Kaitlyn Laprise

4/2/16
Observation Report 3: Dr. White, Aural Skills 2
Most immediately obvious in Dr. Whites Aural Skills class is the friendly, safe
environment he has established with his students. He began his class in a very
relaxed way, just having conversations with the students for a few minutes. He then
had the students stand for a five-minute warm up activity where students sang the
solfege syllables he showed them with hand signs. This activity started with simple
diatonic patterns, and then began to modulate by having the students reinterpret a
solfege syllable as a new syllable for the following key. For example, they would sing
a pattern that ended on sol, and then he would sing sol becomes fa, they would
echo sol becomes fa, and then they would sing the next pitches in the new key
area. Immediately following every modulation, the first interval they sang was some
type of descending third. He built them up to this skill by first having them pause
between notes they were singing to audiate the diatonic pitch in the middle to fill in
the interval before singing the syllable he was showing them. As they got more
comfortable, he removed the pause for their audiation, and they sang the intervals
correctly. He also reinforced this work with some intervallic discussion about singing
major or minor thirds down from the starting pitch, but the main skill they used to
accomplish the task was audiation. This exercise emphasizes Karpinskis belief that
intervals can be used as a tool, but not as a main method of hearing or singing, as
well as Rogers belief that one of the most important skills students develop in an
aural skills class is audiation, or, as he calls it, internal music perception. This
exercise moved very quickly, but covered a lot of topics and prepared the students

with skills they would need both later in the lesson and in the coming weeks as they
approach new topics.
For the next ten minutes of class, Dr. White did a sing back exercise, which he
referred to as Leader Follower. He played three note patterns on the piano for
them to sing back to him as a class, all of which leapt down a larger interval to
either a chromatic or diatonic pitch, and then resolved up by half step to a diatonic
pitch. Throughout the exercise, he reinforced the same activity of reinterpreting
solfege syllables in a new keydo becomes miand relied on the students to
recall where do was after his explanations. The first step in this exercise was for
students to simply sing back a few patterns that he played, and then he reviewed a
discussion of non-chord tones that they knew from their theory classes. Next, the
students were asked to sing back only the first and third notes of every example,
while audiating the second note on a neutral syllable. After a few of these examples,
he asked the students to identify the chromatic syllables that they had been
singing. For the following examples, they had to first sing back the first and third
pitches on diatonic syllables, and then sing the same example back with all three
pitches including the appropriate chromatic syllable for the second note. He told
them he designed the exercise this way so that they would focus their listening not
on identifying the chromatic pitch by itself, but instead by identifying the chromatic
pitch based on its function. This exercise was an excellent example of Rogers ideas
about scaffolding conceptsbeginning simply and then gradually adding layers of
complexityas well as Karpinskis thoughts about listening for structural versus
embellishing pitches in his discussion of harmonic thinking. He also used one of
Karpinskis suggested exercises for building skills with chromatic pitches which
relies on using audiation.

After this exercise, Dr. White moved on to rhythmic exercises which

emphasized switching between compound and simple subdivision of beats.
Throughout each example, Dr. White stopped them often to emphasize not only
precision, but also elements of their musicality; he found that when singing rhythms
in subdivisions that were not typical of the meter for the exampleduplet or triplet
figuresthe students would often accent each note rather than letting them float
evenly and lyrically, as he said. Dr. Whites emphasis on musicality in these
exercises is consistent with what we have read from several different writers
throughout this semester. They also did a short tenor clef reading exercise where he
emphasized the necessity of looking ahead to help them maintain tempo as they
read. This is encouraging Karpinskis skill of visual tracking to help the students
improve their sight-reading skills by looking ahead. Dr. White then spent about ten
minutes going through their assignment for the following class which would involve
singing duplets in compound meter, which was a continuation of the work they had
been doing with triplets in simple meter. For this introduction, he used their
knowledge of the takadimi system to help them properly subdivide the duplets. This
was a perfect example of why the takadimi system is so effective; being able to use
various rhythms to help students put the syllable di in the same place in
compound and simple subdivision of the beat was extremely helpful in this
situation.
The last activity the class did was sing the pitch patterns they had prepared
for that class. For each example, the student was responsible for singing do from
the previous example, identifying an appropriate pivot note and syllables to use to
help them modulate to the key of their example, establishing tonic in their new
example, and then singing their example. This included even the first example,

where he had the entire class establish a different tonic than the first example, and
the first student had to modulate to the correct key on her own. The design of this
modulating activity throughout this class shows evidence of Rifkins taxonomy,
building from simply remembering and imitating his reinterpretation of syllables in
the beginning of class to students at the end of the class conceptualizing their own
ways to use pivot notes, and applying these skills to new keys and patterns.
Throughout this part of class, Dr. White continually asked other students to give
specific feedback about the way a student modulated or sung a pitch pattern
including what specific pitches they made a mistake with or whether or not they
modulated correctly, which is one of Rogers suggested teaching techniques. The
only assistance he needed to give them through this exercise was when it was
necessary to enharmonically respell notes from a key in order to use syllables to
modulate.
In observing this lesson, two of Dr. Whites strengths as a teacher are most
clear to me: his care to establish a safe and cooperative environment which allowed
the potentially anxiety-producing activity of students correcting each others singing
to be friendly and constructive, and his obvious ability to design both his large-scale
and daily curriculum to build concepts in the way Rogers suggests: starting from
simple ideas and gradually building complexity as their skills grow. Each activity in
the class required very little explanation from Dr. White, as it was clear that he had
used all of these activities before and he was just building on them with new
concepts. Also, each specific activity in the class was not only scaffolded well, but
also contributed to a larger structure of scaffolding concepts within the class and
within his larger curricular goals of incorporating more chromaticism and preparing
the students for modulation. His lesson also used a number of Rogers suggested

teaching techniques including scaffolding, having students recognized their own and
each others mistakes, and encouraging active participation. Dr. Whites obvious
example of strong large-scale curriculum design shows a lot of foresight as well as
experience as a teacher, and will be very influential on my future lesson planning.