starts. Surtida asks the teacher for help tuning her guitar while two friends set up the drums and amplifier in the choir room where mini-concerts will be performed. Adding to the usual excitement, Mr. Hutto has promised to treat the students to his rendition of an Elvis classic, and rumor has it that a member of the middle school staff will join him. With the school year coming to a close, Ilse and Dong Pin ready themselves to sing a dedication to Dave before he moves to Beijing where his father has been reassigned to a new post. And there have been hints that Carter, introverted and reserved, has agreed after much encouragement from classmates to play his piano composition. Friends are eager to share positive comments about his performance in the hopes that he’ll play it again before the semester ends.
In music classrooms, it can be a challenge for teachers to find ways to bring together the vast array of diverse student interests, learning styles, personalities, cognitive and physical abilities, and musical skill levels while maintaining their own curricular goals. For diverse classrooms to be positive learning climates in which students achieve musical success, teachers need to create curricular spaces in which individuals may express themselves and be respected for the interests and skills that make them unique. One way for teachers to meet these challenges is through a mini-concert series, a vehicle for students to voluntarily share their interests and talents by engaging in low-stakes, in-class performances of music that they choose—either music learned at school or music they know and learn outside of the formalized music classroom. The mini-concert program described in this article has been successful in a variety of domestic and international school settings, including general music, band, orchestra, and choir classrooms in large and small programs alike. These mini-concerts encouraged student-initiated musical exploration, fostered enthusiasm for the cultural diversity present among friends and classmates, and promoted peers’ understanding and awareness of the originating cultures.
As an instructional vehicle, mini-concerts engage students in playful musical exploration and deepen their passion for music they love with a sense of curricular purpose. Mini-concerts are regularly occurring, low-stakes curricular events in the classroom where students perform for their peers music of their choice that may also include movement, spoken word, and other expressions of artistry. To promote self-confidence, cultural connectivity, and language literacy, throughout the program students receive only positive feedback from peers in verbal and written comments, referencing a vocabulary list that is specific to the musical concepts being studied in other parts of the curriculum.
According to Harvard education scholar Tony Wagner, play, passion, and purpose are critical aspects of developing innovative thinkers in the 21st century. 1 Learning environments where students have space to choose musical tasks and styles can promote the development of these aspects and the individual agency needed to innovate as a musician. The development of individual agency through preparing mini-concert performances helps establish a playful focus where student collaboration arises out of individual curiosity within a culture of diverse musical interests and abilities. Bennett Reimer states that in traditional teacher-led music classrooms, “students are not being given the opportunity to develop the individuality and responsibility required to be an artist . . . while producing results quickly, this [didactic instruction] leaves students dependent on the teacher, when what is desired is the development of musical independence.” 2 While mini-concerts are often a “re-creative” act, they provide a stepping-stone and purpose for individuals to develop the individual musical agency necessary for innovative musical creation.
The creation of a space for students to choose and perform music that is important to them helps teachers engage a diverse group of students with a variety of popular and traditional musical styles representing an array of cultural influences. Educational scholar Kris Gutierrez and colleagues describe a “third space” where teachers intentionally create room in the curriculum for a consilience of teacher and student interest. 3 Gutierrez claims that through the third space teachers can help promote “development as the transformation of the individual, the individual’s relation to the social environment, and the organization of the environment as an educational vehicle.” 4 A curricular space beyond the traditional roles of the teacher and student is created by this program because mini-concerts give students the chance to determine the musical activity, coming together to perform music they like and know.
In music classrooms, cultural diversity manifests itself in a variety of unique ways, and the struggle to balance the values of parents, teachers, and peers are powerful factors that all teachers must navigate while aiming to give each student a voice. Moreover, diverse students can be deeply influenced by an array of different cultural factors. For example, British music sociologist Lucy Green notes that students can be from cultural melting pots that result in a cursory understanding of many cultures but membership in none. 5 When students are given space to perform and respond to music that they select based on how it highlights their own unique interests, teachers are employing a powerful tool to help students engage with others and to develop a meaningful sense of belonging among their peers. Increasing globalization in recent decades has created many learning environments where awareness of “Third Culture Kid” or “TCK” framework can be helpful for understanding the diverse identities of students who are enrolled in schools outside of their home country and can help teachers to understand the complex identity of highly mobile international students. These students are often referred to as global nomads, and David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken, co-authors of Third Culture Kids: The Experience of Growing Up among Worlds, suggest that individual students whose identity is influenced by the intersection of each of these factors often feel as if their home is everywhere and nowhere all at once. 6 While students in these situations have the opportunity to experience a rich cultural life, the constant transformation of their environment can create a deep sense of vulnerability. At this point, students may emotionally isolate and create the appearance that they neither care about nor need anyone else.
