How will I plan and assesses
instruction based upon knowledge of subject matter, students, the community and
curriculum goals.
Planning
and assessing music instruction is a complex process. Every day, at every
moment of my teaching career, I will have to demonstrate my theoretical and
practical knowledge of music. There will never come a time when I will cease
being a musician in my classroom; modeling, accompanying, describing,
conducting and rehearsal will form the majority of my classroom experience. My
students will learn through imitation of my methods at first, but after they
get past the period of imitation the will begin to synthesize their knowledge
and create their own music. To prepare my students for the development of true
musicianship, I must have a goal for their growth and a plan by which I may
achieve this growth.
Lesson
planning will be essential to me, not only so that I have a goal for what I
want to teach my students, but also as a comprehensive and thorough plan for
how to bring about the synthesis of that knowledge. One teacher advised me that
it is impossible to over plan a lesson, and the more resources I can pull out
at the drop of a hat, the better the flow of a class will be. When preparing at
the beginning of the school year I will not have the benefit of knowing my
students and their abilities and interests, but I can plan out what I want to
teach and the direction I wish the course to proceed in. After planning the skeleton
of the school year or semester, I can begin to fill it in with the meat and
sinews of specific activities, which I will modify according to the needs of
the present moment.
My
lessons will, of course, be shaped not only by my interests and goals, but by
the needs and interests of my students. Students connect immediately to that
which they already know and understand, and thus a good method of arresting
student interest is to present them with the material I want to teach them in a
format they already recognize, such as teaching musical form using a popular
song or doing music history reports on bands they grew up with. If I have
certain students who need more hands-on learning experiences, I can modify my
lesson plans to afford them those opportunities. If my students are struggling
with a concept, it should be an easy thing for me to insert some practice
worksheets or learning activities into the class period or substitute one
activity for another. If need be, the benefit of long-term planning will help
me to adjust the course schedule so that we spend all the time we need to on a
given subject.
To
facilitate fruitful planning, during the class period I must be attentive to
how my students are doing. Every music teacher I observed was constantly asking
their students questions to determine how much learning was going on. For
example, I can ask students to name the key signature of the piece we are about
to play and have competitions to see who can answer first. I want to keep the flow
of teaching in my class fairly quick so that students are engaged in the
activities I present, and one way of speeding up the learning pace is frequent
repetition of material.
To
maximize student potential it is important that students know if they are
succeeding in my classroom. Lesson planning will allow me the great aid of an
organized school year or semester, into which I can place systematic
assessment. In most group performance classes, assessment is immediate for the
ensemble, and in solo lessons it is much the same. The formative and summative
assessments are performances given to me or to the community, and feedback on
performances and lessons is immediate. For academic music classes, I shall have
to provide ways for my students to reveal their knowledge in more intellectual
ways. I like having quizzes every day both to encourage students to do the
readings assigned for class and so that I know how much information students
are deriving from the homework. I must make a commitment to grade theses
quizzes daily so that my students know immediately how much learning they are
accomplishing and determine if they need to exercise additional effort to
understand the material better.
I
genuinely appreciate having standards to which I can mold my curriculum and
plan my instruction. I have the unfortunate tendency to get caught up in those
aspects of music at which I excel, and having standards which span a great deal
of music’s expansive breadth compels me to devote appropriate amounts of time
to those avenues of music with which I am less familiar or do not enjoy as
much. Not only will standards provide me with a skeleton on which to base my
lesson plan, but they also motivate me to keep my lessons moving at an engaging
pace.
My
lesson plans will certainly be affected by the school’s expectations for the
music curriculum. For example, if there has been a spring concert every year
prior to my appointment, the school will expect that I prepare the ensembles
for the concert. Thus, time will be spent in class learning performance
repertoire and techniques applicable to those pieces. If the school pushes many
performances, much of the intellectual and emotional side of music must be
taught through performance medium I will have to dive into a piece with a
greater deal of depth in order to glean
theoretical and historical context for the sake of my students.
Music
naturally lends itself to multiple means of assessment. Portfolios,
performance, written tests, projects, and essays are all common place in any
given music class. Music can be grasped in a hundred different ways, both
intellectually and technically, and students will all have their chance to
shine at the level and through the means that they know best. At the same time,
students will be required to learn how to articulate their knowledge of music
in ways that are not as natural to them, and by doing so gain great expressive
knowledge. A more philosophical or intellectual child will be able to
communicate their knowledge through music history essays and theory tests, but
they will also have to apply their knowledge on their instruments and through
projects specific to a unit. If I make a true effort to prepare my lessons
well, I am certain all of my students will be able to succeed in my classroom.
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