Rooted in the experience of a professional choral conductor, this book provides a guide to practical issues facing conductors of choral ensembles at all levels, from youth choruses to university ensembles, church and community choirs, and professional vocal groups. Paired with the discussion of practical challenges is a discussion of over fifty key works from the choral literature, with performance suggestions to aid the choral conductor in directing each piece. Dealing with often-overlooked yet vital considerations such as how to work with composers, recording, concert halls, and choral tours, A Practical Guide to Choral Conducting offers a valuable resource for both emerging choral conductors and students of choral conducting at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

String Methods for Beginners is designed for students to receive the essential playing and teaching skills on all orchestral string instruments. The goal of this textbook is to be truly methodical in its approach, and to assist the instructor, completely eliminating the need to do additional research, or reorganization in preparation to teach this class. Students will gain the basic knowledge and experience to teach bowed stringed instruments in public schools. String Methods for Beginners covers the necessary topics to learn and teach the violin, viola, cello, and string bass. It explores the fundamentals of those instruments and teaching considerations, utilizing a heterogeneous approach. As the primary resource to any college- and university-level String Techniques, String Methods, or Instrumental Methods class, this course book fits into a standard semester, comprised of 25 lessons, which correspond with two hourly classes per week for the term. It provides the instructor with the tools to teach a classroom of non-majors or string education majors, or a mixed classroom of both. FEATURES Offers a blueprint for a semester long string methods course. For beginning students, and also comprehensive for more in-depth study or for reference. Logical, step-by-step "recipe-like" approach.

Why do so many beginners, both children and adults, fail to master chosen skills? "The Elements of Skill" was inspired by--and addresses--that question with a program based on proven techniques. The book, written by a renowned practitioner of the Alexander Technique, outlines an educational system that makes the process of learning a performance or athletic skill more conscious, and therefore more successful. Its principles include breaking down a skill into manageable parts, setting realistic goals, observing mind/body processes, overcoming blocks, controlling habits, and achieving heightened awareness and self-mastery. Included are inspiring examples of people who have benefited from the method.

The goal of this book is to present and evaluate the concept of dynamic testing. Unlike "static" tests such as the SAT or IQ tests, it emphasizes learning potential rather than past learning accomplishments. This book is unique in its wide-ranging review of virtually all approaches to dynamic testing. It also suggests alternatives to the typical kinds of tests given in the United States--tests that often seem to stifle rather than encourage the development of human potential.

What is learning? How does it take place? What happens when it goes wrong? The topic of learning has been central to the development of the science of psychology since its inception. Without learning there can be no memory, no language and no intelligence. Indeed it is rather difficult to imagine a part of psychology, or neuroscience, that learning does not touch upon. In this Very Short Introduction Mark Haselgrove describes learning from the perspective of associative theories of classical and instrumental conditioning, and considers why these are the dominant, and best described analyses of learning in contemporary psychology. Tracing the origins of these theories, he discusses the techniques used to study learning in both animals and humans, and considers the importance of learning for animal behaviour and survival. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Barry Schwartz, Steven Robbins, and new coauthor Edward Wasserman offer students an engaging introduction to the basic principles of Pavlovian conditioning, operant conditioning, and comparative cognition. The text s critical approach exposes students to the unresolved problems and controversies surrounding behavior theory and encourages them to interpret the material and make connections between theories and real-life situations. With several hundred new references, a new emphasis on comparative cognition, and expanded treatment of neuroscience and the neural basis of learning, the Fifth Edition sets the standard in its coverage of contemporary theory and research."

The concept of 'communities of practice' (Lave and Wenger 1991, Wenger 1998) has become an influential one in education, management, and social sciences in recent years. This book consists of a series of studies by linguists and educational researchers, examining and developing aspects of the concept which have remained relatively unexplored. Framings provided by theories of language-in-use, literacy practices, and discourse extend the concept, bringing to light issues around conflict, power, and the significance of the broader social context which have been overlooked. Chapters assess the relationship between communities of practice and other theories including literacy studies, critical language studies, the ethnography of communication, socio-cultural activity theory, and sociological theories of risk. Domains of empirical research reported include schools, police stations, adult basic education, higher education, and multilingual settings. The book highlights the need to incorporate thinking around language-in-use, power and conflict, and social context into communities of practice.

Experimental research by social and cognitive psychologists has established that cooperative groups solve a wide range of problems better than individuals. Cooperative problem solving groups of scientific researchers, auditors, financial analysts, air crash investigators, and forensic art experts are increasingly important in our complex and interdependent society. This comprehensive textbook--the first of its kind in decades--presents important theories and experimental research about group problem solving. The book focuses on tasks that have demonstrably correct solutions within mathematical, logical, scientific, or verbal systems, including algebra problems, analogies, vocabulary, and logical reasoning problems.

The book explores basic concepts in group problem solving, social combination models, group memory, group ability and world knowledge tasks, rule induction problems, letters-to-numbers problems, evidence for positive group-to-individual transfer, and social choice theory. The conclusion proposes ten generalizations that are supported by the theory and research on group problem solving.

