|
New Teaching Methods For the last seven years I have been involved, as a consultant, in the creation and application of innovative and dramatically effective teaching methods. Our work is being used in U.S. public schools in about forty-five states. The underlying philosophy of this work is expressed by Dr. Shinichi Suzuki, the man who developed the Suzuki Method. He believed that average and even below average children could become functional geniuses given the proper development. What we now call average is just the minimal required to get by in society. What we call genius is most often just average people who had the good fortune to get the right developmental opportunities at the right time in the right way. This does not negate the physical reality that people are born with different aptitudes. It simply states that the margins of difference in our natural aptitudes are most often less significant than the differences in our environmental and developmental opportunities. Through the work of the last seven years I have seen children who had no prior instruction in music learn more music theory in hours than is typical in a year. Children in second and third grades are routinely learning the multiplication facts in six to eight hours compared to the many months of instruction required by the traditional methods. These students are also achieving higher performance in both speed and accuracy. These children are not geniuses; they are average kids responding to a method that works. In one pilot study, a group of children in fourth to sixth grade with IQ's in the 80's-90's and who were also suffering from emotional / social disabilities that barred them from participating in the public school system, learned the multiplication table with only eight hours of instruction (over a two week period). The class average on a test of all 100 multiplication facts was 83%. What traditional education could not do in years, these new methods achieved in two weeks. We have also worked with very enjoyable methods of language instruction that allow people to learn and remember vocabulary at the rate of about one word per minute sustained. As someone who has studied ten languages, the language methods are the ones I personally regret having missed out on in my own education. Working with Dean Vaughn has been an inspiring journey in raising the standards of my own expectations for the developmental potential of humanity. I look forward to a global expansion on the principles of this work that will make our highest expectations for education a common achievement. Below are more specific descriptions of the applications of these new methods to various subjects. MUSIC THEORY http://musictheory.deanvaughn.com Over the past six years I worked with Dean to develop The Vaughn CubeTM for Music theory course of study. This course of study teaches approximately one year of High School music theory (or one semester at college level) in seven hours. At the end of this course of study, students are able to answer thousands of music theory questions such as, "Spell the F# Major scale", or "Spell the G# Half-Diminished Seventh chord" or "What is a Major sixth above Ab?". They can do this in their head without external reference. How is this possible? The foundation of this course is surprisingly simple. Students just remember where eight animals are located in a room that is shown on a DVD video. Along with a few simple rules, this allows them to quickly and easily memorize an interval structure known as the circle of fifths and use that interval structure as a mental musical calculator. Although it has been known for a long time that the circle of fifths does have properties than enable the calculation of musical relationships, music students cannot effectively use the circle of fifths as a mental music calculator due to the lack of ability to easily memorize the structure. Even when memorized, the complete lack of useful reference markers in the circle of fifths as it is typically represented makes it impossible for the average student to carryout much in the way of musical calculation even when the circle of fifths is printed on paper in front of them. With the Vaughn CubeTM for Music Theory, students do not memorize the answers to all those questions. After four hours of instruction (on video) and about three hours of practice, the average student can calculate the answers to all those questions using the circle of fifths in their mind. The circle of fifths, in its Vaugh CubeTM form, is so useful for musical calculation because it is a structure with set-generating properties. Anytime you have a set of elements (such as the set of vocabulary words in a language) combined with rules of manipulation (such as the rules of grammar), you have the potential for useful set- generating properties in the resulting structure. Just as the rules of grammar allow us to manipulate a relatively small set of vocabulary words to generate the much larger set of meaningful sentences, the rules established for the Vaughn CubeTM for Music Theory allow us mentally manipulate the circle of fifths to generate a much larger set of meaningful musical structures. Both Dean and I were actually quite stunned by the effectiveness of this method. As we kept discovering more things that could be mentally calculated with this structure, we realized that this course of study would be making a good contribution to the history of music education. After watching the four hour DVD and reading the accompanying book, a Ph.D. in music stated that this course will change the way music theory will be taught throughout the world. The change I envision involves the importance of building a solid foundation of music theory knowledge for every music student. According to music theory professors, approximately half of all freshmen music majors enter college without an adequate knowledge of basic music theory. It is now possible for music students to gain a college-ready knowledge of music theory in their first year of elementary school instrument lessons that many college freshmen music majors do not have after many years of participation in music. Nobody would ever dream of trying to learn to do creative writing without learning the alphabet. Yet, many music students proceed to spend years with their instruments without mastering comparable basics in music theory. What would happen if all music students were able to know and do the list of items below from their very first year in music? I think that would be amazing. In about seven hours the average student will be able to:
There will soon be online videos of the first five lessons which demonstrate the effectiveness of this course. You will be able to find those videos at http://musictheory.deanvaughn.com. They should be up online by mid to end of April 2008. As the first beneficiary of this new method of music instruction, I am happy to report that developing this course of study has opened up new horizons in my own musical life. I have started the study of orchestral music composition and am enjoying it very much. LANGUAGE Free Online
Spanish Course If you have always wanted to learn Spanish but never got around to it, click on the link above. It will take you up to an hour to go through and you will be surprised how much you learn and remember in that one hour. As someone who has spent time studying a quite a few languages, I must say that Dean's methods for handling language instruction are the most enjoyable I have ever encountered. I am always fascinated by how much vocabulary that can be learned and retained so quickly with this method. I wrote the computer program that presents the first 10 lessons of the Instant Spanish course over the net (see the link above). Although I have seen many different uses of memory techniques to help retain vocabulary (some were not very effective), this is the most powerfully effective applied memory system I have ever seen. More examples of new teaching methods in different subjects are coming soon. |