The case for expectation-free, exploratory music learning

Grace Thompson is a voice and piano teacher based in Austin. She is a classically trained soprano who graduated from Kennesaw State University in 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in music–ethnomusicology. A longtime advocate for the neurodiverse community, Grace joins us on the blog to discuss her nontraditional methods of teaching music to kids through the Groove Garden program at Eastside Music School.

Musicking: (v.) any activity that includes playing, performing, listening, writing,
recording, or sharing music.

Childhood music lessons. We’ve all been there before, or maybe you haven’t. A parent has signed you up for a music lesson—piano, guitar, violin, or maybe even singing—and you’re getting ready to demonstrate to your teacher what you were meant to have practiced in the time since your last lesson.

Only you haven’t practiced or didn’t get as much practice time as you wanted. Teachers always can tell when a student hasn’t practiced, and you know walking in that your teacher will pick up on your lack of practice. Does this make me a bad student? A bad musician? Will my teacher be mad at me? Or disappointed? Will I ever learn to play this instrument?

As you go to play your instrument, these fears and anxieties course through your still-developing brain and begin to distract you and tell you that you’re not good enough. Playing your instrument has now turned from a fun hobby after school to an insurmountable test. The traditional private music lesson environment can, unfortunately, breed these sentiments in students, eventually turning students off from music as a whole.

Now imagine yourself as an atypical learner. Traditional learning environments are already not geared toward you, and now there is compounded stress from not being able to meet the expectations set by your teacher. These expectations have been set from a hegemonic system of learning music that is centuries old. This system of learning does not reflect the modern learner and is, in part, creating more failures than successes.

As a music teacher, I define success as a student being happily engaged in their studies, followed by an improvement in their technical and theoretical abilities. To support this type of musical education, the environment must be conducive to every learner, and we can create these environments by leading exploratory-driven, expectation-free music classrooms.

Musicking is a life-long process that no one will ever truly master. It is the embodiment of “about the journey, not the destination,” so we should present to students this idea of a musical journey. Twists, turns, and unforeseen circumstances may occur on our journey through a musical life, and allowing students to explore for themselves will well-equip them to navigate these changes. Perhaps a violin student watches a harpist and becomes enamored with this new instrument, or a classical piano student wants to begin playing jazz repertoire. These changes in instrument or repertoire are not typically supported in a traditional music education environment due to the expectations to stay with and master one particular instrument or genre.

Taking out the expectations of a traditional music classroom environment gives students fewer restrictions to explore different areas of music they might not have been exposed to before, and more confidence to try without the fear of failure or rejection. Expectation-free learning passes the baton into the hand of the students to create and express themselves without any limitations. Autonomy is given back to the child, therefore creating a more enthusiastic student. Exploration-led classrooms also promote social growth through a free exchange of ideas between peers, unclouded by any pre-existing musical “rules.”

Music education is vital to all people, but especially children, as it has been linked with a plethora of brain-boosting qualities such as supporting language and reasoning skills, emotional intelligence, coordination and fine motor skills, memorization and imagination, and intellectual curiosity, among many others (see nafme.org). Learners who find themselves on the Autism spectrum or any other spectrum of learning differences can especially reap the benefits from any of these characteristics.

Music plays a part in many other fields of academia, and finding an interest in music can help support other areas of interest for students as well, such as math, science, visual arts, and history. Music also supports a social outlet for students who lack interaction with peers, whether because of developmental differences or more solitary forms of education such as homeschooling or virtual learning.

Eastside Music School’s Groove Garden is an inclusive music class for children of all ages, backgrounds, and learning styles. It’s designed for kids to learn and make music together in a way not normally offered in traditional music classes or private lessons. Parents are also welcome to join their students as parents play a fundamental role in the student/teacher relationship. We encourage exploration-based learning as well as expectation-free instruction. In this class, we aim to give students the basics of music education, such as rhythm, melody, harmony, and instrument types, while also allowing for independent and group playing as well as encouraging student leadership and autonomy. While children in traditional music education are often given very little voice, if any, in what they choose to study, at the Groove Garden, we allow students to have a say in what kinds of music to study and activities they enjoy.

The next Groove Garden class will be held on Thursday April 27, from 3pm to 4pm at Eastside Music School.

Grace Thompson | Groove Garden

Why I instruct my students in the art of lock picking

Guest contributor Ken Hawthorn is the founder of Austin School for the Driven. Students at Driven smash educational silos and question the premise of the question in their learning journey. Hawthorn is the author of Super Arduino. Outside of Driven, he consults with both Austin Community College and the University of Texas at Austin on makerspace education and design.

