Abstract

Song has been used by faculty of many disciplines in their classrooms and, to a lesser extent, by educational developers in workshops. This paper shares and discusses a new song (about an instructor’s evolving openness to alternatives to lecture only teaching) and its novel use to open an educational development workshop. Self reported participant data from an exploratory survey suggest that the song was most effective in reducing stress as well as in increasing motivation, morale, engagement, and connection. Practical implications and implementation considerations are discussed regarding the song as well as related creative work.

Keywords: faculty development, instructional development, experiential learning, critical thinking

Introduction

Song has been used in the classroom for many purposes, including aiding recall, introducing concepts or terms, reinforcing thinking processes, connecting to history (or the real world), and humanizing the subject. The vehicle of introducing song has also varied greatly, including playing a song recording right before class to prime that day’s topic (e.g., Albers & Bach, 2003), having students find a lyric and analyze it (for relevance, type of connection, and correctness) with respect to course content (e.g., Jurmu, 2005), and rewriting popular songs (e.g., Dickson & Grant, 2003). Several disciplines—especially in STEM—have produced song related resources ranging from songwriter in residence programs (http://www.nimbios.org/songwriter.html) to searchable collections (e.g., http://singaboutscience.org/wp/findandaddsongs/ or https://www.causeweb.org/resources/fun/index.php).

Crowther (2012) reviews putative mechanisms for increasing student learning, and Governor, Hall, and Jackson (2013) discuss how songs prolong listeners’ engagement with concepts and activate multiple neural connections and pathways. Individual instructors in a large variety of disciplines have found song to be a powerful vehicle for giving students possible benefits such as improved recall, stress reduction, and motivation (Ahlkvist, 2001; Berk, 2008; Calvert & Tart, 1993; Crowther, 2006, 2012a, 2012b; Leck, 2006; Lesser, 2014a, 2014b; Levy & Byrd, 2011; McClough & Heinfeldt, 2012; McCurdy, Schmiege, & Winter, 2008; Soper, 2010; VanVoorhis, 2002; Walczak & Reuter, 1994; Wallace, 1994). Some of this scholarship (e.g., Ahlkvist, 2001; McCurdy et al., 2008; VanVoorhis, 2002) involved assessing students who were exposed to songs on their performance on test items related to the content of the songs. Other studies (e.g., Crowther, 2006) involve collecting student self reported data on how helpful and/or enjoyable the songs were. Other studies (Leck, 2006) report both student reported and teacher assessed data.

Most empirical studies have entailed either a single group or a quasiexperimental (i.e., without random assignment) comparison of two intact groups or sections of a course. However, the first author’s team (Lesser, Pearl, Reyes, & Weber, 2014); Lesser, Pearl, & Weber, 2014) found, in a randomized experiment at a university and a community college (with different and diverse student populations), that students randomized to the group that had songs inserted into otherwise conventional self contained content (in a learning management system, thus removing any instructor effect) answered embedded midterm exam multiple choice items an average of 7.7 percentage points more than students randomized to the lessons without songs (this result was also statistically significant: two tailed p ≈ .04).

While less common than in the regular classroom setting, there are also promising examples of how song can be a powerful, efficient thought provoker and conversation starter in the context of educational development. The University of Michigan based CRLT Players (Kaplan, Cook, & Steiger, 2006) are noted for their innovative use of theater since 2000 to enhance teaching, learning, and institutional climate, and some of their sketches include songs—such as Jeffrey Steiger and Sara Armstrong’s “In Between,” a powerful and personal song about student diversity (CRLT Players, 2013). The skits are generally followed by a period for faculty to discuss (or even act out) solutions to the problem that has been theatrically presented. Kaplan, Cook, and Steiger (2006, p. 39) discuss the benefit that “rather than being told ‘the answer,’ audience members are asked to make meaning from what they have seen.”

The primary author, who has directed (part time) his campus’ CTL since January 1, 2014, performed on an acoustic guitar an original three minute song at the beginning of an educational development workshop. The song was intended to “open” the event both literally (by playing it a minute after the words of welcome) as well as figuratively (by inviting attendees to enter a space of greater creativity and openness to reflection and change). This paper now presents the context and rationale for the song and shares empirical assessment of its effectiveness.

