Choral Warm-up

In addition to the clarinet lesson, I had to lead my class in a choral warm-up yesterday. This experience was very intimidating, but also a lot of fun. There were three main lessons that I learned from this exercise:

I consider myself to be a very positive person, so it seemed natural for me to say "good" or "excellent" at the end of a particular warm-up. It turns out too much positive reinforcement is a bad thing. Particularly when the students didn't do anything to reinforce, or you're really just reinforcing bad happens. It would have been much more effective for me to be specific, to really listen to who's doing something right and draw their attention to that. This reinforces the good work, and provides a positive teachable for the other students who may not be doing it right. This gives them information about how to correct themselves without you saying "Johnny don't sing like that!"

I also definitely should have listened more. Instead of listening I sang with the students. It hadn't really occurred to me that this could be a bad idea. I sang with them out of habit, but also because of my lack of piano ability. I felt that if I couldn't play the warm-up with them I should sing it with them to keep them on track. This was not necessary the students knew what they were doing. Also, by singing with them I wasn't able to really hear the students well enough to make corrections. If corrections and reinforcements are not given during warm-ups it tells the students its ok to be lazy at warm-ups and creates bad habits for future warm-ups and repertoire.

Warm-ups are about more than simply warming up the individual voices. Warm-ups should also prepare the choir for the rehearsal. Warm-ups using harmonies help get readjusted to the sound of the choir. It helps them focus on tuning and blending with the other choir members.