An important part of the learning process is for individuals to seek experiences that help to clarify their identity. No matter the location, ethnicity, age, or social standing that plays a part of forming a learner’s identity, feeling a sense of belonging is an integral part of feeling at home and thriving as a learner. Chester Hartman—an education scholar who investigates the reason behind high classroom turnover—identifies social connection as an especially important challenge for teachers to consider given that highly transient students often suffer from low achievement and confidence because they find it difficult to adapt to an entirely new school. 7 Given that learning among highly mobile or transient student populations presents a challenge to an individual’s sense of belonging, mini-concerts are a tool that teachers can use to develop important social connections with their peers and teachers. For example, highly mobile students experience stress through frequent transitions in and out of communities. These students in mobile and transient communities experience changes both as the mover and as the stationary figure while new friends arrive and established friends depart. Mini-concerts serve as a practical activity for students to build new relationships and gain exposure to their peers in a structured, safe environment. Additionally, when students depart, mini-concerts offer a forum for them to process and express emotions that can be difficult to articulate, working through farewells constructively by performing together and dedicating performances to one another.
Developing a Mini-Concert Program
Drawing on a similar positive experience as a high school choir student, the authors’ colleague began implementing mini-concerts in an international school setting and later in an American public school. Introduced in choir classes, this occasional program consisted of solo voice and small vocal group performances followed by student comments. When opportunities later arose to combine choral and instrumental classes on a regular pattern of Fridays and add written commentary to meet schoolwide literacy goals, the program took on a life of its own. In a short time, school and community members could see the benefits radiating throughout the whole music program. Without taking anything away from the class other than the time it took to stage the performances, students enhanced their experience in the class with authentic pursuits based on their own passions, a highly rewarding and motivating endeavor undertaken with the support of the teacher and peers.
Mini-concerts offer students the chance to self-select musical material to explore, rehearse, and perform with as much teacher and peer participation as a student chooses to employ. Students who enroll in music courses often possess musical ability in a form other than what is studied in the traditional music curriculum. While the teacher might select most of the performance material to meet the artistic and skill-building goals of the class, mini-concerts give students multiple opportunities to choose music and ensembles for themselves. Sometimes this emanates from their own interests; at other times, it emanates from music that is popular among their peers at the time. It is important to note that in many cases, the material that students choose for mini-concerts may not align with the teacher’s preferences. However, as long as the choices that are made are school appropriate, the ownership that comes with students choosing their own repertoire is perhaps the most important factor to promote engagement early in the process.
While offering students opportunities for choice may be a source of uncertainty or anxiety for teachers, establishing guidelines in advance helps to set the appropriate tone for the program (e.g., lyrics being approved beforehand by the teacher, music to match ability level, etc.). Furthermore, opportunities given to students in this program occasionally require conversations about respect, trust, and the meaning of “school-appropriate” and community standards. In the authors’ experiences, little more was needed beyond reminding students of their community’s nonnegotiables about dress code, appropriate language, and supportive environment.
The question may arise, “Isn’t a mini-concert just a talent show?” While a talent show is an infrequent, high-stakes event that often includes competition through audition to participate or in the show itself, mini-concerts are vehicles for repeated practice with an audience. Students are free to repeat material or try something new. In our experience, the multiple performance opportunities offered to students through mini-concerts ultimately raises the performance standard in talent shows, assembly performances, poetry jams, and other events students pursue in and outside school. The priority in this program is that students have a safe, intimate environment in which to take risks. While from time to time a parent, staff member, or student not enrolled in the class may attend or participate, generally the performances are for the classroom community where trust and safety are established.
Whether students operate in a block or traditional schedule, mini-concerts are most successful when they happen with predictable regularity at least once every two to four weeks. A regularly occurring schedule allows students to plan and organize performances with their peers and creates a necessary vehicle for student ownership whereby the program can take on a life of its own. A mini-concert program can be implemented in a variety of ways depending on the school culture and teacher’s objectives. The examples in Tables 1 and 2 outline two possibilities for scheduling mini-concerts in a grade 6–12 public or international school.
