Harmonizing Minds Reimagining & Expanding Music in School

uh there's a lot right everyone's overwhelmed you look tired um but thanks for coming I I I appreciate it uh if you don't know me my name is Patrick Sera and I am a uh New Jersey based um music researcher educator uh author D Crow Ur rhythmics teacher and I uh run my own 501c3 nonprofit called education flow which acts as a place for me to get funding to pursue my research and bring my work to universities and staff development workshops that kind of thing uh but I want to start today by just telling you

a quick story if that's okay um one of the schools that I'm currently working in now I've been there for about six years it's an alternative high school for atrisk inner city students with behavioral and emotional classifications and our students are um Mo they all come from poor or marginalized communities um 99% of them are black and Or Hispanic uh we have many students who are just out of juvenile detention and still on probation so some students have um monitor devices on uh we have a handful of students who come to school out of a

group foster home and then a smaller group who come to school out of a residential mental health facility so it's a wide range of learning types behaviors um a lot of the students have very very difficult home lives so we sometimes have violent incidents so it can be very challenging but nonetheless uh the way that I work is every day regardless of where I am uh what class the first day of school I begin my classes with a movement game and about five years ago um I walked into my class on the first day and

uh kids came in was about 18 students and because it's an alternative education setting they range in age from 14 all the way up to 20 some kids 21 um and the game that I was doing with this group of students uh on this particular first day was I handed them all a bean bag like this and I was walking around the room and I began explaining the game the whole object of the game was every student was going to get a bean bag I was going to go behind my piano and the first step

um they were going to pass their bean bag like this to the beat of my piano playing so they had to keep the Rhythm and then when we go from a solo to two Studio it would go from a solo to a duet they had to pass it amongst Four Hands then when we go to a trio they have to pass it six hands whole time you got to keep the beat going the ultimate objective being to get the whole class to be able to pass one bean bag around in time with my piano playing

so as I'm explaining the game in this room full of 17-year-old atrisk students uh here from the back of the room this game's stupid and I like when that happens so I went to the back of the room and I found the source of the comment was a young man named Tyrell and I went up to Tyrell and I said Tyrell why do you think this game is stupid and he said because it's easy this game is for kids I'm grown I don't play this stuff so I said well you know it's actually kind of

hard the objective is to get the whole class into a circle get the bean bag around the circle without losing the Rhythm without dropping the bean bag on the floor that's easy I can do that I said really you think it's that easy he said yeah I said I'll tell you what and this is the first day of School said if you guys can get the bean bag around the circle on the first try without losing the beat without dropping the bean bang on the floor for the rest of the year when you come to

my class we will watch movies and I will bring donuts well Tyrell could not get his friends out of their seats fast enough into a circle let's go so I reminded him I said remember it's hard it's not as easy as you think it is no no no no no get behind your piano let's go let's go let's go so I go behind the piano and I say remember you got to get the bean bag around the circle we know so I start playing a very Jazzy kind of bluesy piece one two ready go while

the bean bag made it to the fourth student on the floor ah no no no no no I walked over I picked the bean bag up I said okay good try and Tyrell said to me no no please give us another chance I said okay but remember you got to get the bean bag around the whole circle without losing the beat we know so he took the bean bag out of my hand I went back behind the piano I countered it off one two ready the bean bag made it to the eighth student this time

on the floor no somebody kicked the bean bag across the floor I went into the middle of the circle I picked the bean bag up and I said to my students you know why this game is so hard right cuz it's not just about listening to the music it's about watching each other it's about moving together it's about listening maybe those people who dropped the bean bag dropped it because of the way it was passed to them not because of the way they took it I didn't even hear you Tyrell say which direction you were

going to start in so nobody knew this game is all about listening focusing moving together and working together it's what music is and the room was silent nobody was talking no nobody was saying anything it was so quiet the security guard ran in from the hallway and said are you okay said yeah I'm fine but that's an example of Music being used in a different way I was using music to build a class dynamic in other words it was a a classroom management game and the kids didn't know that I didn't make the circle Tyrell

got his friends out of their seats to make the circle um they wanted to try it I was telling them no you can't I challenged them they stepped up to the challenge my first day of class is not me standing in front of the room saying well this is how you're going to do it in my no no no we start working together right out of the gate and that's just a different way that music can be used it can be used that way not just in my classroom but in other classrooms too it's a