The Song

The primary author, whose educational songs and song videos have won several recent awards (in national contests sponsored by the American Statistical Association, the National Museum of Mathematics, the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education, and the Quantitative Literacy Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America), wrote the song (see Appendix A to read the lyric or play the accompanying MP3 recording to hear it sung) in the educational development context to achieve several aims: (a) convey research based information about lecturing in a less threatening and more engaging and interactive manner than simply telling (i.e., lecturing) faculty this same information; (b) use the disarming stress reducing tool of humor and playfulness to give a gentle vehicle for faculty to reflect seriously on their own feelings and practices; (c) by having a singer depict the problems, the faculty can maintain a safe distance to reflect on and “discuss strategies for solving them without having to reveal whether they experience similar difficulties” (Kaplan et al., 2006, p. 37). The primary author reinforced the latter aim by making this comment before performing the song: “Whether you use voting cards, liberating structures, team based learning or something else, the key step to make your teaching more engaging and effective may be to lecture less. Like many, I was a by the book lecturer when I began teaching, and I wrote this song as I thought about why I taught that way.” Owning the motivations to write the song allows the presenter to just “share my process” and let attendees assess the extent of similarity with theirs.

The song is written from the point of view of an instructor who feels quite comfortable sticking to the lecture mode with which he was taught and proceeds to give three verses’ worth of unsupported but all too common rationalizations and resistances (informed by observations and literature on higher education instructor behaviors) for keeping it, including adding a measure between the second verse and second chorus as the singer counts out (“1…2…”) an amount (two seconds) of wait time that is clearly insufficient for a teacher posed question (Rowe, 1986). Even the double meaning of the repeated phrase in the first choruses provides a safe way for faculty to reflect upon whether “giving students a lecture” is just a matter of fact reference to teaching a class or whether that teaching is a one way pontification that is authoritarian or, possibly at times, admonishing.

Several places in the lyrics invite the listener to reflect on whether the line applies to oneself. Examples include “it must’ve worked for me” (prompting reflection on whether professors succeeded in spite or because of the pedagogy they experienced and whether it would necessarily best serve a broader student population), “it’s like I believe…” (prompting attendees to reflect on whether they believe in the transmission model of learning and whether their teaching is consistent with that belief), and “I must make it all so clear…” (prompting reflection on what can really be assumed from the silence after a generic call for questions that many students have learned to treat as rhetorical).

Then, the character of the song has a breakthrough realization that the professor centered lecture only mode of pedagogy was actually undermining his true teaching goals (“if my mission….” is a vehicle to ask oneself “well, what IS my mission?”). By the end of the song’s bridge (where the italicized words are spoken more than sung), the singer has vowed to try changing, and the final verse models the movement towards active learning by inviting attendees to suggest a word to complete the last rhyme. One attendee called out line and one said rhyme, both of which the primary author pronounced excellent fits before launching into the concluding choruses that invited attendees to sing along. This built in small victory models how instructors can get beyond an either or “stark contrast between the learner centered and instructor centered approaches” and simply aim for concrete, incremental progress (Blumberg, 2009, p. 116). This middle ground is also reinforced by the reassurance in the fourth verse that “Lecture has its place: in little bits, it’s fine,” echoing the literature that refuses to lump all types of lecture together for condemnation (e.g., Corrigan, 2013, 2014; Weimer, 2014), especially given, for example, the importance of online bits of lecture to free up time in a flipped classroom (e.g., Prunuske, Batzli, Howell, & Miller, 2012).

Secondary benefits of playing this song for the workshop attendees in the midst of the intense wrapping up of a spring semester included: (a) give a small dose of fun or stress release; (b) build community and inject passion as efficiently as few things other than music can; and (c) using a mode that “models the experimentation and creativity that faculty should be bringing to their classroom” (Kaplan et al., 2006, p. 39).

Method

The setting is a moderately large doctoral/research university located in the southwestern United States, which has had a CTL for over 15 years. The center was founded to focus on STEM but was subsequently charged with supporting the entire campus, including part and full time faculty as well as graduate student instructors.

