Teaching Strategies

An Ensonglopedia is a collection of 26 peer-reviewed educational songs on a single theme, one for each letter of the alphabet. I tour these song collections regularly around the UK, and have produced accompanying music videos and a making-of documentary, which can be found on YouTube, as well as audio albums which are available on Spotify, iTunes etc.

It's easy for instructors who enjoy singing to use songs in their classes. But the vast majority of instructors are unwilling to sing in class. Are there good ways for them to use the power of songs for STEM teaching? We'll discuss your ideas and your experiences that might apply to this group.

The presentation will demonstrate the use of music to introduce beginning statistics topics, using an "oldie but goodie" song. The demonstration illustrates how to engage students actively in counting, frequency tables, and graphs - counting words, phrases or musical beats; recording these; and creating graphs to display the generated data. Then, the activity examines using a more recent song appropriate for grade levels 6 – 10 (depending on course set-up) or pre-service teachers to create a frequency table and graph of the data.

Science songs can often be seen in a one-dimensional way, i.e. "It's a song about genetics/ dinosaurs/space" or "It's a cool way to teach science" but science songs have different strengths and play to different needs in the listener. Some songs present factual statements that could be used as rhythm or rhyme based mnemonics; like jingles. Some songs portray an idea in a way that can help a listener to get a deeper understanding of it for example, a song about the roles scientists play in society or a song about a misunderstood concept (such as climate change or evolution).