Teaching Percussion Assignment

Quinn Parsley

MUSC 216-001 Fall 2015

As a part of the introduction to Teaching Percussion, the author Gary D. Cook emphasizes
several important topics in music education that are discussed throughout the book. While some of
particularly relevant to percussion instruments, many are important strategies for teaching any
instrument. Three topics of particular highlight are the following:

 Experiential learning

Experiential learning is described as a basic way through which people learn skills and
knowledge through experiences of the body and the central nervous system’s registering of
these experiences. Cook takes the position that not all knowledge is acquired through “trial and
error,” but rather some of it is acquired through an awareness of one’s own experience through
“trial and learning.”

 Triple-channel learning

Triple-channel learning is based off of the strategy of learning a skill equally through auditory,
visual, and kinesthetic channels. The idea behind this is that many people have a preferred
method for working on a particular skill, but this method does not necessarily benefit them
equally in all situations. Learning percussion is often thought of as particularly based on the
kinesthetic and auditory channels, but the author argues that learning a skill through all three
channels offers more benefits than just a single one.

 Cloning

Cloning is the practice of performing the same motion with both hands at the same time so that
the non-dominant hand can “clone” the fine details that are exhibited in the dominant hand. By
doing this, the non-dominant hand can catch up to the skill of the dominant hand faster than if
the motions were practiced separately. This also benefits one’s time management for practice
because the amount of practice time required is significantly reduced.

I found these three topics quite interesting, but that last two are of particular note for
me. As I was working on my A.A. degree, I worked as a writing tutor in the Academic Support
Center of my last college. During my time there, my fellow tutors and I would regularly undergo
sessions where we discussed the processes through which people learned. Most of this time,
these sessions focused on trying to figure out whether people learned best through auditory,
visual, or kinesthetic methods. For me, I always scored about equally between visual and
kinesthetic, but when I thought about how this applied to music, I always felt that my learning
was split between the three common channels of learning since I spent a good amount of time
reading, practicing, and listening to music. This topic of triple-channel, therefore, makes a great
deal of sense to me and seems like it would be a good philosophy to incorporate into future
teaching strategies.
The second topic I found particularly interesting was that of cloning. This is a topic that
seems particularly geared towards percussion students, and it is a topic with which I have less
experience since I am a beginner percussion student. Being a guitarist, my hands never really are
performing similar motions at the same time, although I could see how such a topic could be
relevant to my piano skills when I am working on performing scales with both hands at the same
time. However, in that case my hands’ positioning is somewhat mirrored and thereby not quite
as “cloned” as Cook discusses when he is mentioning both hands performing sticking patterns at
the same time. However, it is most certainly a topic that I will consider in the future as I work on
my own rudiment patterns.