Along with choir classes, I am very thankful to have a chance of working with the students in musicianship class. Even though I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to teach the class because we meet every other day, I didn’t have many concerns dealing with the students. I guess it is partly due to the fact that I teach the same students in choir class and also my background knowledge in piano helped me a lot dealing with this class. Luckily I had a supporting cooperating teacher who always has a positive attitude towards students, so I was able to enjoy teaching this class. In musicianship class that I do not teach, but still observe every other day, I thought about how important is the teacher’s role in terms of teaching methods. The students are using the textbook in order to get musical history and knowledge, but the book itself cannot help the students understand the material well. My cooperating teacher always tries to make a connection between what is written in the book and what they actually learn and understand. At times he seems very animated and he is also very good at improvising when explaining certain musical styles and repertoires. I could clearly tell that his strength in vocal music really helped teaching this class. I have been afraid of teaching music history, in a way it is partly due to the fact I am not sure to how to approach the material to teach the class. However by observing this class I was able to get an idea on how I could approach the music history class.
I had my final observation last Wednesday for the keyboard/theory class. At the time the students were learning key signatures in major scale and they were able to play the song ‘Moon River” with both hands. Not every student learned at the same pace, but by reviewing repeatedly and playing different chords and scale practice, I could see the students were improving little by little. For my observation class, I picked the song “Try to remember” on my own since my cooperating teacher didn’t have any preference on the subject. One day I brought an easy piano solo piece, and they played the music quite well but the students seemed to be more engaged with popular songs. They seemed as though they were interested in learning different qualities of chords and also hearing the sound of the chords. For that reason I chose a popular song that have melody and chord names.
After the first bell rang, I wanted them to start with pentatonic and scale exercise, which has been a routine for the class. Then I introduced the song I brought and I had them clap the rhythm. I didn’t expect the activity to take so much time and I was concerned about the rest of stuff I had planned for the period. I couldn’t stop the activity because many students were still clapping in the wrong rhythm. After a couple of more trials they finally got it. After the activity, the students played the melody part but some students had trouble with playing the melody with the correct rhythm. By the time I explained about some different chord names, many students were not paying attention to what I wrote down on the board and what I was explaining to them. I kept asking the students to stop playing the keyboard, but they just kept on doing that. I had to make clear rule about when to play and when not to play. However I feel like I did not successfully deal with both managing the class and keeping the lesson going. Actual teaching the class was much more complicated than I expected. When I am standing in the front and looking at the students, I really had to catch what was really going on and at the same time try to get rid of all the stuff that was distracting. For example, there were always two girls who played the keyboard in a much faster tempo and they made unnecessary sounds while I was explaining. On top of that, two boys in the back rarely followed my instructions and played whatever they wanted to. When I asked the entire class, who wanted to answer my questions, the same students always raised their hands. That made me worry about the students and how much they understood the lesson that I was teaching. By spending a lot of time in the beginning, we didn’t get the chance to play the song with both hands. I think a lesson could be adaptable to what the students really need to know and it could be slower than expected. After the class I felt that I should have been more aware about managing the class along with keeping the lesson flow. When I had a conversation about this with my other cooperating teacher, she said that it is important to know that class management is also a part of the lesson plan and also to be able to anticipate what the students might do in the classroom. Through this experience I definitely believe that I have learned a valuable lesson that I need to work on and I feel that I am gaining more confidence with the students.
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