great tool for classroom management strategies um okay let's let's move on to the next thing I just I know you're all wondering because I'm from New Jersey I want to get the uh immediate question out of the way uh I live off exit 135 in the Garen State Parkway and just to give you a little Geographic reference I'm about eight miles from Tony Soprano um not lying the restaurant where the final scene at The Sopranos took place my wife and I go there quite often yeah it's a good place um I'm just going to tell

you a little bit about myself my background so you can understand my perspectives a little bit more I started playing the drums when I was 6 years old I was a lifetime bandgeek Elementary School Middle High School I was a less than atrocious student to call myself atrocious afford some credibility that I don't deserve I struggled through school uh but music was my savior when I went to the band room they told me I was smart and that's why I stayed in school uh I went eventually went on earned a ba in music in the

humanities and then I went on to complete a three-year study in D croth rythmics at the Julie art school in New York does anybody know dcro rhythmics any music teacher welcome sir okay um if you don't know what Ur rhythmics is it's a system of teaching that was created and developed by a Swiss educator and composer named Amir Jac D cros that's how you have to say it and um he was a really interesting guy he was teaching uh at a point in time not unlike today early part of the 20th century the industrial revolution

had just taken hold of society things had changed living had changed uh everything had changed and dcos noticed that his students were unable to put any feel or flow into their music he said they were very technical players but they couldn't put any feel or Rhythm so he tried to figure out a way to fix that and he couldn't this frustrated him so what he eventually did was he started using physical movement to teach his students how to move musically he related physical movement to musical movement and when you study rhythmics you study three specific

things you study physical movement musical improvisation and singing or sufed as we call it and you learn how to use those three things individually as well as weave them together so you learn how to improvise for physical movement you learn how to use physical movement and sued it's like a multimodal system which I think is really perfect to teach today's students this is the single most important data point I believe regarding education today 15% of American American school age children require special education services 7 and a half million kids Nationwide are going to school every

day who require some form of school service occupational speech therapy self-contained class small group instruction one-on-one AER par Professional 7 and a half million kids to put that in perspective the overall population of the state of Rhode Island is 1.1 million that means we could populate Rhode Island seven times over solely with the students who need special education services it's a lot in addition to that uh data from the CDC specific to uh student mental and neurological Health rates of anxiety and depression you can see the blue is students ages 3 to 5 orange is

6 to 11 Green is 12 to 17 those those are the data points on anxiety depression and behavior or self-control classifications more and more kids are coming into school every day classifications and diagnoses before they even begin to learn how they learn and the way they intake information is affected before they've even taken their code off so what does this mean it means that schools need more support teachers need support the students need support the therapists needs support the AIDS and the par professionals need support School leadership needs support where is this support going to

come from that's what I'm here to talk about right how do we view music in in school when when somebody says to You music in school what's the first thing that comes to mind it's band it's chorus it's Orchestra or it's General music class right marching band jazz band yeah um and that's it that's how we see it it's an elective right it's nothing more nothing less and the music teachers themselves my colleagues and friends if you ask them what do you do I'm a band director I'm an orchestra teacher I was a yeah okay

and that's great and I love those things I wouldn't have gotten through school without them but those are an established part of Education they're already there right I believe that music is more than that and I actually believe that music is the most underused support tool in every school in the United States of America we're not using it the right way we can do more with it uh this is a study out of University of Connecticut uh where they brought music and movement interventions to children on the autism spectrum and they found that it was

a a multisensory stimulant so it not only could affect the kids physically it affected them uh from a sensory perspective and also from verbal and neurological perspectives so the paper basically said we should be bringing music and movement based interventions to all autism based therapies this is another study that came out of uh Stanford University um small Symphony pieces were played followed by periods of Silence Peak brain activity occurred during the silences they could stretch the silence out regardless of how long the the piece was and the Brain stayed in that stimulated state for however

long the silence was when I read that study I thought this is a great intervention that could be used for children with ADHD right this is a study that came out of Auburn University where they hooked sensors up to the participants and they played Stravinsky's right of spring and then toggled over to Eric sati's gymnop pede number one which is a very soothing piano piece and the physiological responses when the when each piece was played were Beyond different when the Stravinsky piece was played a very sharp piece the skin was tingling there was actually more