The Real Deal

Over the last eight years, I have offered my students instruction in lock picking. I am not talking about just sticking a paperclip in a hallway doorknob, but how to systematically pick the same locks you find on 80 percent of residential and business front doors. I offer this instruction starting in 5th grade. For students to get consistent at this skill, they need quite a few hours of practice. Why would I take class time to do this?

A Physical Analogy for Life

The person who does not know how to pick locks lives in a world where every locked door is a hard no. There is no choice to open that door. Having taught perhaps 400+ people to pick locks over the years, I have never had one student, child or adult, report back to me that they changed their behavior in any way after learning to do it. So why am I teaching this skill?

The answer is that there is a huge mental shift in someone who has learned to pick most of the locked doors that surround them every day. It’s a shift from “every locked door is a hard no” to “every locked door is a polite request to please keep out”—the choice is now up to the individual. This is really significant in the context of personal agency—the level of internal belief that you can change the world around you. When my students have learned lock picking and then have an idea in high school or college and someone says, “That’s a stupid idea,” they are more likely to reply with a “Thank you for your perspective; I will make my own judgment.”

We don’t normally raise our children with a lock on the cookie jar through age 18. Pretty early on, students need to know that they can open the cookie jar at any time and must use their executive function skills to do so when given permission and not count on a physical lock to deter them. 

I have found that around 5th grade is the right time to give students this lens through which they can see that the world is theirs to navigate and that they should have the knowledge and tools to go where they want—all the time doing so in the context of social rules and contracts that they choose to follow. From cars to kitchen knives, students going into high school will need to wield tools that require this commitment to using them correctly and within the social context they are navigating.

The Lock as a System

What is the nature of a lock? A lock is a system. Our goal is to turn the keyway in a lock. This requires that the internal pins of a lock line up in just such a way where each pin is held not too low or too high. For most front door locks, this means about 31,000+ possible key patterns to lift each pin into exactly the right position. Without a key, we need to use micro-tactile feedback with the pick and a turning tool to set each pin correctly and keep each pin in position as we are working on the next pin. This is difficult and takes concentration, but with practice, locks go from a black box to a well-understood system that can be opened with the application of skills and the right tools.

How to Learn More

Now that you know why I teach my students how to pick locks, let me leave you with the resources to learn this on your own.

Image Credit: Deviant Ollam / deviating.net

Deviant Ollam has a great set of open-source materials to learn lock picking. This link is a rabbit hole of knowledge. He came out and led a great workshop for students at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

In Austin you have a couple of free hands-on resources to learn lock picking:

• The Longhorn Locksport Club meets every other Saturday at Batch Brewery.

• Austin School for the Driven puts out a free table at the SFC farmer’s market every other Saturday (weeks Longhorn Locksport is not meeting).

My hope is that groups of students and adults learning to pick locks will start to be described as engaged in locksport vs. lock picking. Whatever you want to call it, I will continue to teach these skills because I have seen the benefits for my students.

Ken Hawthorn | Austin School for the Driven

Intentional tech use: Helping young people build immunity to persuasive technology

Photo by Fredrick Tendong on Unsplash

Alt Ed Austin is delighted to bring the work and voice of guest contributor Seth Bunev to our readers. Seth is a remarkable young writer, researcher, and educator whose new book, Screenfarers: Nurturing Deliberate Action in a Digital World, was released in paperback this month; both book and ebook can be found here. He has been rethinking education systems since age 7 and has participated in numerous forms of school, from Montessori to distance learning. Starting at age 17, he spent four years offline to better understand how digital technologies had shaped his experience and to try to experience something different. Seth teaches naturalist skills to children and is currently working with Turning Life On to develop a school program that facilitates a more balanced relationship with tech at a community level.

I grew up with the internet. In high school, I regularly stayed up till three in the morning watching YouTube videos. This was normal among my peers—it was also normal to have trouble remembering things, avoid eye contact, and be diagnosed with depression. It was obvious to me at the time that these things were, at least to some degree, related to our digital habits.

Why would we do this to ourselves? Well, in the moment, it seemed fun. Somehow, it seemed fun even when my eyes were bloodshot, I had a headache, and I had barely left my room for a week. There was always another interesting thing to read, or watch, just a click away.

While modern digital technologies are powerful, and can have many benefits, some of the less positive effects are increasingly obvious: the eye damage, attention disorders, compulsive behaviors, loss of social skills, even loss of a social fabric in which to practice those skills.

