Critical Thinking In The Classroom By Matthew Garret

Matthew Garret wrote this article to shed some light on how students are thinking in choral rehearsal. This is valuable information to directors because focused thinking and critical thinking are vital to productive rehearsal. Educators should aim to encourage critical thinking because it is important for students to make connections between ideas or to self-evaluate.

Critical thinking is an important goa for educators and it has been becoming more and more incorporated into education since the mid twentieth century. Research has been conducted on critical thinking in academic classrooms, but less is known about critical thinking in the musical setting. The development classification systems for critical thinking has aided the research of this topic because a common vocabulary was established. This

The average nonperformance time for all ensembles was 53.89%. The majority of this time was the teacher talking. The average time of lower-order thinking was 45.96% with a minimum of 40%. The average time of critical thinking was 6.36% and the average time of nonspecific nonperformance time is 1.57%. Beginning choirs exhibited a higher average of nonspecific nonperformance behavior times than the advanced choirs did. This is to be expected because beginning ensembles likely have less discipline than the advanced choirs and will require more instruction. The data from this research shows that there is a positive correlation between nonperformance activity time and critical thinking time. After comparing all rehearsals, it was concluded that more time was spent by the teach instructing than by the students responding. Half of the rehearsal time spent was performance and half was nonperformance, however, advanced choirs spent more time in performance than beginning choirs