Peer Teachig Reflection

On Monday, November 27, 2006, I taught my peer teaching lesson. I taught the LH shape technique called “Opening for a Bee” and the bow stroke exercise technique using elbow motion. As short as it was, I felt that the lesson went well. My teaching of the skills was effective, as best as I could tell. Though I’m not a string player, I felt that I understood the concepts I was teaching well enough to be able to effective convey them to my peers (who, of course, were also somewhat familiar with the concepts). I also used (and complimented) a student model, which was a technique with which I am not a stranger. The echoing of the brief, 4-note patterns went fairly well, although I played one poorly the first time. I could have played each of them perfectly, that would have been idea. Nonetheless, everyone seemed to understand what I was playing each time, and they just had some simple intonation problems, as might be expected. Lastly, then, the exercise from the book that we played went well. It was not a terribly hard piece, and everyone played it pretty well. I liked the methods I used to have the students practice it a few times without even realizing it – I think that repeating it in different combinations of people playing is a good idea.

To prepare for this lesson, I looked up my assigned skills and made sure I understood what they were. I then wrote down notes that I would understand so that I would remember how to teach the skills, and then I made up three 4-note patterns that I thought would be somewhat challenging yet still playable. Lastly, I found an exercise in the book that, similarly, would take some work but would not be out of the students’ grasp. I wrote all this down, and then went through the teaching in my head, visualizing the class and just how I would teach each portion. Overall, I though this preparation was sufficient. This was verified by what I thought was a well-received lesson, one that the students understood and possibly even enjoyed. Aside from playing my examples more clearly, there was not much about my lesson which I would have changed.

[ home ]  [ philosophy ]  [ mused courses ]  [ pgp ]  [ intasc standards ]  [ links ]