It is no accident that young people spend huge numbers of hours on digital media, with US teens averaging about 7.5 hours per day in 2019. Social media and video game companies carefully design their products to be as addictive as possible, because their business model usually depends on maximizing “time on device” to generate data and ad revenue, or encourage in-game purchases. On top of that, there is the cumulative effect of millions of people competing to create the most eye-catching and engaging online content.

As a result, compulsive tech use is rampant. If this were confined only to video games, or clickbait sites, the solution would be simpler—complete avoidance would be an option. But pretty much everything on the internet can create unwanted habits, from email to database searching to blogs. It is possible to live without digital media—I did so for four years, to better understand its effects on me—but at present that is not feasible or desirable for most people. Can we have the good things the internet provides, without the disruptive habits?

It would help to have cultural norms that restrict digital tech’s invasion of every aspect of life. Perhaps we can also hope for a digital paradigm that doesn’t aggressively leverage human psychology to keep people hooked. But those things will take time. While we work towards them, we need to help kids and youth develop the skills to take charge of their relationship with digital tech at an individual level—ways to build immunity to the nebulous thing variously referred to as habit-forming technology, persuasive technology, or behavior design.

The immunity-building regimen I have developed, through research and experimentation on myself and peers, involves three components:

1. Understanding how persuasive tech works, the underlying motivations behind it, and how to recognize it in digital interfaces

2. Practicing attention to one’s own digital habits and how they are shaped by design

3. Cultivating habits that facilitate intentional use of digital media

Together, these three approaches can interrupt some of the unconscious habits and habit-forming mechanisms through which tech use gets out of control.

Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

How Persuasive Technology Works

The human brain works and develops by linking things together—neurons, words and their meanings, places and memories of them, stimuli and behaviors. These associations can form sequences, which become habits.

Drawing on the field of behaviorism founded by B. F. Skinner, digital platforms create associations that shape behavior. Specifically, they do this by linking something we desire or feel strongly about with an action the company wants us to take, according to Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. The desire for social connection can be linked to a behavior like checking notifications, which leads back to a social media site. Then, when someone takes the desired action, the habit is reinforced by a psychological reward—either one directly generated by the platform, such as an “achievement,” or one generated by other people using the options strategically provided within the platform, such as an exciting video or a “like.” Thanks to competition among companies, pretty much every human desire is now targeted by this approach.

The companies responsible for vast swaths of the internet use this type of psychological technique to maximize “time on device.” The net result is widespread compulsive use and many people of all ages spending more time on screens than is healthy or even desired (by them!). This is a difficult issue to confront for several reasons:

• The good things about digital technologies—availability of information, ease of connection with others, entertainment, convenience—are also what can make them addictive.

• Persuasive design accomplishes its goals by restructuring a person’s values, motivations, behaviors, and identity around using the platforms in question.

• Persuasive design is integrated into the very infrastructure that we currently depend on for many essential and valuable activities.

• Widespread dependence on digital technologies for nearly everything has destroyed the offline social fabric.

How can we navigate this complex situation? How can young people, whose identities and lives are often heavily invested in digital media, and who are immersed in a society where compulsive use of these technologies is the norm, be encouraged to find moderation, assess their habits, and be intentional?

Learning to Pay Attention

When I was a teenager slouched over my laptop, it was not helpful for my parents to tell me I was damaging my eyes, or to express any other kind of concern about the effects of my actions. I grew up in a culture that valorizes rebellion against authority—adults telling me to do something made me want to do the opposite, even if I agreed with them.

While it is helpful to tell young people about how and why digital tech is designed to shape their behavior—this is a fact of the world, which they can research themselves—it is not necessarily so helpful to tell them how they are affected by it. It can feel like an attempt to limit their freedom, creating pushback.

On the other hand, helping kids and youth see how designers of digital platforms are trying to control their behavior allows pushback to go in a more productive direction! Are the persuasive technologists succeeding? If so, in what ways? Better to ask the kids to figure that out for themselves, developing the habit of being more intentional with how they relate to devices in the process.

Photo by Peter Jones on Unsplash

One excellent way to do this is to encourage them to keep a journal of their tech use. Whether it is the number of times they touch their cellphone, the number of hours they spend on screens in a week, or how much of that time they are spending on each type of activity, writing down observations as objectively as possible can be revealing. It’s easy not to remember where the time went, but it’s hard to argue with one’s own record of it.

In addition to tracking their own behavior, young people can use journals to track the persuasive design features they find in their apps, games, and websites, and to asking questions about them. Why is this button here? Why did this message pop up at this specific time? What is this webpage trying to encourage me to do?