The song was debuted in 2013 to open the CTL’s annual August half day kickoff workshop that year. This setting was fitting because that year featured an outside presenter on the topic of team based learning (TBL; Michaelsen, Knight, & Fink, 2002), a pedagogical approach that clearly requires de emphasizing or revisiting the role of lecture (Michaelsen & Sweet, 2008). Therefore, it seemed important to offer the song as a vehicle to reflect on the limitations (e.g., Deslauriers, Schelew, & Wieman, 2011; Freeman et al., 2014; Hake, 1998; Petrović & Pale, 2015) and lures of traditional lecture in order to free up room to consider a powerful alternative. Management educators Kent Fairfield and Michael London (Fairfield & London, 2003) have applied music metaphors in an informal content analysis of TBL, conceptualizing it as a tool to get nonroutine insights, increase awareness, and signal when intervention is needed. Their analysis describes the figurative music one hears in the way student teams (i.e., ensembles) function, using counterparts to six musical dimensions: melody, harmony, dynamics, tempo, rhythm, and the players. They provide a diagnostic instrument with guiding questions in these six dimensions, such as this example from the realm of harmony: “When students do a solo, in what ways do you harmonize with them? How might you drown them out?”

The kickoff event was given high ratings from attendees on postevent surveys, but the assessment did not specifically ask about the opening song, and so, there is no way to assert how much of the event’s success may have been primed or helped by the song. The song was also used to open a set of songs performed at the banquet of that year’s national conference for statistics educators (https://www.causeweb.org/resources/fun/db.php?id=527). After those 2013 performances, and after receiving valuable feedback from anonymous journal reviewers, the primary author was inspired to change the lyric of the bridge and the opening couplet in the first two verses to better ensure that the artistic depiction of the professor’s thoughts would be even more grounded in the topic at hand and not be viewed as a disconnected caricature or stereotype.

The next school year, the primary author gave a one hour interactive lecture on interactive lecturing, including modeling techniques such as classroom voting cards that the primary author learned from a fall 2010 CTL workshop by Ed Prather (Prather & Brissenden, 2008) and has continued to promote via workshops, a paper (Lesser, 2011), and a podcast: http://cetal.utep.edu/index.php/teaching toolkit/abcd. The workshop opened with the presenter asking attendees to estimate what percent of their class meeting time could be described as lecture, and then, the counterpart percentage they estimated was true for all instructors on their campus (every time the presenter has posed this pair of questions, attendees report that they lecture less of the time than their colleagues do.) Attendees were then asked to reflect at their tables on “Why do many (mainly) lecture?” before the presenter performed the song “inspired by reflecting on why I was a by the book lecturer when I started teaching”. The song was followed by a discussion of the strengths and limitations of lecture and interactive demonstrations of how lecture can be used in a more interactive way that incorporated real time engaging assessment of student learning. At the conclusion of the workshop, all attendees signed a consent form, then completed a concise anonymous survey (see Appendix B) focused on the song that opened the workshop. To minimize potential bias, the survey was administered after the presenter (primary author) left the room and before attendees saw and completed the general workshop survey form that this CTL uses for any workshop.

Sample

This workshop, like almost all programs of this CTL, was advertised campus wide as open to all part /full time faculty, staff, and graduate student instructors. The N = 8 attendees were diverse in their ranks (postdoc, lecturer, assistant professor, staff, graduate student instructor, institute director, academic advisor) and academic units (College of Science, College of Health Sciences, College of Engineering, Library, and Entering Student Program). The attendees consisted of six women and two men. The attendees also included Hispanic/Latin persons in a proportion close to the overall percentage (36%) of the faculty at this university. While the sample size is small (and this limitation is mentioned in the Discussion section), the sample was reasonably representative and diverse, and there was no nonresponse.

Survey Findings

Analysis of the postworkshop surveys completed by attendees revealed the participants’ perceptions about the potential benefit of using artistic/creative activities such as song in the teaching of college level courses. This section provides empirical evidence based on the surveys, including these two components: (a) the quantitative findings from the survey’s Likert scale items and (b) the qualitative findings from the survey’s open ended reflection items.