Friday Mini-Concert Once Every Two Weeks (Traditional Class That Meets 50 Minutes a Day, Five Days a Week)
Friday Mini-Concert Once Every Three Weeks (Modified Block Classes That Meet 90 Minutes a day, Two to Three Days per Week)
No matter the skill level of the students involved, mini-concerts offer the flexibility to meet students’ growth needs wherever they are in their journey. This can mean simply giving students a low-pressure setting to overcome the anxiety of getting up in front of an audience. Mini-concerts can also give students the chance to realize progress along a continuum. For example, students at the entry level may participate in a group performance of a popular song accompanied by the original recording. Conversely, students who demonstrate exceptional skills in a performance medium beyond what is studied at school can demonstrate to classmates and teachers an artistic depth that may otherwise go unseen. Simply put, mini-concerts give students the chance to bring their music into the school setting. Once ownership and engagement are established, teachers can create a curricular space to encourage students to try more challenging material in order to develop higher degrees of sophistication and artistry.
Take the example of a sixth-grade student who first stands in front of her peers singing with a group of friends. Within a few weeks, she sings on her own, perhaps still accompanied by the original artist. Over the next several weeks, the student seeks out live teacher or student accompaniment after recognizing the expressive limitations of singing with a prerecorded track. Following this, the need to have more personal investment and autonomy compels her to learn a few chords on guitar. By the time she completes ninth grade, she has composed original songs, sung for classmates on special occasions, helped a classmate overcome performance anxiety by inviting him to sing a duet, taught a classmate basic guitar accompaniment skills, performed with ease throughout the community in higher stakes events, and posted performances online, including selling tracks of an original song on iTunes.
Sometimes a need to know drives new learning and collaboration between students. For example, as students explore and prepare a potential musical selection with their friends for an upcoming mini-concert, they may need to learn to play new instruments, such as piano, guitar, or drums, or to accompany a tune with simple piano voicing. Through active exploration of performance on various instruments or singing in various styles, students often broaden their awareness of the intricacies of ensemble performance and composition. Through current technology, students have access to a vast array of performance materials. For example, printable sheet music, tablature, lead sheets, and lyrics are available via the Internet as well as accompaniment tracks on streaming media websites. When students create their own accompaniment tracks with GarageBand, Band in a Box, BeatPad, and other software, they are empowered to make artistic decisions about form, timbre, texture, harmony, and other musical elements.
With the teacher’s guidance, students learn and practice good audience etiquette in mini-concerts. Within the mini-concert program, teachers establish standards for audience behavior that is appropriate to the setting and presentation. Additionally, cultivating desired audience behaviors among the students promotes improvement in the wider community audience when students recognize they can serve as role models. By being in an environment where students have frequent opportunities to switch between acting as the performer and audience member, a sense of empathy can be nurtured among students where the outcome is often attentive, encouraging, and inquisitive behavior.
Assessment, Standards, and Music Literacy
In our experience, mini-concerts worked best when they were free of grade-bearing performance assessment in order to maintain the low-stakes atmosphere that encouraged voluntary participation. Students felt free to choose performance material without fear of value judgment on the genre or difficulty level of the music. With that said, various learning opportunities and formative assessments not necessarily directly related to the performance are available to enrich the experience within the framework of the National Common Core for Arts Standards (NCCAS). For example, the ability to skillfully select music to perform and explain their reasons is addressed by Anchor Standard 4–Select. Also, self-assessment and peer assessment of performances and teacher assessment of positive written and verbal feedback can enhance participation while being valuable tools for student engagement and literacy skill building.
Written and verbal peer-to-peer feedback that is constructive and supportive is an essential component of the mini-concert system. Music education scholars Lucile Alexander and Laura Dorow assert that positive peer-to-peer feedback is a powerful motivator to increase student achievement, especially when students engage their peers with positive feedback about musical performance. 8 The safe and supportive culture of a mini-concert program depends on the teacher modeling examples of positive feedback and encouraging students to practice giving verbal and written feedback centered on what the students liked about a performance.
