Today I was mentoring teachers doing Musical Interactions in the classroom at the Rowan school in Sheffield. The purpose of the project is to embed the practice across the school and I have been working with each class for a single term, teaching a repertoire of interactive songs, how to play the ukulele and how to design and lead the sessions.
Today I was discussing the layout of the room, an aspect of the practice that we have developed over the course of the summer term. At the beginning of term, the teacher used the usual room layout for session which involved the children sitting on chairs around tables. Gradually we removed the tables and moved the chairs so that the children were free to move around the room however they wished to. With this new level of autonomy, the children are more relaxed and we can join in with what they are doing.
In the post-session discussion, I explained that, although we had removed tables and chairs, the success of the sessions was due to the fact that we had removed something much more important… expectations.
While some children are able to sit in a circle and can benefit from the opportunity to participate in a group experience, the children in this particular class were not so interested in sitting. And the success of our facilitation style and choice of activities relies upon the children being happy to sit in a circle, then we are likely to place an expectation and demand upon the children to sit and behave in a certain way. Consequently, if they do meet our expectations and refuse to sit how we want them to, then we are less likely to celebrate their behaviour, asking them to stop what they are doing and return to sitting again. For these children this style of facilitation does not meet the children’s need for autonomy or competence or relatedness.
We can avoid this turn of events by lowering our expectations by finding a way to deliver the session without the need to sit in a circle. For the staff I was talking to today, this was achieved by co-leading the session. One member of staff was free to move around the room and join in with any of the children while the other member of staff sat down playing the ukulele, ‘holding’ the session and singing songs to support the interaction that the other staff member was engaged in. This created a very relaxed feeling, and the children were very calm. Every child engaged in high quality interactions with a member of staff and the staff felt that they had achieved a good level of rapport with each child. When the children weren’t interacting directly with the staff then they were happy and relaxed, moving to the music, singing or engaging in some other peripheral way.