For the Likert scale items of the survey, participants were asked to indicate how experiencing a song impacted each of the 10 factors for them personally during the workshop as compared to how they think it would have been if the same information had instead been conveyed via instructor guided discussion or slides. While some participants rated about the same on a few items, such as opportunity for self reflection, overviewed the topic, and created a safe space for examining habits and assumptions, most participants expressed that the song made their experience either better or significantly better for all 10 Likert scale items (see Table 1).

Table 1. Results from Survey’s Likert Scale Items (see Appendix B)
ItemsCounts
About the SameBetterSignificantly Better
Opportunity for self reflection134
Increased memorability of the ideas014
Reduced tension/stress017
Overviewed the topic341
Motivated/grabbed attention026
Set an engaging tone017
Increased connection with presenter017
Encouraged subsequent interaction026
Created a safe space for examining habits and assumptions134
Increased morale or sense of community017
Columns for “worse” and “significantly worse” are not displayed because all their counts were 0.

It is not surprising that the “overviewed the topic” item scored low (this was the only item where at least half of the respondents did not give the highest rating) relative to other items because the song did not specifically reference or use the workshop’s main tool (ABCD classroom voting cards) but rather primed attendees for the general need for some (unspecified) type of change to traditional lectures. Indeed, Gray and Jackson (2015) share many ways to make lectures more interactive and engaging, such as a note taking structure, a daily quiz, a personal response system, having a student speak every 2–3 minutes, pause procedure, the carousel method, etc.

Inspiration for implementing entertainment themed teaching

While only two of the eight attendees reported previously experiencing a similar artistic or creative feature in professional development (e.g., skits and games in a leadership training setting), all but one of the attendees reported that the song inspired them to consider using such a form of entertaining media in their future teaching or presenting. The reason given by that one hesitant attendee was having “no musical talent (writing, singing, playing),” a hesitation that can be readily addressed by taking an existing song recording and pressing “play.” The other participants noted how the current workshop inspired their future ambitions for implementing educational entertainment in teaching by using or making jokes, videos, songs, etc.

A role for songs and other creative activities in teaching

All participants indicated that they felt using songs and other creative activities as educational resources for teaching might positively impact teaching and learning processes. Specifically, participants reported that teaching college level courses through songs offered themselves several choices to facilitate interacting with students and meeting students’ individual needs. In addition, participants noted that songs and other creative activities provided opportunities for effective instruction methods that help students relax by genuinely engaging them. For example, one participant articulated:

Music almost always seems to relax and helps you connect with others. I believe the song did that for us. It surprises you and makes you see the person in front as a human, a regular person, not just a professor

Discussion

The workshop occurred in the penultimate week of the school year, a time when many instructors encounter a bottleneck of extra work as they start to wrap up not only their courses but also various other professional tasks and reports before their colleagues start to scatter for the summer. Indeed, 15 people registered in advance for the workshop, but only eight ended up attending. While attendees were diverse, the small quantity is a limitation, and results should be viewed as exploratory and suggestive rather than definitive.

Still, it is encouraging that the results of using song in an educational development context were in the same (positive) direction as the more established literature on using song in the instructional context with students. Directions for future research include assessing the song’s effectiveness for workshops with larger turnouts as well as supplementing the survey with interviews to get more depth in the responses. Another line of research is to assess the effectiveness and additional engagement of songs that are intentionally constructed to be “interactive” by leaving one or more key places (e.g., the end of the last verse in Appendix A) blank for attendees to complete. An example of this type of song in the mathematics education context would be this lyric from Lesser (2014) to the tune of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”:

Take your finger ‘round the jar, circumf’rence equals 2 π ___.

For area, you multiply r squared by that number ___.

Twinkle, twinkle, you’re a star: knowing math will take you ___.

More open ended examples of song completion that allow students to contribute words and phrases that make connections not only to concepts but also to context are being developed and explored in the primary author’s current National Science Foundation grant (NSF/EHR/DUE 1544237). This grant involves collaboration with Music Department faculty, and such collaborations may be useful to less musically inclined CTL staff looking to bring song into an educational development context. CTL staff may also try tapping the talents of students taking an appropriate course in an area such as music, communications, or film and video production. Resources for educational lyric writing (and discussion of what types of songs are easiest to try first) are provided in Lesser (2014a, 2014b).

