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Five Teaching Lessons from Bobby McFerrin

By Bonni Stachowiak | August 17, 2016 | | XFacebookLinkedInEmail

Bobby McFerrin Teaching Lessons

Ever since I saw this video of Bobby McFerrin teaching about the pentatonic scale, I've been captured by all that it tells us about teaching.

Start Small

Bobby McFerrin stands up and walks to the front of the stage. His voice erupts with the first note, as he hops in the air, beginning to model for his students what he is inviting them to do. It is both simple and captivating.

Be Welcoming

He doesn't tell anyone to put their cell phones away, or read off of a syllabus. He doesn't say, “I'm going to teach you about the pentatonic scale, which first was performed by musicians back in…” No, he welcomes us to join him in experiencing the pentatonic scale, before we ever hear any of the particulars about it.

Leverage the Unexpected

The clip embedded above is only three minutes of what appears to be your typical panel. Five men sitting in chairs. When you're on a panel, you're supposed to sit, wait your turn to be asked a question and address it in the same way as everyone else.

Bobby McFerrin jumps up out of his chair, in what seems to be a response to a question about setting expectations (maybe?). Rather than talk about that, he demonstrates how expectations get set. He creates a sense of the unexpected and we begin to wonder what will come next.

Test Your Learners

He doesn't take the lead role throughout the demonstration. Instead, once he shows a bit of the patterns, he lets the audience move out ahead of his singing and show their learning as they go. He fluctuates between two notes in the scale and then lets the audience predict what will be the next note in the progression.

In part of his teaching, he is doing a version of retrieval practice (having the students recall what he has shown them so far). He also does what James Lang describes in his book, Small Teaching, as prediction. Lang streses that “making predictions about material that you wish to learn increases your ability to understand that material and retrieve it later.”

Allow for Improvisation

Our classrooms can be far too predictable. We do our students a disservice, by not preparing them for the complexity they will encounter as soon as they leave our white boards and our bulleted PowerPoints.

Watch this wonderful illustration of what's possible when we allow for improvisation.

What else did you see being illustrated about teaching from these Bobby McFerrin clips?

Filed Under: Teaching

Bonni Stachowiak

Bonni Stachowiak is the producer and host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, which has been airing weekly since June of 2014. Bonni is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at Vanguard University of Southern California. She’s also a full Professor of Business and Management. She’s been teaching in-person, blended, and online courses throughout her entire career in higher education. Bonni and her husband, Dave, are parents to two curious kids, who regularly shape their perspectives on teaching and learning.

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Comments

  1. Carrie Lennard says

    August 26, 2018 at 1:34 am

    Hi, would love to share a music-making approach from London U.K. It’s called The ‘Improvise Approach’ and it utilises the C major pentatonic scale. If you and your children enjoy making up tunes, take a look at the ThumbJam app from the App Store. Use this app as your musical instrument with the backing music tracks contained within The Improvise Approach ebook (www.improviseapproach.com) Music only available from iTunes, Spotify, Amazon – Improvise One (2016j Improvise 2 (2018)
    Ebook contains all the setup information as well as 10 music tracks to instantly play along to.

Trackbacks

  1. Teaching Lessons from Bobby McFerrin » Faculty Learning Corner says:
    October 5, 2016 at 11:35 am

    […] https://teachinginhighered.com/2016/08/17/bobby-mcferrin-teaching-lessons/ […]

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