Young Drummers’ Curriculum
Creating a new learning curriculum for drum students age 4-9
Overview
Long before I even knew what UX Design was and what the field entailed, I used the principles of user-based design to create a new curriculum for young drummers, to fill a gap in the market.
This project was borne out of my empathy for my young students, and a desire to better serve their educational needs.
What did I do?
I performed contextual inquiry with existing tools, found them lacking, then designed my own pedagogical packet, and performed usability tests with my students. As I learned more about how they interpreted the information, I iterated on further designs.
Results
Before I created this packet, I had students leave my teaching studio, likely out of frustration with the material. After developing this, no students left my studio. The attrition rate of drum students fell from 20% to 0%.
Methods:
Secondary research
Contextual inquiry
Usability tests
Tools:
Microsoft word
Deliverables:
The Challenge
There are almost no pedagogy books aimed towards very young children learning how to play the drum set. Rhythm is a particularly difficult skill for children to grasp, and is usually taught slowly alongside concepts on pitched instruments such as note reading, learning note names, and playing simple melodies.
When I was employed by the Okemos Music School, I was tasked with teaching beginning drum set in addition to my responsibilities as a piano teacher. Growing up, my school required all percussionists to already have two years of piano lessons before beginning.
Many schools have this policy, for two key reasons: (1) rhythmic concepts are difficult to teach to young children, and take time to internalize, and (2) when your band’s drummers don’t have good rhythm, you’re gonna have a bad time as a band leader.
The fact that most public schools don’t even bother trying to teaching children percussion without prerequisites was my first hint that this would be a difficult challenge.
I began teaching students using the method books I had used, and quickly realized it was too advanced for any child under the age of 10. Coordinating four limbs in complex patterns while still learning the basics of note reading was overwhelming for young students.
I pivoted to teaching simple patterns to be played alongside the students’ favorite songs. This had its benefits, but was also difficult, as students had a difficult time keeping in rhythm with the music. Explaining the overlay and interplay between beat and rhythm is a slow process with any age student, let alone young children.
The room where I taught for two years.
Some early attempts at creating exercises. While these may seem simple to musicians, even this amount of information was overwhelming to young students.
I then began teaching two young siblings, ages 4 and 6, and realized I needed a radically different approach to teaching. I performed secondary research into method books for very young drummers, and discovered only one book that could potentially work. By that time, I had spent so much money on method books, I decided to just make my own.
First Iteration
I began by identifying the most basic issue that needed to be solved. Young students needed two things:
A wide variety of activities in different contexts, to keep their interest over a full half-hour
A way to learn left vs. right hand and foot
With these two things in mind, I stripped away almost every element that is present in most method books: notes, rhythm, bar lines, drum names, dynamics, rests, etc. What was left was this:
Simple boxes, with L for left hand, R for right hand, T for both hands together, and F for foot (only right foot to begin with, which is used to play the bass drum).
My young students could immediately grasp what these boxes meant: first I play a note with the stick in my right hand, then I play a note with the stick in my left hand, and so forth. Conspicuously absent are any overt musical concepts: no music notes, no measures, no specification of which drum to hit.
Second Iteration
I performed usability tests with this early prototype, and quickly discovered that my young students would lose their place in the pattern of eight boxes. This is consistent with the design principle of chunking material for better readability. I made a simple edit: thickening the line in the middle, creating two sets of four boxes:
This simple change made for much better readability for the students.
I created many more pages of patterns, each one introducing a new concept in a systematic way.
Paradiddles (which I love introducing early because the students find this word so funny!):
Combining hand and foot patterns:
And, hiding in the section titled More Complex Patterns is a pattern any drummers reading this might notice is one of the most basic drumming patterns, used all the time in rock and pop music:
Once the student learns exercise 8, I have them play it with right hand on a cymbal, left hand on snare drum, and right foot on bass drum, and the magic is revealed!
Other Considerations
Due to the simplicity of this material, I can alter and edit it as I see fit for each student in their lessons. I often write in counting above the exercises to have them practice saying: “one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.” In this way I am teaching the fundamentals of drum patterns and counting in a way that is fun and not overwhelming for young students.
Along with this material, which addressed main concern no. 2 (teaching students left vs. right), I often taught note shapes and counts as a separate activity, away from the drum-set, with the students drawing different shapes on small whiteboards. This addressed main concern no. 1 (keeping students’ interest), creating that sense of shifting focus that helps keep young students engaged for extended periods of time.
By separating these concepts I found much more success as a teacher. Through actively designing both my material and my lesson structure from the student’s perspective, I was able to help them learn and grow much more effectively.
Conclusion and Next Steps
Teaching music lessons was an incredible crash course for me in usability studies. Each one-on-one encounter was a chance for me to observe students read and try to understand different materials, and piece together where and how they were confused, frustrated, or bored.
This packet was the largest single component I created in my years of instructional design, but I also designed piano pieces for students, as well as games and other activities. My desire to create these materials was borne out of empathy for my students, and a drive to create lessons that were engaging and challenging in a fun way.
This packet became invaluable to me in my drum teaching, even in its bare-bones format. I’m hoping it can do the same for other teachers as well. Next up I would like to add a few features:
Instructions for teachers on how to best use the material
More whimsical designs that can delight young students