While the song has its own self contained message, the primary author realized that by performing a song about teaching, he was also offering an opportunity for reflection on the extent to which performing can be a metaphor for teaching. After all, a musician is typically on a stage, and some professors see themselves as the “sage on the stage,” whether or not they are physically on a stage (e.g., when the class size is very large). When a performer is the only one in the room with a microphone, there is little opportunity for others in the room to have a voice except at structured times (e.g., joining in on a song’s chorus, singing phrases in a call and response song, clapping along with the rhythm, etc.) unless the performer intentionally makes room for it. This has an obvious parallel with teacher centered instruction, and the primary author later generated this list of additional parallels between teaching and performing that could be explored in a future setting:

  • Awareness: Know your strengths and your main style, but keep expanding/growing your repertoire. Know enough about the backgrounds of your audience to tailor what you offer them.

  • Preparation: Know your material well enough that you can allocate enough attention to your audience to be responsive to their nonverbal cues (this may be difficult if you feel you need to look constantly at the board, screen, instrument, sheet music, notes, etc.). Know what parts need to be fully worked out and practiced for precise consistency and what parts are fresher and more effective by being completed or improvised in the moment.

  • Density: Know when “less is more,” when decreasing the density allows what you do offer to be more effective and memorable. Also, make what you do less performer centered by making room for interaction.

  • Progression: Give the hour a meaningful sequence (i.e., more than the sum of isolated songs or slides) that starts with an immediate hook, has appropriate variety and pacing in its arc, and ends with a sense of culmination.

While most factors that make a song effective for a student population (e.g., Lesser, 2014a, 2014b) also apply to an instructor population in the professional development context, there are some caveats. First, the range of ages in a group of instructors is likely much larger than for a group of students and so professional developers planning to write a parody song should be aware that attendees’ collective musical favorites will probably span more decades.

Encore: Related Creative Work

Poems are a close relative to songs/lyrics. To open a course (i.e., to start the first day of class), the primary author wrote a discipline independent poetic reading that he has used to start a variety of classes. This reading was selected for publication by The Teaching Professor (Lesser, 2010) and later by Faculty Focus (Lesser, 2014). Doing such a reading arguably addresses goals faculty have for starting a course, such as “setting a positive atmosphere,….grabbing students’ attention, and introducing yourself.” (Perlman & McCann, 1999, p. 277).

At a national statistics education conference of instructors from the many disciplines that teach statistics, a five minute skit (Lesser, 2013) was enacted (with several colleagues, one playing the role of a secondary school teacher and the others in character—and costume—of confused and outspoken secondary school students) to kick off a workshop for statistics educators (Harrell Williams et al., 2013). The skit was designed to illustrate common student misconceptions about the three most common statistical measures of location: mean, median, and mode. The skit included moments of humor even as it pointed out serious pitfalls grounded in literature (e.g., Lesser, Wagler, & Abormegah, 2014) on content specific misconceptions. This use of a simulated lesson that goes beyond a lesson plan by incorporating student comments and interactions is similar to the strategy of virtual duoethnography as discussed and illustrated by Zazkis and Koichu (2015), who note that such a fictitious narrative text can be a useful tool in teachers’ professional development for communication, reflection, and empathy.

Song is not limited to workshops with strictly educational objectives; there is also a place to cultivate community and reflection at events that are more social. At the May 2014 end of school year teaching excellence reception sponsored by the university’s CTL, the primary author capped the program by quoting the Lang (2006) depiction of the last day of class:

…I always have this vision that my students and I will spend our last day of class reminiscing about what a terrific time we had and sharing war stories….and then the students will give me a hug or a pat on the back on the way out

Lang goes on to describe the much more familiar anticlimactic routine of doing course evaluations and reviewing the final exam or paper, after which, “some of them wave goodbye or thank me, but mostly we are all just too tired at that point to do much beyond be grateful that it’s almost over.” To address the latter feeling many instructors were likely experiencing that day, the primary author encouraged attendees to use the present ending as an opportunity to reflect upon and assess the motivations and aims they had when they launched the course as the cycle would begin again in 15 weeks. Then, the primary author performed his original song “Butterflies” about how instructors approach the beginning of a semester’s life cycle. A video (of the song performance, preceded by most of the verbal introduction) is at https://vimeo.com/95446843, and its lyric appears in Appendix C. The CTL’s May 2015 end of year reception continued the precedent of song by playing the primary author’s winning entry in a national museum’s educational songwriting contest (http://momath.org/home/2015 pi day winners/) and a song promoting the CTL itself (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtWgmK2MiYc).

