A Reflective Lens: Music Pedagogical Research to Transform Practice | Page 18

Co-operative Learning Structure in Group Music Composition

In Lesson Three:

In Lesson Four:

Students were tasked to piece everything
together as they needed to come up with a
performance with the set parameters. The
task was given in such a way that everyone
needed to be involved and serve as one
another’s resource to complete the task.

Students were introduced to a more complex
concept of form in music – namely, the Ternary
(ABA) form. They were then presented with
the second composition activity that required
them to start their composition from scratch,
and applying the musical elements they had
learned previously. They performed at the end
of this lesson, and they were given suggestions
on which areas to improve upon by Lesson
Five, at which they had their final performance.

Data Collection
Lesson Recordings, Transcriptions and Fieldnotes
Since two groups were observed, there were two separate
video cameras capturing the group discussions and students’
interactions at every lesson. In addition, each of the ten
students under observation had an individual audio voice
recorder to pre-empt any video camera malfunctioning and
resulting loss of data. This was especially helpful during
Lesson Four when the video cameras ran out of battery,
and the second half of the lesson was not video-recorded.
The recordings of each group from each lesson were then
transcribed word for word by the research assistant using
the video file, checked against the audio file from each
individual voice recorder, to ensure accuracy in transcribing
the discussion. It was interesting to discover that although
both groups were in the same lesson completing the same
tasks, the lesson recordings and transcriptions captured
very different discussions and responses from each group.
I felt that the most significant data source for this qualitative
study came from the edited version of lesson transcriptions
when I added the field notes; particularly noting down
students’ behaviour and body language. Since the nature
of the research questions required me to study and

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