Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
Every instructor has their own style. Finding your voice and developing your teaching persona is a key part of effective teaching and helping students succeed.
In thinking about this, you might consider your tone, your language, and the tools you want to use in the classroom.
For Greg Crowther, a tenured biology instructor at Everett Community College (located north of Seattle), music is a key part of his teaching persona.
He teaches human anatomy and physiology to pre-nursing and other students at the community college and is well-known among his students and fellow science faculty for creating nerdy song parodies like Weird Al Yankovic. In 2019, he led an extra-credit singalong for his microbiology students at Everett Community College. His website contains an extensive list of STEM songs with study guides, sheet music, and audio or video files.
The Benefits of Using Music in the College Classroom
According to the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, music can be used to positively shape your classroom environment and support student thriving.
It can help students learn how to memorize words and improves math skills, according to young musician Grace Carrasco, who gave a TEDx Talk on “Music in Education” in 2021.
“Why don’t we continue to use music as a way of learning in later years of education,” she asked.
Music can decrease stress and boost your mood, making you more likely to want to learn and absorb information, Carrasco said.
How Crowther Has Implemented Music in His Classroom
Crowther has used music in the college classroom or as supplemental materials for over 20 years, including in his first teaching role at the University of Puget Sound in Washington state.
“I later learned that Francis Collins, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and a leader of the human genome project, used to take a similar approach for similar reasons when he was a young university professor,” Crowther said.
As he progressed in his career, when the students responded positively to his songs, Crowther began to think more seriously about whether the songs could be educationally useful. Through trial and error, he settled on a model of writing a brief song, performing it for students, and leading a quick discussion of the meaning of the lyrics.
In his current role, he’s had to put the music a bit on the sidelines — or on Canvas — while his students master large volumes of content in the hopes of getting into nursing school. In a 10-week quarter, Crowther said they “blast through all 11 body organ systems,” including skeletal, muscular, nervous, endocrine, cardiovascular, and more.
Even so, his experience and the research he’s published provide lessons for other college instructors.
Could Music Be a Good Fit for Your Courses?
“There are many possible ways to use music to help students learn science or other subjects, and it’s critical for instructors and students to have a clear, shared understanding of the point of the music,” he said.
Questions to consider include:
- Do students need a mnemonic for memorizing foundational facts, or
- Do they need to grapple with nuances of meaning in a more creative and constructivist way?
Crowther said those two goals call for vastly different approaches. The first might involve an instructor supplying a previously vetted song for students to memorize, while the second might entail students writing their own lyrics.
“Incorporating music can certainly be enriching and fun, but it’s good to be almost ruthlessly focused on how the music supports student learning,” he said.
Crowther and colleagues provide more guidance on this topic in a recent paper, “Teaching Science with the ‘Universal Language’ of Music,” published in Advances in Physiology Education in June 2023.
Moving Beyond Music
Music is just one way to get creative in the classroom and make a positive impact on students.
“Creativity (in the broadest sense) is how we connect ourselves to the course material and insert ourselves into the narrative — in a good way!,” Crowther noted. “Noticing and attending to those connections can make the difference between a course being perceived as a collection of dry facts and it being perceived as information and skills relevant to a student’s life.”
Singing is how he conveys enthusiasm and excitement for course material to his students. Finding your own way to do that, whether it’s through music or other avenues, is important.
Hopefully, Crowther’s ingenuity can serve as inspiration to other faculty members striving to help students retain and increase their knowledge, but he also notes the importance of sparking your students’ creativity.
“Creativity can be expressed in many diverse ways,” he said. “A big movement in undergraduate biology education for the last 15 years has been CUREs: Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences. The basic idea is, within the context of a one-term course, to give students a foundation of some general techniques and then let them come up with their own research questions and perform their own experiments. Ideally, they feel some authentic ownership of the project because they are able to control major aspects of it. I have never led a CURE myself, but I greatly admire those who can pull it off.”
