The Content of Change: An Analysis of Collaborative Learning Communities’ Decisions

• In Event: Knowledge Transfer Through Professionally Embedded Collaborative Learning Communities

Abstract

This paper reports on a KNAER project entitled “Engaging Students through Collaborative Music Creation” involving a partnership among two university research centres and three school districts with the goal of motivating and implementing change in teachers’ perspective and pedagogy. Although the basic intent of the project was to motivate and enable teachers to implement some form of creative process in the classroom, teachers had much latitude in what the specific content was. Change decisions, or more properly here, innovation decisions are, as is evident within music improvisation and composition itself, in many ways restricted by memes, by self-efficacy, by functional ability, and by anticipated evaluative response from significant others, in music usually peers.
In this paper we present an analysis of the specific pedagogic and musical content of the changes implemented by the collaborative learning communities in this project. We examine carefully the project plans, the project materials, the lesson contents, the musical processes introduced, and any products resulting from these processes. These observations are then examined reflexively with participant perspectives and personal reflections of the decision making process with the aim of understanding the contributing factors to the innovations implemented. We then interpret these findings with lenses from our understanding of cognitive models of improvisation, as well as from social psychology of creativity.

Authors

• Augusto Monk, University of Toronto

• Lee R. Bartel, University of Toronto

• Lee Willingham, Wilfrid Laurier University