"Group Problem Solving" is an essential resource for decision-making research in social and cognitive psychology, but also extremely relevant to multidisciplinary and multicultural problem-solving teams in organizational behavior, business administration, management, and behavioral economics.

Communicative Musicality explores the intrinsic musical nature of human interaction. The theory of communicative musicality was developed from groundbreaking studies showing how in mother/infant communication there exist noticeable patterns of timing, pulse, voice timbre, and gesture. Without intending to, the exchange between a mother and her infant follow many of the rules of musical performance, including rhythm and timing.
This is the first book to be devoted to this topic. In a collection of cutting-edge chapters, encompassing brain science, human evolution, psychology, acoustics and music performance, it focuses on the rhythm and sympathy of musical expression in human communication from infancy. It demonstrates how speaking and moving in rhythmic musical ways is the essential foundation for all forms of communication, even the most refined and technically elaborated, just as it is for parenting, good teaching, creative work in the arts, and therapy to help handicapped or emotionally distressed persons.
A landmark in the literature, Communicative Musicality is a valuable text for all those in the fields of developmental, educational, and music psychology, as well as those in the field of music therapy.

What is immediately clear when meeting individuals with acquired brain damage is that the patterns of communication impairments vary in remarkable ways among these individuals. Aphasia and related communication disorders, while devastating life events for individuals who acquire brain damage, provide lessons of considerable interest to many clinicians and researchers trying to understand the brain's neurological and psychological complexity and develop methods to facilitate optimum recovery of lost language and communication functions following brain damage. The Oxford Handbook of Aphasia and Language Disorders weaves theoretical and neurological foundations with rational, motivated clinical approaches to assessment, diagnosis, and intervention for aphasia and related communication disorders. The contributing authors, experienced clinicians and scientists with strong backgrounds in neurological and cognitive neuropsychological theories, bridge theory to clinical practice, reviewing the extant literature in each aphasia syndrome while exploring implications for guiding clinical decision-making. Introductory chapters provide historical perspectives on the aphasia syndromes following left hemisphere brain damage, and review aphasia assessment across the decades. The bulk of the Handbook covers aphasia syndromes, with chapters that describe each aphasia syndrome in detail, including behavioral, neural, and cognitive neuropsychological correlates and methods to assess and treat each syndrome. Additional chapters provide insights into acquired reading and writing disorders and social and prosodic communication disorders that follow damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. The final chapters examine neural perspectives on aphasia recovery and principles of neuroplasticity in aphasia treatment. As such, this book integrates neural, cognitive, and clinical perspectives to provide a broad understanding of the complexity of language and impairments that can arise following acquired brain damage, and will be of interest to scholars and clinicians in the speech-language, neuropsychology, and rehabilitation professions.

Discussion on the Web is mediated through layers of software and protocols. As scholars increasingly study communication and learning on the Internet, it is essential to consider how site administrators, programmers, and designers create interfaces and enable functionality. The managers, administrators, and designers of online communities can turn to more than 20 years of technical books for guidance on how to design online communities toward particular objectives. Through analysis of this "how-to" literature, Designing Online Communities explores the discourse of design and configuration that partially structures online communities and later social networks. Tracking the history of notions of community in these books suggests the emergence of a logic of permission and control. Online community defies many conventional notions of community. Participants are increasingly treated as "users", or even as commodities themselves to be used. Through consideration of the particular tactics of these administrators, this book suggests how researchers should approach the study and analysis of the records of online communities.

Studies of learning are too frequently conceptualized only in terms of knowledge development. Yet it is vital to pay close attention to the social and emotional aspects of learning in order to understand why and how it occurs. How Students Come to Be, Know, and Do builds a theoretical argument for and a methodological approach to studying learning in a holistic way. The authors provide examples of urban fourth graders from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds studying science as a way to illustrate how this model contributes to a more complete and complex understanding of learning in school settings. What makes this book unique is its insistence that to fully understand human learning we have to consider the affective-volitional processes of learning along with the more familiar emphasis on knowledge and skills.

First published in 1987, Learning by Expanding challenges traditional theories that consider learning a process of acquisition and reorganization of cognitive structures within the closed boundaries of specific tasks or problems. Yrjo Engestrom argues that this type of learning increasingly fails to meet the challenges of complex social change and fails to create novel artifacts and ways of life. In response, he presents an innovative theory of expansive learning activity, offering a foundation for understanding and designing learning as a transformation of human activities and organizations. The second edition of this seminal text features a substantive new introduction that illustrates the development and implementation of Engestrom's theory since its inception."

Learn how to effectively bring growth mindset into your community and classroom by choosing impactful language From the authors of the bestselling The Growth Mindset Coach, this handy companion is a must-have if you want to empower students through purposeful praise and feedback. Here are the key strategies, helpful tips and go-to phrases for helping students transition thoughts, words and actions into the growth-mindset zone. Designed for ease of use and packed with over a hundred specific examples, this book offers a "say this, not that" approach to communication that will help you model and cultivate growth mindset in the classroom. For example: Fixed Mindset * You're so smart. * You're wrong. Growth Mindset * l like how you used different strategies to figure out these problems. * That didn't work out for you. How could you approach the problem differently?