You're listening to that music podcast with Bryson Tarbet, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind that music teacher at the elementary music summit each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher, and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve. Show Notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at that music teacher.com.
Hello, and welcome back to that music podcast. This is going to be an extra special kind of bonus episode of the podcast. And I am super excited because it is all about one of my favorite kinds of things that I've come up with, which is the idea of seven minutes. In teaching, whether you're teaching kindergarten or sixth grade, I firmly believe that the majority of the things that you do, especially at the younger age, should be no longer than seven minutes. And I want you to test this theory for me, I want you at some point today, to set a timer on your phone for seven minutes and sit there and do nothing. That's a long time. Imagine your students for whatever reason, hate the thing you're doing. And they have to sit there for seven minutes, they're going to likely act out, they're going to be bored, they're not going to be engaged. And they're going to feel like they're just sitting there doing nothing. The reason I chose seven minutes, honestly is kind of arbitrary. I just kind of went with it. And it's worked pretty well for me. But I think it is incredibly crucial to move from either one activity to the next one concept to the next. And ideally, one zone classroom zone to the next, or sitting to standing or standing to sitting or sitting down to playing game every seven minutes. And some of you are probably thinking, goodness, gracious Bryson, that is so much in a lesson. And the answer is yes, it really is. But the reality is, is as music teachers, we we don't have the luxury of extra time. Now, first of all, I'm not saying any teacher has extra time. Don't Don't take it don't twist my words. But the reality is that we only see our students so many day every so many days, right. So we have to make the absolute most of the instructional time we have. So if we even move everything up from seven minutes to eight minutes, the amount of compound time that they are no longer the basically other instructional time that we have, by spending eight minutes on one concept rather than seven. That adds up really fast. So what can you do? Within seven minutes, I think seven minutes is the perfect time for a game. I think if it starts going closer to 10 minutes, you get kids that are like alright, cool, we play bounce high bounce low. Now, I think if you get too short, we have students that are saying, well, we just got to this, what do you mean, we're done, we only had two turns, right, we want to make sure we have time for both sides of it. Seven minutes, I think is a great way for students to be able to work together to create a rhythmic rhythmic notation of something, it gives you some time to work together on the board to fix it out, gives you some time to practice it to clap it to touch it. But it doesn't let it often doesn't get to that point where students are checked out and they're throwing popsicle sticks, or they're doing a little spinny thing on the ground, because they're ready to move on. I truly, truly believe that seven minutes is really kind of that special sweet spot. But the reality is this, your classroom is different than mine, your classroom might have be five minutes, it might be 10 minutes, what I want you to do is I want you to find whatever that time is for you and your students, I would highly recommend you start with seven and kind of seeing where that goes. And it might be kind of based on grades. For instance, my preschoolers, if I tried to get him to do the same thing for seven minutes, I probably wouldn't be successful. But I think I know, at this point in my career that if I tried to have them do one activity for more than seven minutes, it would be a bloodbath, because they're they just that level of engagement. It reaches kind of that there's like a bell curve, right? We want to move on when the majority of engagement is there. And we're just starting to get dropped off and move on to something else to keep that roller coaster going on the upward slant rather than everybody crashing and burning. Because our kind of engagement and our focus has really gone to the tank. If you're sitting there saying I don't know how much I can fit in seven minutes. Like that seems really short. I want you to challenge yourself to deliver a chunk of instruction in seven minutes, because I think you'd be surprised at how much you can cover when you realize that there are some strategies that you can use to make that better. So for instance, we like to talk a lot sometimes the what we're talking or into the instructions we're giving to be helpful are actually just wasting time. Sometimes it is so much more in fact impactful to just start doing and learn by mistakes or We're learning the actions by doing, rather than talking about it. For instance, if we, you know, I could say, All right, we need to make sure that we're using your head voice, and making sure that we're standing up nice and tall. And we need to make sure that we're matching pitch. Or I can say, Everybody go, right, and they're gonna, they're gonna echo me and standing up nice and tall. And boom, that kind of fixes a lot of the stuff. It's really easy for us as teachers to just talk and talk and talk and talk and talk. But we need to talk less, say more, right? Kind of that that wonderful, wonderful phrase you've probably heard before. But Bryce and I have upper elementary, they can do so much longer than seven minutes, you might be thinking, and the answer is, yeah, sometimes they can. I like to flip that seven minute rule a little bit differently, especially if my students are working like in groups to come up with a composition or doing some group work or something, I make sure that I am checking in at a minimum of seven minutes. And when I say check in, I mean, everybody stop everybody, look at me, everybody, give me a thumbs up or thumbs down or thumbs the middle, where are we getting checking on the pulse between those seven minutes, obviously, I'm rotating and kind of going in here and that, but I think we need to at least reset the focus at least every seven minutes. And sometimes that could be as simple as something as simple as everybody freeze. Everybody, take a breath, hold it, let it out. Alright, remember, you should be working on this, this and this, right? Whatever you're working on kind of rethinking the room. We're getting everyone back into focus and making sure that everyone is back on task every seven minutes at the minimum. So this episode is going to be short and sweet. I want you to challenge yourself to make sure that your lesson segments are no longer than seven minutes. At least give it a shot and give it a real tribe and see what that does to your classroom. What that does your engagement what that does to you as a teacher to try to neutrino having to try new things. I would love to hear how this changes or what your thoughts are or even if you're like I try to brace then everything blew up. I would love to hear that please send us an email Hello at that music teacher.com Or send us a DM over an Instagram at that music teacher we would love I would love to hear how that all went. So again, this is gonna be really short and sweet episode but it would mean the world to me if you would take a moment and leave a review here on the podcast wherever you're listening. If you're on iTunes or Spotify you should be able to scroll down and click on some stars. We would love a five star review but even if it's below five stars, we would still love your review. With that being said Have a wonderful week and I will see you next week on that music podcast.
