Here is an example of a collaborative assignment I use in an upper-division course.

· First, let me set the table. One of the main objectives in my analysis courses is to develop student's musical intuitions, and refine their analytical, listening, and writing skills. The assignment I will relate to you today occurs after the midterm, after I have presented several "model analyses" and provided the students with relatively risk-free opportunities to test out some analytical methods. This assignment requires the students to transfer the analytical skills they've learned to a new situation by applying familiar methodologies to a new contexts.

· Students choose their works from a list of works that I provide; with a class of 20-25 it usually works out that there are eight groups of two or three students. The students study their chosen works for a period of two weeks-until they "own it."

· I ask for two things.

One is an essay (a paper as opposed to a PAPER) that asks them to find a "way in" to the work, and describe this path. I encourage the students to consider the musical work from a structural and a teleological point of view, and to answer the following: What is the form of the work? Where are the "cool spots"? Where is the "heart" of the piece, and why? What are the compositional strategies, and how can you hear them, describe them, and convincingly perform them?

The second document is a "road map." A road map is a pictorial representation (with arrows, words, musical notes and symbols, and other sorts of visual imagery) that represents their experience of the musical work as they hear it in time. A road map traces the history of events, and is intended to provide another "take" on the narrative strategies outlined in the essay. The idea is that one can follow a composition alternatively from a the road map or from a musical score (although each activity engages different processes and has a different sound and meaning).

· Now for the collaborative part.

On the day the essays and road maps are due, I devote a portion of a class to small-group discussion so that the students in the groups can share their analytical viewpoints and road maps with other students in the group. (Keep in mind that all of the students in a group study the same work.) At the end of the class, the students exchange essays for peer review, and they also exchange their road maps. Each student reads the other students' papers, and also listens to their piece through the eyes of the other students' road maps. They then return the essays and road maps (with comments). Students revise their papers and rethink their road maps; when they are satisfied they submit both to me. I also ask them to describe how their understanding of the piece has changed throughout the process.

I have found this to be a highly successful enterprise, and I am always thrilled with both the product and, more importantly, the process. Not only does the activity really change the way they hear, think about, and play the pieces they've studied; it also opens them up to a kind of analytical pluralism.

In my view, some of the factors that make this so successful are: peer critique, small-group discussion, and the fact that they have to experience (indeed, internalize) in two distinct ways someone else's perception and conceptualization of a musical work.