Participating in a mini-concert program provides students with the opportunity to sing, perform on instruments, improvise, arrange, and compose. The National Common Core for Arts Standards provide teachers with specific Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting domains that students should acquire and experience. Over time, recurring mini-concerts introduce and help students engage with music content that relates to many of the skills and actions emphasized in the revised standards. Specifically, in addition to the standards pertaining to Creating and Performing, mini-concerts provide a structure for response and gives students the opportunity to reflect on music that is “influenced by their interests, experiences, understandings, and purposes” in reference to Responding benchmarks. 9
Various Responding objectives related to the National Core Music Standards can be addressed by including written and verbal peer-to-peer feedback related to mini-concert performances. Through the process of organizing and communicating peer-to-peer feedback, students engage with several enduring understandings associated with the NCCAS including but not limited to “the personal evaluation of musical work(s) and performance(s) is informed by analysis, interpretation, and established criteria,” which is Anchor Standard 9 associated with Responding. For example, by referencing a list of predetermined music vocabulary words to give feedback to their peers, students can engage in meeting substandard MU:Re9.1.6 associated with Anchor Standard 9 where students “apply teacher-provided criteria to evaluate musical works or performances.” 10 As students engage with specific music vocabulary through giving feedback to their peers in relation to the observed live performance, the use of a vocabulary list gives them the flexibility needed for using words as a tool to evaluate musical works appropriate to an individual’s level of understanding.
Written feedback can be realized in ways that suit the learning environment, resources available, and teacher’s learning objectives. Ideally, the feedback system benefits the writer, the performer, and the teacher by giving each an important artifact from the process. As the writer clarifies his or her thinking, the performer receives constructive commentary and the teacher receives artifacts to determine next steps in guiding evolving music and language literacy. A word wall displaying music terminology and key words for talking about music performance is a useful reference during mini-concerts. Additionally, students can keep vocabulary lists in their choir or band folders for quick reference. The initial list or word wall is created with student input through a word splash or other teacher-guided activity, and new words are added to the collection as novel performances call for fresh and imaginative ways to write and share about the presentations. For example, guided by a set of vocabulary words or prompts (see Table 3), teachers can help students to respond to the performances of their classmates using music-specific terminology. By practicing awareness and identification of musical concepts in a nonthreatening and supportive environment, students can begin to develop fluency and immediate connection with musical concepts and performers in an authentic way.
Creating Music-Specific Terminology for Feedback
When all participants have access to a device (laptop, iPad, tablet, or smartphone), online platforms can provide the writer, the performer, and the teacher with immediate access to the feedback, and they can each interact in real time. For example, the teacher can inject focusing comments, and students can learn from reading each other’s comments. A group chat such as todaysmeet.com or an educational platform like Edmodo provide good forums for collaborative work of this kind. Of course, manual forms of written feedback can be used when the technology described previously is not available. Examples include journals or teacher-constructed “mini-comment” sheets such as the one included in Figure 1. Regardless of the platform, written comments can be a useful way to formatively assess language literacy or to address other schoolwide literacy objectives.
Example of a “Mini-Comment” Template That Can Be Used for Written Peer Feedback
Students provide positive feedback to performers through todaysmeet.com.
Supporting a Musical Future
Including a mini-concert series in a music program can result in rich returns beyond the investment of class time required to run it. Students select and prepare performance material outside class, taking responsibility for their own level of quality that can be raised with peer encouragement and teacher support over time. Mini-concerts can also be a scaffolding tool for chamber music ventures, solo performance units, and recitals. Moreover, a supportive and nurturing environment can help to offset the risks that students take to perform in front of each other independently or even in large ensemble rehearsals. Looking forward into the new NCCAS framework for developing students’ cognizance of Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting processes, mini-concerts are an important tool to meet these standards and for elevating musical independence. By creating a space for students to share “their music” in a supportive, nonthreatening environment, teachers can nurture the social and musical validation between students. Validation in this sense can help students feel empowered to bring the confidence and agency necessary to benefit from learning less familiar forms of music-making that they are bound to encounter. Moreover, in cases where social barriers arise between individuals who possess contrasting worldviews, mini-concerts create a vehicle where students can frequently come together to share music representative of many cultures, softening the often rigid conceptions of cultures other than one’s own.
Middle school girls performing a duet during a Friday mini-concert.
Band and choir students collaborate on a performance of a popular song.
Friends dedicate a song to a student who will soon move to another school.