The more I observe consciously how I am impacted by digital tech, the more motivated I am to take charge of my interactions and ensure that they serve my goals, not Google’s or Facebook’s. And the more I look for persuasive design in the digital places I go, the less likely I am to simply do whatever a website prompts me to do without even noticing. The practice of observing and recording one’s tech habits is a way to wedge some conscious thought into sequences of behaviors that have become totally automatic.

Creating Habits of Intentional Use

Ideally, we should be helping young people create intentional use habits when such habits are the easiest to form—as soon as they have access to digital technology. But starting early is not always an option.

A “digital detox,” a period of time without digital tech, can be helpful for creating intentional habits. When I started using computers again after years offline, it was easy to stay on task and do exactly what I intended—my old habits had mostly faded into oblivion. Even a week can be enough time to create a sense of divide between habits-before and habits-after, and to give new habits a head start. Even a weekend would help.

One of the simplest ways to develop more intentional digital habits is to take a moment to decide on an intention before using a device, and practice sticking to it. The following exercise builds this skill:

1. Decide on a single purpose before opening a laptop, unlocking a smartphone, etc.

2. If straying from the original purpose, try to remember the origin of the distraction and return to the intended activity.

3. When finished, reflect on the difference between intention and behavior. Was there a gap? Why? What could be changed?

As with paying attention, practicing intention can be aided by recording the intention and reflection in a notebook. Over time, young people who apply this exercise to their digital activities will build up an understanding of their own minds, making it easier to anticipate and prevent distractions before they happen. The habit of sticking to an intention can help counteract the numerous sources of distraction.

Cultivating such a habit, combined with the practice of attention, a basic knowledge of how persuasive design works, and a grasp of what is at stake (their time—that is, their lives), can empower people to access the bounty of the digital age while reducing some of its negative side effects. 


Note: This guest post is the author's adaptation of an article originally published on INTENTA DIGITAL.

Seth Bunev | Screenfarers

Why should I take an art class? I don’t want to be an artist when I grow up!

Alison Pilon Nokes teaches art, among other subjects, at Huntington-Surrey High School in Austin. Her guest contribution here is adapted from her recent post on the school’s own blog.

After about ten years in the visual art education world, I feel pretty strongly that everyone should take an art class—every year, if possible!

Throughout my own educational and professional experiences, I have always felt freed by the opportunity for creative problem solving and exploration of visual media provided through the visual arts. I was, and still am, able to process many different parts of my life through an art outlet. And while I do, personally, as an adult, identify as an artist, I think the benefits of working through an artistic process—much like the experience of working with the scientific method in a science course—are worthwhile for everyone to experience as they venture through their education, no matter what they end up doing and becoming. 

We are living in a rapidly changing world. In many ways, we cannot even imagine what the work force and daily life are going to look like for our kids when they come of age. This year of rapid adjustment to virtual learning and social distancing has certainly given us all a taste of how flexible we need to be and how quickly our world can change. What we do know is that students who can think critically and creatively about a variety of complex problems are going to have the best chance for success in just about any setting. 

Not every student who is taking an art class is planning to apply to art school for college. In fact, most aren’t (just as not every student who is taking a biology course plans to become a biologist). It is with that in mind that I design lessons and projects for my art students. My lessons provide students with opportunities to play with materials they may not have used before, discover for themselves how those materials work, and consider how they can use them to meet their needs. My lessons present students with a problem, a dilemma, or an obstacle and ask them to come up with an out-of-the-box solution.

As much fun as it is for families and friends to walk into a student art show at the end of the year full of beautiful finished work, the reality of art is that most often what students make is messy and strange. For every finished work of art that is “pretty,” there are often several unsuccessful attempts (I’m purposely avoiding the term “failures”). Those unsuccessful attempts—those messy and strange drawings, paintings, and sculptures—are what show the important lessons of art: the processes of working out a solution to a problem. As a teacher of art, the most important thing to me is not what the final product looks like. Rather, I want my art students to put forth their best effort, maintain a good attitude about trying, and work through the hard process of solving problems in innovative ways with materials that may be new to them.

Alison Pilon Nokes

3 things I’ve learned about distance learning as an online tutor

Jason Silverberg, M.Ed., joins us as a guest contributor to share his insights about remote learning. He has been a classroom teacher and popular tutor since 2004.

