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.
Once again a fantastic lesson Abe. In my college choral warmups we used to do an exercise where used to sing a one-octave scale ascending and descending (1 to 8 and 8 to 1). The second time around, the tenors would stay at 8 and hold their note, sopranos stop and hold at 6, altos at 4, and basses stop at one; creating a IV chord in second inversion. On the conductors signal, the sopranos resolve to the 5th and altos to the 3rd, resulting in a plagal cadence. Might be a good introduction that leads into learning the song by rote.
ReplyDelete