perspiration when the Sati piece played the body Cal down so we know that music affects you physiologically as well and we know that right when we listen to music what do we do we move our bodies sorry I'm not much of a technologist okay here we go um so music and music educators are an existing support in the school right when I go and talk to schools I I I ask questions like is a music educator available to support occupational therapies to assist in self-regulation protocols and they look at me like I'm crazy is there

music teacher teaching an seal class no is there a music teacher available to a fourth grade teacher who may be struggling with classroom management to bring a movement music game to help build a class Dynamic no why not because we don't think of it that way we only see it as an elective nothing more nothing less and please don't misinterpret what I'm saying band course and Orchestra and general music we need it but it can and should be more than that uh I want to share another story with you um so another school that I

teach in is a school for children on the autism spectrum uh grades K through six and I was working with a student about three years ago his name is harth and um as you can see by this picture harth was a really really sweet kid but he had a corresponding speech diagnosis and his speech diagnosis very interesting he could read in fact he read above grade level he could talk and he could understand language but his diagnosis was he had a processing delay such that he could not write language he couldn't write it freehand so

his therapists were having um they would print large letters on a piece of paper and just have him trace the letters but they could not get him to draw or write free hand so the speech therapist and occupational therapist came to me and they said is there anything that you can do do to help our interventions so I started to think about writing language and what it is and as a u rhythmics teacher I thought well it's movement when we are writing we're physically moving our bodies and we're taking that physical movement turning it into

a visual representation of sound it's pretty abstract right but so the first thing that I thought to do with harth was um begin working with the soulage hand sign has anybody ever done this besides my music teacher friend here okay um so everybody stand up don't be shy um so this is going to be your lowest dough and then we're going to go up and then we're going to come back down you think you can do it all right we're all going to do it together everybody ready uh where do you think a good dough

is thank you all right ready let's all do it together ready go D beautiful now we're going to come down wow listen to you guys I got to tell you I was nervous so I I was doing that with harth and just to show him how you can associate physical movement with the sounds that come out of your mouth and then another thing that I did with him was we stood together and we touched fingers and when we moved through the sounds we drew them in the air together and we move that way so did

I oh where did I put my remote control did you see oh thank you I'm sorry um so then I got to school I was worked with harth for about nine weeks doing these interventions and one day I I came into school and I was walking down the hallway and his teacher uh Allison is her name came running down the hallway and she grabbed me and she said you have to come see this so um I went into Harris's classroom and this is what we got he still couldn't write his name but look at what

he did write freehand so he wrote that um on his own and by the way I I laminated it cuz I was so happy but no so that that did a number of things for us it showed harth that he could do it um it showed his classroom teacher that he could do it his therapist now knew that he had that processing ability and then uh the principal called his parents too so that's an example of the music teacher supporting the therapist supporting the classroom teacher supporting the student and supporting School leadership because school leadership

gets to call the parents right so the music teacher and I'm not bragging about myself because it's the music that did it but the MU the the music right is supporting the whole school it's creating a sense of well-being for the whole school and that's just the kind of work that I'm I'm committed to and that's what I'm trying to do another thing that I'm working on um this actually grew into a larger study I'm teamed up with a uh fellow researcher at University of Southern California and um we're doing a bigger sample on music

and movement interventions on autistic children with speech delays and we just found I found out right before I came here that um our abstract was uh we we were contacted by a research conference in Luxembourg we they asked us to come there so you that sounds fancy doesn't it um another thing that I'm doing at my high school for atrisk students the um math teacher came to me and said I have um a group of students who are really doing well in math but they're struggling with um formula and algorithmic Concepts cuz she wanted to

um begin to teach them how to write code so I got a micr grant and I I developed and designed an 8-week module where I went into the math class and the first thing we did was all the kids sat down and I taught them all gave them cowbell clav kga We we played a salsa Rhythm they learned all the individual salsa parts and we wrote them out musically in a rhythmic notation and showed wrote how they all came together there's a logic behind that it's a math problem it's a formula and then we wrote

the mathematical interpretation under that you know it's a pattern it's an algorithm so they were able to see the concept of algorithms through music so again that was the music teacher coming in and supporting a math class um so that's just a couple of examples I don't know how we're doing on time okay so we've got 10 minutes um I left some time for questions I don't know if anybody had questions or comments or complaints um if you don't have any questions or comments and complets uh I do have one more story I can share

