For the final week of our Psychology & Sociology class, we were mostly given the time to write our final paper. There were no assigned readings, just a Live Lecture on the topics covered this term and a Live Classroom to discuss the applications in our classroom of the prompt for our paper. The main thrust of the paper is discussing one or more of the psychological/sociological concepts from the course and how it might reconceptualize our pedagogy. The first concept that came to my mind was self-determination theory from Week 4: Identity, Community, and Music Making, but I also thought about digging more into constructionism, the theoretical framework I used in my research proposal for our Introduction to Research class. I ended up settling on constructionism, but I plan on reading more into self-determination theory during my “Spring Break” next week.Read More
Week 3 of our Psychology and Sociology in Music Education course looked at the concepts of motivation and creativity. We had another slough of readings (from which I learned a great deal!) with a required reading response as well as our second Live Classroom. I’ll discuss a bit of my learning and the implications from the reading in the post below.Read More
For the second week of our Psychology and Sociology in Music Education course, we looked at how the theories we discussed in Week 1 can be applied specifically in music. The readings and lectures sought to address three important questions:
How can we apply developmental theories to music teaching and learning?
What is intelligence? What is talent?
How does an individual's musical ability develop? What is ability? Can we measure ability? What about achievement?
For Week 1 of Psychology and Sociology in Music Education: Perspectives and Applications, we began reading several chapters from Developmental and Educational Psychology for Teachers: An Applied Approach. These chapters gave us a broad overview of the text; psychological research; theories of cognitive development from Piaget, Vygotsky, and Bruner; and theories of personal and social development from Freud, Erickson, Rogers, Maslow, and Marcia. We also had our first Live Classroom, and we were required to write a response to our readings.Read More
Today is the first day of the Spring I 2019 term of my doctoral program, and I am beginning a class entitled Psychology and Sociology in Music Education: Perspectives and Applications with Dr. Ronald Kos. I am especially interested after doing some preliminary reading and having conversations about cognitive load theory with my friend and colleague, Nick Covington. It looks like I’m going to have a lot of reading to do these next seven weeks!Read More