Our concert is less than a week away, but I’m ready to be done with this music. Normal rehearsals aren’t cutting it for me anymore. Honestly, I feel like we keep going over the same things and there’s not much more I can do to get my students any better than they are right now. When I start feeling like we’ve hit Groundhog Day in our rehearsals, it’s time to mix things up. If you can relate, here are five of my favorite ways to mix up rehearsal in meaningful ways that can actually be very productive.
Circuit Training
If you’ve heard of circuit training, it was probably in the context of strength training. The idea is that you do a rotation of exercises that work different muscle groups, allowing one muscle group to rest while you work another one.
At this point in our concert cycle, I know exactly where my students will mess up. To set up a circuit training rehearsal, I choose one section from each of our pieces that I know we haven’t mastered yet. I set a timer for 3-5 minutes and we spend that short amount of time fixing that problem, or making as much progress as we can. When the timer goes off, we move on to a section in the next piece and set the timer again. We’ll rotate through all our pieces this way two or three times.
There’s another name for this kind of rehearsal. It’s called interleaved practice, and there’s quite a bit of research to support it. The idea is that if you force your brain to keep switching between tasks, your retention improves significantly, resulting in more improvement over time.
My students either love or hate this kind of rehearsal. It takes a lot of mental stamina and energy, and some of my students have a hard time keeping up. On the other hand, it makes rehearsal go by a lot faster and some of my students really love the fast pace and targeted, focused practice.
Record, Listen, Discuss, Progress
When I get tired of fixing the same things over and over or wondering if my students even know what I’m talking about, we do this activity. It’s a way for me to give students the reins for a little while, to help them take ownership of their performance.
I choose a short section of music that needs work and I record my students playing it with my phone or iPad. As soon as we finish playing, we listen to the recording as a class. There’s usually quite a bit cringing and groaning as the students listen to themselves play. I ask them if we were to only fix one thing, what one thing would make the biggest difference in our performance? They always have a lot of great ideas. We choose one and work on fixing that one thing, then we record the section again and listen to see if it improved at all. Most of the time it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. Then we have the discussion about why things didn’t sound any better and what we still need to do.
I like doing this because it takes some of the responsibility off of me and gets the students listening to themselves more critically. They get to be their own teachers! Also, recordings can help you take a step back as a teacher and listen to your group more objectively. When I hear a recording of my groups, I hear a lot of things that should be fixed that I don’t hear while I’m conducting.
Play for an “Adjudicator”
I work with two other amazing music educators at my school, and sometimes I’ll ask them to come in and listen to us play through our pieces. They give us some great feedback and my students get to hear things from someone other than me. It only takes a few minutes and it’s great for me to get someone else’s opinion on what my group needs to work on the most. It also adds a little bit of pressure to do a practice performance like this and can help students mentally prepare for the actual concert.
If you don’t have another music teacher available to listen to your groups, there are other options. The office staff at my school are always happy to listen to a performance. They might not have any music experience, but you can ask them to listen for specific things and give you feedback. You could ask them to listen for the dynamics, or to watch if everyone’s bow is going the same way. Again, this is all about doing a practice performance and getting some feedback from someone who is not you.
Small Ensemble Performances and Peer Assessments
My students have benefited a lot from doing in-class performances and peer assessments. Once we’ve learned our music pretty well, I split up the class into several small groups that have at least one player from each section. I try to keep the groups around 4-6 people, and I never have a group larger than 8. The groups work on one of the pieces or an excerpt from one of the pieces and then play it for the class. Sometimes I have them rate each other on a rubric. Sometimes I give them a grade for these performances. Sometimes we don’t do any sort of assessment or evaluation.
I love doing this for a few reasons. First, it encourages students to be more independent. When they are the only person playing their part, they have to be strong and confident with it. It also helps the students be more aware of the other parts happening in the orchestra and how they fit together. Students have to learn how to keep a steady beat and stay together without a conductor. The in-class performance increases the level of accountability and importance and it also puts more of the responsibility and ownership on the students rather than on me as the teacher.
Donut Day
I heard about this idea from a local college professor last year and my students love it. Once or twice a concert cycle we rehearse in a big circle instead of the traditional orchestra setup. If I can, I try to do this outside of our classroom somewhere. We’ve often done it on the stage, but when that’s not available we’ve played out in the hallway or even outside. I tell the students to sit anywhere in the circle as long as they aren’t sitting next to someone in their section. At the end of class, I usually bring donuts or a small treat for the class (which is probably why they love this so much.)
Donut Days have been really helpful in preparing for concerts. The students have to be more independent since they aren’t playing with their section. I don’t conduct them as they play through their pieces, so they have to work on maintaining a steady beat together in a new environment with different acoustics than they’re used to. It also helps me to see which pieces or sections of music are still shaky and need more work. Things that have always gone fine in rehearsal may suddenly fall apart in the new setup, which helps us avoid those disasters at the concert.
Whether you’re trying to make the most of the last few rehearsals before a concert or you’re just bored and need to mix things up a bit, try one of these ideas with your students! It helps you listen to your group from a different perspective and helps your students learn more independence and take more ownership of their performance. If you have other favorite ways of mixing up rehearsals, let us know in the comments!