General Music Lesson Reflection #2

Today I taught my second example lesson for my final in my Secondary Music Methods class. I decided to focus the lesson on a newer part of the lesson that I designed which was just teaching a choral piece and trying to break down the parts to help bring a greater understanding of harmony.

I felt that it was better. The main thing that was lacking is the keyboard instruments that I had last time. My current idea with this lesson is to move to the instruments later. I'm still fiddling with how to work out playing and singing in one lesson, but so far I very much prefer teaching harmony through singing, so I may just change the entire unit.

The point of the lesson and activity is to get my students singing in harmony. From there I wanted to define the harmonies. This should be clearer, but so far I'm happy with just jumping into singing and explaining it more later.

My biggest weakness is not making the objective clear enough. I need to make it obvious what our goal as a class is. I have the objectives in my mind, and I guess I'm still stuck on an idea that we just need to get started making music to really learn. Assessment also goes much faster for my colleagues than it would with my students. In my classroom, I'd need to spend more time teaching the parts of the choral pieces. This would take away from teaching about harmony.

I should have the music better prepared with chords. Originally I wanted to work through the piece more slowly to explore the intervals and how the notes relate. Now I'm starting to think it'd be more useful to have the extra information. My only concern is giving too much information at once. Maybe it'd be something I'd do once we've spent some time talking about harmonies and specifically chords.

I didn't get to it, or I forgot, but the warmup singing numbers was intended to connect to the notes the students were singing. As I said, this is a very new part of the lesson so I'm not totally familiar with my plan. It's a sad excuse to not know what I planned, but that's why I had them singing numbers this time. I wanted to use it as an easier way to introduce intervals.

Assessing should be easier for me. In both of my lessons, I didn't really make a clear effort to assess. I should be assessing constantly, and both times I was trying to assess by simply listening to what my students were playing/singing. I'll try to make a more intentional and consistent effort to always be assessing. So far it's just been the attitude of, "are they doing what I asked?" "Yes?" "Good."

This two experiences have been valuable to me. It's helped me to better understand the true impact of good preparation by the teacher. I'm grateful to my classmates that have been good sports and given me great feedback. I'm going to improve most by assessing more and being more clear with my objectives. I think I have a great sense of how to get started making music and make lessons fun, but I need to bring in some more focus.

Audience

How can I build an audience and should I worry about this?

I think audiences are a critical part of music. I think it's important to worry about them. Without them we lose a lot of purpose. With no audience, there is still the musician. At the very least, we musicians need to be worried about what we play. There should never be a time where we play for no one with no regard to the reception.

I can build an audience through marketing most easily. After that I think it's just a matter of investing into the music. People are drawn to art that is worthy of admiration. Art can only be worthy of admiration when enough time and energy has been poured into it. 

In terms of live music, audiences know when the musician is into the music or not. It's an easy sense to gain if you attend live music events. When the musician is truly invested into the creation of the music, the audience can enjoy it much more. There is a much greater, but still unsaid, value that is placed in the music. 

This is what I think is the way to retain an audience. Getting it in the first place is tougher. It's all about finding the people that care about the music you are playing. Marketing helps, but there will always be people missed. Word-of-mouth is almost always the most reliable way of hearing about new and exciting things, but it's hard to exploit that to build an audience.

To keep it simply, to build an audience I need to make music that matters. Who decides what matters? I do. I should always be worried about this.

Movie Blog Prompt

How can I create a love for music and performing in my program?

This is a tough question to answer. As a musician, I naturally feel that having fun in music is the most important thing. If I can convey that sense of fun to my students and help them to experience fun, then I think they will fall in love with music and performing.

There are many ways that I can cultivate fun in my music classroom. First of all, I must always be prepared. If I know the music, it makes teaching it so much more smoothly. There should be no downtime due to second-guessing how the music should go. The music also needs to be relevant to the students and interesting enough that I don't need to pull teeth to get them involved. Interesting music to them will always be challenging to pick, but it's worth every second spent in figuring it out.

Ideally, when the right mix of fun and relevancy mixes with a challenging repertoire, the motivation to play would hopefully switch from extrinsic to intrinsic. In the movie "Chops," I believe all of the students were running on intrinsic motivation. This was the only explanation for being able to play such challenging music and pursue its perfection with such vigor. It was truly inspiring to see so many kids so invested in playing their parts.

For me, as a musician that started playing in college with no background from middle or high school, it's always amazing seeing high school or middle schoolers play challenging material. Maybe they aren't in love with the music, but to me, when it's played well, it can only be due to instrinsic motivation and being in love with the music.

This can only be achieved when the music is fun and challenging at the same time. That's how I can create a love for music and performing.