with you real fast oh go ahead yeah come on up to the microphone you can sing if you want to uh first of all thank you very much for this this is that that's brilliant uh I'm I'm an educator using music uh that in know unconventional ways uh and I I started again out of necessity I had a a visually impaired student and there was a science teacher so I had to talk well I had to guide the students I describe graphs and uh and I had the piano in the same classroom and so I

say okay the first thing I was doing was actually I was I'm making her finger going through the graph and going up and down so using using prep perception and using I say I'm going to minute I have a piano there let me play that for you so what I did was actually playing Melody of course yeah and that and that was the starting point for me to start using music as a way to describe science communicate and uh and and make music as a language language for for communicating thingss and uh so that that's

fantastic thank you nicely done well you know like um who you know like Pythagoras everybody knows Pythagoras is one of the fathers of math he he invented music theory like his whole he also gave us the major scale so there's a correlation there um does anybody else have a comment or a question yeah um I work at a a K12 school I'm a third grade teacher and my my best friend is a music therapist so I've gotten to do a lot of cool things with music with her and it's really great I was wondering what

do you think is the most effective way to communicate and to get people on board at a school or at a place um to to have that part of the program yeah that's a good really good question you know I and what and what is your name I'm sorry Corey Corey thank you um so yeah I I'm not naive because a lot of times when I go to schools and talk to them the first thing I hear is like well that's great but you know I'm not a music teacher right but you don't have to

be you know so here I'll I'll give you an example like this is a a thing I like to do like every everybody has had chatty kids in their class right yeah so another game I do um I call it the chatter choir but it teaches them self-regulation and and control right so when I move my fingers like this you guys are all going to go and when I stop you have to stop you think you can do it now there's an extension of that game I had a a little girl in my class once

I'll never forget her her name was tajanique and she talked all the time so I um I did the chatter choir and I said today we have a guest conductor her name is tajanique and tajanique came up and conducted the chatter choir and I'll never forget it she stood up in front of the class and she put her hand on her hip and I said are you gonna are you going to do it and she said Not until everyone stops talking so she didn't like it when they did it but no but that's you know

that's a chatter CH again uh tajan was a good conductor can you choose someone else to do it and now she's brought somebody else up so but the way we convince teachers or or administrators to bring these ideas isn't is to show them that you don't have to be uh a virtuoso because we all have music in us right you know uh this is another thing too like I'll do this real fast I'm sorry um the bean bag game that I showed you sorry does anyone know how to work a phone um if you if

you um if you're not Musical and you don't have a piano in your classroom but you want to get your kids into the bean bag game Dr Dre has a whole album of beats like he does right can you hear that okay here we go right there you go oh and then you can have fun with it we're going to pass in half notes right the whole class right you don't have to go to jul want to do that you know but that's just another thing like a classroom classroom classroom teachers can do that you

don't need to have quote unquote musical skills to do that the chatter choir anybody can do that right there's um what was your name in the back this the graph that you did I'm sorry Dum okay yeah you could do that game right you could make a graph with your finger right no but that's you don't need to right and then you you let's print that out on the board you know so there's all things you can do that are quote unquote musical somebody said to me once you know I don't have any rhythm I

said can you walk yeah well you have rhythm right CU walking is rhythm right your heart beats to a rhythm you breathe to a rhythm you chew and swallow to a rhythm right so people who say I don't have rhythm yes you do so we can be you know we can take advantage of those things I read a study the other day that said um they now know um when we participate in music in any way whether it's listening to it playing an instrument dancing every region of the brain that we have mapped and that

we know of is stimulated which is really amazing right how many other things do that I read another study that said um infants can Pro they now know infants can separate two rhythms in their head they monitor their brain and they're able to do that so like I always tell people you know music is preloaded in the human operating system it's in there right it's innate and so we have to take advantage of that so um it should be more than band chorus and Orchestra and general music and the music teachers themselves um that's another

thing I'm really on a mission to do is to make sure sure that they know they possess these skills to do it but they haven't been taught to use them you know so um and then yeah this is my information um that's my uh website education fl.org my email if you're here for um the credits that's the CPE code and also Shameless plug time my book is available in the South by Southwest edu bookstore uh and again thanks for coming you all were great and I appreciate it anybody else com comments complaints all right thank

you enjoy the rest of your day and thanks for coming if you're traveling home today get home safely