Microteaching: Brass Flexibility
Reflective Essay
For this, the one and only microteaching in MusEd 250, I chose to teach the class of "beginners" about flexibility in regards to playing a brass instrument. I made a sheet of warm-ups, with lip flexibility and long tone exercises on it. We played through some of these in class, and I suggested to them that they practice from the sheet on their own. Then, we went to the Standard of Excellence book and played exercise number 57, because it included some intervals and things that take some flexibility to be able to play well.
I think that, overall, I taught well. My lesson was very organized, thanks to good planning and a thorough lesson plan. Also, I had many fundamentally sound ideas to convey to the students. In fact, I even used an extra-musical analogy to make a point (I used baseball to discuss gentle warm-ups). Other strengths would include my conducting, which was simple yet useful (including snapping to provide audible tempos). Lastly, I made a point of listening while the students played, not just mindlessly beating time. Therefore, I was able to stop and fix some things, even stopping in the middle of an exercise to make a couple comments and then continue, hoping that the students would play better for the rest of the exercise.
There are some things I could work on, however, to be sure. First and foremost, as always, I talk really fast. I was more comprehensible this time, I think, than some times in the past. But it was still enormously fast. I really need to be conscious of this; it honestly never crossed my mind, even while preparing, until I watched the video. Also, I used "um" way too often. It wasn’t necessarily pervasive throughout the entire teaching, but when used, it was used a lot. Additionally, my lesson was so well planned that it seemed fairly obvious that I was essentially reading from my plan at times. I tried to make it sound otherwise, but it still did. I need to be more extemporaneous; I can start by just not writing everything out in complete sentences on the plan. That would probably essentially fix the problem completely. Lastly, I planned to include a lot of content. This isn’t inherently bad, but I ended up with more material than I really had time to cover. As it was, I taught for just under 11 minutes, despite the 7-10 minute time frame given. And, I even skipped a few things to save time. One positive, I suppose, is that I was able and comfortable enough to make those changes/deletions on the go, to adapt to the time better. However, if I had planned a little more precisely (and realistically), I would not have had to cut anything on the fly. It was not a huge issue, but I can work on planning realistically.
In general, I was very happy with my microteaching. I think that with a few refinements it could have been a great microteaching, not just a good one. The content and methods were very solid. My delivery could use a little work. I planned well, just not realistically enough. These are all goals to help me to do better next time.
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