Listening Lesson Reflection

For this group-teaching lesson, I felt that our group was quite effective. It’s always very difficult to tell just how effective we would have been with real children, but all of our peers in our class seemed to understand well. Had we been teaching actual children, our directions may have needed to be a little simpler. The fact that we were asking college students to recognize fairly subtle dynamic changes, for example, is interesting because, well, that’s pretty simple for most college students; it may very well be a pretty different story for many elementary-age children.

As to our planning – we met during class, as the other groups did, but then we also met (two of us in person, the other on the phone) in an evening a couple of days before our presentation to finalize the lesson plan. Also, at this time, we decided what our objective, lesson statement, materials, national standards, and INTASC standards would be for this lesson. All in all, I believe that we planned quite well for this lesson. There is really only one exception to this. For one, we didn’t clearly communicate with each other which recording of the piece we were going to use; we actually all practiced with the same recording, but this was not the one we used in the lesson. This didn’t really cause any significant problems (they were quite similar), but we just weren’t quite prepared for this.

Individually, I think that my portion of the teaching went fairly well. My instructions were pretty clear; the ideas I had to lead the students through were simple yet useful. However, there definitely were a handful of areas in which I can improve. For one, upon watching the video I became very bored. I spoke fairly monotonously, and I did not do enough to actively involve the class through participation. Also, I needed to speak up. Granted, the audio quality on the video recording is not very good, but my voice was considerably less audible than, for example, Melissa’s, who was fairly understandable.

Also, I must address the fact that I taught one small thing factually wrong. A – mark over a note is not a “legato” marking. It is a “tenuto” marking. I was intending to teach legato style, but at the last minute decided to include symbolic notation for these styles, primarily so that the students would have some additional tangible ideas for what to draw on their papers to represent the styles. In doing so, I did not full think through what I would teach and how, and thus I incorrectly described a “legato” marking.

Overall, I felt that our teaching was effective, relatively concise, well-planned and went smoothly (no real stops or breaks, except obviously between each person but even those were fairly short). If taught in an actual school, our delivery methods would need to be refined, but otherwise I think it could be fairly directly applied. In summary, I was happy with our teaching but recognize that another opportunity to teach the same lesson would result in a higher quality of teaching.

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