I have never met a child who didn’t love to make sound,’ says Hayes Greenfield. ‘The element of making sound – it is that basic element – that is what kids get so excited about.’
The New York-based jazz composer and saxophonist is the author of a programme designed to harness the innate joy associated with noisy self-expression and turn it into something that helps children learn self-regulation, collaboration and other essential life skills. Called The Greenfield Method, the approach, he says, aims to ‘enhance children’s executive function abilities and help develop eye-hand co-ordination, active listening skills, socialisation and raise self-esteem’.
While banging a drum or blowing through a tube are an essential rite of passage for children experimenting with sound, Greenfield says his ethos is similarly reductive: this is not about turning children into consummate musicians but about methods of experimenting with noise and silence singly and in groups. He talks about sound in terms of four basic elements: duration, volume, texture and patterns.
While his method provides ‘all non-music pre-school teachers with the tools necessary to work with sound and silence in their classrooms in very substantial, musical ways’, he is careful to point out that teachers do not need to be musical to try it. ‘The biggest obstacle is teachers,’ he explains, ‘because they say, “I don’t know how to teach music”. So, you have to break down what is a sound.’
His method is a series of exercises of increasing complexity which practitioners can use to lead short sound-creating activities with children aged three years and above. This might start with simply counting to five while experimenting with a gradual increase in volume.
‘Sound is what happens before there is any kind of music,’ he says. ‘Music is a by-product that comes after something or someone has first created a sound. Somebody plucks a string, hits a piece of wood, shakes a can of beans, or blows a metal tube.’ Anything that makes this more than just sound is a matter of organisation, he adds.
The effects
The origins of the method came about in 2006 when Greenfield was working with high-school children with special educational needs. ‘One kid who was about 15, Marcos, was always making noise but was non-verbal – he had no inhibitory control,’ he explains. ‘At this point I was conducting the kids with physical gestures, indicating when and when not to play, as well as how loud or softly to play. I said to Marcos, “You are my soloist, which is a very important position to have. You have to sit there and play silence and wait until I point at you to play.” I made him wait for a minute and a half – by the end, he was dying to play.
‘As hard as he struggled to hold back, he did so. Everyone there could see and feel his struggle to play silence, instead of sound. And when I finally instructed him to play sound, he jumped up and just let it rip. He blew the roof off that flutophone. And when I gestured for him to sit back down and play silence, he did so effortlessly.
‘If that wasn’t profound enough to witness, what totally blew everyone’s mind was when I asked the class who wanted to come up and conduct, and Marcos was the first to yell out, without hesitation and with complete authority, “I do!” A teacher told me, “I’ve never heard him speak.” Marcus was pointing at people to play and not to play and generally having a ball.’
Greenfield says the technique has also helped children with inhibited movement to move. ‘I’ve had kids with multiple sclerosis go from taking every effort to move their hands ten inches to moving as a butterfly. Teachers have come up to me with tears in their eyes and said, “You have no idea how hard it was for them to do that.”’
Expert involvement
The method was codified by New York University Professors and self-regulation experts Clancy Blair and C Cybele Raver, and trialled at Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, a New York kindergarten. Professor Blair calls it ‘one of the most thoughtful and direct approaches of which I am aware to help children build self-regulation skills’.
‘The key insight of The Greenfield Method,’ he says, ‘is to make use of something that is tremendously appealing and fun for children – the production of sound – and to embed that within a set of exercises in which children collaboratively create and perform structured sound compositions. In doing so, children build essential behavioural and cognitive self-regulation skills, including the ability to inhibit impulsive responding, to hold information in mind in working memory, to recognise and create patterns and sequences, and to take the perspective of others in collaborative activities.’
Adele Diamond, Professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience, University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has also endorsed the project. She says, ‘Sound is ever present and it is simple. You don’t need anything expensive – you just need your body. Yet it is so rich in terms of what you can do with it.’
The method
Activities can range from clapping to conducting through gesture
‘The most effective way to learn and master The Greenfield Method is in daily, frequent, short warm-ups, cool-downs, focus games and transitional exercises only’, says Mr Greenfield. Simple daily exercises involving the voice and clapping can become more complex, with instruments added and more sophisticated layering from different groups of children. He has grouped ways of making sound into 12 activities (see box, below).
He suggests that children use these to explore different aspects of sound and silence, working up to producing ‘sound sculptures’ – layers of intentionally produced sound using body parts, instruments and voice. ‘It takes about a year to go from working with voices to hand gestures to sound sculptures,’ he says. ‘Start with kids saying names and hitting body parts. Get children to “play” silence by putting hands not quite together.’
The method is now online as a series of teaching videos (see More information), while a written document will be made available.
Just the voice alone, according to the document, ‘is extremely rich with all of the different types of textures it can make, from a soft whisper to a shrill yell, from wavy, to smooth, to growly, to raspy. Voices can be quiet and gentle as well as quiet and stern, all of which depends on the intention and texture of the sound one chooses to create.’
12 SOUND ACTIVITIES
The 12 ways in which sound is explored within the programme are:
1. Counting, clapping and stomping
2. Technique and texture (clapping and rubbing)
3. Dynamic control (from very loud to very soft)
4. Emphasis and duration
5. Time and tempo
6. Passing sound one to one
7. Dividing into groups
8. Improvising and creating dialogue
9. Rhythmic literacy
10. Using elements of art as a trigger for sound – for example, one colour for quiet, two colours for a medium sound and three or more colours for loud.
11. Conducting through patterns
12. Conducting through gesture
Mr Greenfield recommends children do activities in short sessions twice a day, using only fingers, hands, arms, legs, feet and voice before introducing percussion.
What matters is not the amount of activities that children try to master but the fluency that they achieve within an activity. Adding variations and layers of complexity with ease indicates that children have mastered the activity.
The more regularly and consistently children work with sound and silence on a daily basis, he says, the more they will come together and resemble ‘a well-oiled machine’.
To increase children’s focus and engagement, give each child an opportunity to lead the exercise.
SAMPLE ACTIVITY
This activity helps develop children’s executive functioning, which encompasses:
- self-control
- working memory
- cognitive flexibility – the ability to change tack or come up with new ideas quickly.
Step by step
Count from one to 20, gradually increasing the volume, from a whisper to a yell on 20.
Repeat the numbers, this time saying each as short as possible, while maintaining a constant speed – controlling volume and length of sound enhances self-control and working memory, especially when the speed remains slow and consistent.
Now, forget volume and focus on length, again keeping a steady pulse. Sound out numbers 1-5 as short as possible, with silence between each, then make 6-10 long with no silences in between. Repeat the pattern for 11-15 (short with silences) and 16-20 (long). Once all the children master this pattern, increase the volume from quiet to loud, as before – all three core aspects of executive function are now employed.
MORE INFORMATION
To see the method in action, visit: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/thegreenfieldmethod/237819963
A text version of the method is available on Amazon
Self-regulation interventions tend to have a high educational impact for low cost, according to the Education Endowment Foundation. See: https://bit.ly/2J92JXx
‘All about…self-regulation’ by Anne O’Connor