Acknowledgments

The primary author expresses appreciation to previous CTL director Harry Meeuwsen for his mentoring and for including the song at a major CTL event.

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Appendix: A. “Gonna Give You a Lecture”

lyrics & music © 2013, 2015 Lawrence Mark Lesser; reprinted with his permission.

* = attendees complete rhyme by calling out a word such as “line” or “rhyme”.

You’re the apprentice, I’m the expert, I’m the PhD:

You’re payin’ me to profess what wisdom is to me.

And when I impart this time every week,

I’ll teach how I was taught ‘cause it must’ve worked for me!

Gonna give you a lecture, gonna give you a lecture:

As the professor, gonna give you a lecture!

It’s like I believe you write my stories down.

Like your minds are blank sheets to receive truth I found.

And I must make it all so clear ’cause when I ask for questions.

No one ever volunteers, though I pause two seconds: 1… 2….

Gonna give you a lecture, gonna give you a lecture:

As the sage on the stage, gonna give you a lecture!

I feel in control holding a script:

Don’t know the flow if my classroom were flipped!

Lecture’s what they expect of me and gives me a buffer,

And see how efficiently material gets buried – I mean, covered!

Gonna give you a lecture, gonna give you a lecture:

Keep my grip on the lectern and give you a lecture!

Bridge: Maybe somethin’s missin’ havin’ you just listen if my mission.

is making you critical thinkers, engaged collaborators, and skilled doers….

who can apply concepts long after the midterm!

So, I’ll make the choice for the coming term:

To hear more of your voice to know what you’ve learned.

Lecture has its place: in little bits, it’s fine.

Just to show I’ve changed, YOU can end this ___*!

Gonna do more than lecture, gonna do more than lecture:

As a guide on the side, gonna do more than lecture!

Everybody, even the back row!

Gonna do more than lecture, gonna do more than lecture:

As a guide on the side, gonna do more than lecture!

Now, without my voice of authority!

Gonna do more than lecture, gonna do more than lecture:

As a guide on the side, gonna do more than lecture!

B. ANONYMOUS POST WORKSHOP SURVEY

[blank lines between items not displayed here for space considerations].

1. Have you experienced a creative/artistic feature (e.g., a song, a role playing skit/game, etc.) in a professional development setting BEFORE today?

a) No.

b) Yes, and it involved the following modality and setting.

2. Did the use of song inspire you to consider using some form of entertaining media (created by your students, you, or someone else) in your future teaching or presenting? If so, please explain. If not, what is the main reason why not?

3. Please indicate how experiencing a song impacted each of the following factors for you during today’s workshop (compared to how you think it would have been if the same information had instead been conveyed via instructor guided discussion or slides).

Significantly worseWorseAbout the sameBetterSignificantly better
Opportunity for self reflection
Increased memorability of the ideas
Reduced tension/stress
Overviewed the topic
Motivated/grabbed attention
Set an engaging tone
Increased connection with presenter
Encouraged subsequent interaction
Created a safe space for examining habits and assumptions
Increased morale or sense of community

4. Other comments about the song or its role today (feel free to use the back of this page if necessary):

C. “Butterflies”

lyrics and music © 2011–2014 Lawrence Mark Lesser; reprinted with his permission.

Ev’ry August brings dreams.

We teachers have: feelin’ unprepared,

Up there with our soul laid bare!

If I’m to try to change their lives,

Gotta go past my fear, my butterflies.

Ev’ry August brings dreams.

That students have: what brought them there.

In these chairs with much to share! May I help them open wide.

And see more of the world, like butterflies.

When I stay still and clear,

They may alight right here: In the chaos learning brings,

The world can change from a pair of wings.

Old forms cast aside,

We emerge and soar like butterflies.

For more vibrant skies.

Ev’ry August brings dreams.