General Music Lesson Reflection

So I taught ten minutes of my general music lesson today. It was on harmony for 8th grade. My basic idea was to take the students' previous knowledge of scales and apply that to explore harmony. I wanted to be playing and creating music as soon as possible. I also wanted to not flood them with information, but rely on their ears and asking questions about what they were playing.

First of all, I was very glad that I had them on instruments quickly. I loved starting with singing, but the transition to instruments was clunky, as I had anticipated. I didn't like that I hadn't connected the singing much to harmony. The purpose was to just get the music-making started, but I needed a stronger connection to the subject.

Speaking of which, I could have made it clearer. When writing the lesson plan, I was thinking that I would have had plenty of time to make the objective clearer and connect everything to the subject. I feel that the students may have gotten lost, but seeing as how it was meant to be only a 10 minute snapshot of the lesson, I am happy with what we could accomplish. I was trying not to talk too much, but I think I talked too much anyway.

In terms of how much I covered, I think I had too many concepts built in, but at the same time that I didn't get far enough. When I wrote this plan, I assumed that the terms scale, interval, and the actual numbers of the scale would not be new to my students. If this was a totally new concept, I definitely flooded my students with too much information is such a short amount of time. However, as I was leading the class, I found myself continually throwing out more and more concepts. So I'm not sure how I will change my plan concerning this yet. Before this lesson is taught, some stronger foundation is needed for sure.

I had the opportunity to teach this exact same lesson to my students today. It was a class of 5th - 8th grade students. I think it went well, aside from some behavior problems. I did not have enough keyboards, but I got through the lesson much more slowly than I had thought. Actually, I couldn't make it through all the way because it took longer to have everyone play through the examples. I expected that when writing the lesson plan. I explained less, and the students played more. That makes me think that the reason I went through so many concepts during my example 10 minute snapshot was party because the musicians knew better how to do what I was asking.

I think I should have had the students playing more and talking more about what they were playing. Maybe the best way to do this is to introduce a song that the students know and can play already. That was my thinking with playing "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or "Twinkle Twinkle" in the lesson. Maybe I need to get to that sooner. My feeling now is to just work on the simpler steps of playing the scale and harmonies on top of it more.

The biggest thing I can improve on is to get students feedback constantly. To assess, I was simply listening and watching students as best as I could. Since it was the beginning of the first harmony lesson, I was not overly concerned with how well the students were doing. I was trying to make sure every students was participating and trying to play what we were working on together. As the lesson goes on, I wanted to have students paired up on one instrument to play through the examples together, but wasn't thinking that I'd get that far in 10 minutes. The idea with that is to hear less students to better assess, but still not put one students on the spot.

Another thing I should do is talk less and try to get the students to play and especially describe what they are playing more. I jumped to the next thing too quickly. I think it was mostly because of the graduate students acting as 8th graders playing everything so well. I tend to do this in my other classes, though, too. I need to give my students more time to digest what they are hearing.

I am happy that it seemed like a fun enjoyable lesson. Since it was the first 10 minutes, I'm not too concerned with the ambiguity of it. I want to bring it back in to focus on the objective of harmony, but don't want to force it. I guess what I'm saying is that I need to slow down, but also be more clear in the point that I need to hit along the way. In some sense that could mean that I'd move faster, but mostly I just want to help the students experience the music and give them the tools to understand what they are playing.

Finally, I had a lot of fun. My classmates were great. We didn't get nearly as far as I had wanted, but I think it's alright. In the end I think I need to slow down anyway, but still get the students doing more.