Ever since the world turned upside down, many parents have been in a constant state of uncertainty as to what type of schooling environment is best for their children. Is it safe to return to campus? Could lessons taught over Zoom really be effective? Well, ever since shifting all of my tutoring online in March, I’m proud to report that I have had much more success than I originally thought possible. I’ve learned a lot about connection, improvisation, and perseverance, and I look forward to seeing my students continue to meet and exceed their goals. Here are my top three takeaways from the last six months as an online educator.

A positive outlook is key.

To a lot of people, education just seemed too hands-on and interpersonal to move to an online medium. But as anyone wearing a mask and social distancing will tell you, sometimes doing what seems uncomfortable might just be the best way to move forward. People, especially children, are resilient. If the goal is to learn with no threat of spreading the virus, online tutoring is the safest bet. Starting off with a positive mindset makes all the difference. You get out what you put in.       

Vibe is fully translatable.

A teacher is more than just a random person, and a classroom is more than just four walls. It’s the teacher’s personality, vibe, and surroundings that create a unique, welcoming atmosphere. Whatever you bring to the classroom can also be conveyed online, especially a sense of humor. Nothing cements a friendship like cracking up together! Ironically, being limited to the confines of a computer screen actually feels limitless in a lot of ways. This even applies to my students whom I have still not yet met in person. Seeing my home, my drums, my plants, my cat, etc. gives them more of an opportunity to see what we have in common, which of course only strengthens our bond and makes learning much more of a fun experience.  

Being face-to-face on the screen rather than side-by-side at a table also makes it easier to notice when students get distracted. At these times, I can always tell what they need in order to get back on track. Redirection? A change of gear? A brain break? A quick conversation? Even taking one minute together to watch a youtube video of a puppy can make the rest of the session even more focused than before.

Being in the driver’s seat further opens the open road.

Online tutoring may seem impersonal at first glance, but it actually allows students to work for extended periods of time with their teacher one-on-one…an extremely rare occurrence in most classrooms. In this type of setting, teachers can more easily assess a student’s specific needs, reinforce unclear concepts, and even identify and repair past educational misunderstandings that might have normally gone undetected. 

Watch Jason in action in this video from a tutoring session. [TutoringMindset.com Disclaimer: I do not claim to own the rights to the songs or movie clips in this video. 😇]

My students know that they can only succeed if they meet me halfway. Signing into sessions on their own, taking initiative, and asking clarifying questions encourages and empowers them to take their education into their own hands. Of course, these feelings contribute to their ongoing ability to consistently surpass expectations throughout their academic career and beyond.

When the world gets back on its feet someday, I look forward to seeing the many ways in which schooling may change. Regardless of lessons being taught online or in person, I take comfort in knowing that the connection between the teacher and the student will always remain the most important aspect of education. 

Jason Silverberg

Sudbury silver linings

Today we’re pleased to share an important update from Bruce Smith, a longtime staff member of Clearview Sudbury School, about the Clearview community’s democratic decision-making around reopening during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a time when so many are stressed and scrambling, when good options seem rare, gratitude for the silver linings becomes that much richer. As schools and unschoolers alike approach the end of summer, I am very fortunate to be part of a community that just made our own hard, but healthy, decision.

At a special (and, of course, virtual) meeting in late July, the staff, students, and parents of Clearview Sudbury School voted to push the first day of our 2020–2021 school year to 2021— January 6th, to be precise. Our schedule the rest of the year will also see reduced hours and four-day weeks. This vote followed two rounds of surveys and informal discussions, as we worked over several weeks to assess everyone’s preferences and concerns, along with crunching all the numbers we could get our hands on.

While the outcome was relatively difficult and frustrating, there is also a degree of comfort and gratitude. I know I feel better putting off reopening to a date when more of us will feel safer returning. Neither opening while Texas remains a hotspot nor spinning the revolving door of opening and reclosing held any appeal for me. Nor was I interested in returning to the week-to-week uncertainty of this past spring, not knowing if we’d be closed for a week, a month, or the entire semester.

There have been many times over the years when I’ve appreciated the democratic processes of Sudbury schools, but this is the first time it’s hit home quite like this. There’s still plenty of uncertainty, of course, and it isn’t getting any easier to support our families, to keep everyone feeling connected at a distance. However, in comparison to so many other schools, I feel incredibly lucky to be part of one where everyone has a voice and a vote, where we get to decide for ourselves, together, what approach feels safest and best for us.

In a perfect world, every family would have this much of a say in the decisions affecting their children’s learning. And who knows? If this crisis leads more people to find the educational option that works best for them, well, maybe that will be a silver lining on a grand scale.

Thanks for reading, and my best wishes for health and strength to all of you.

Bruce Smith