Audition Lesson: Round 2

From giving my own lesson and pretending to be a student during others people’s activities, I have learned that the most successful lessons are one in which students create, respond to, or perform music. If students are given the opportunity to participate in one of these ways, they remain focused, enjoy class time, and remember the concepts presented. Making these personal connections to the lesson helps students incorporate the new information into their schema. Completing these assignments have given me a better understanding of the theory behind the 2014 National Standards for Music Education and their organization into three main categories: creating, responding and performing.

Successful lessons are also extremely well thought-out and focused. It takes time and practice to figure out the clearest way to present new information and instructions to students. Premeditation about specific word choice is very helpful for me at this early stage in teaching. While it is time consuming, I don’t mind practicing exactly what I will say before a lesson because the rehearsing puts me at ease. Hopefully, over time I will improve at thinking on my feet, but for right now rehearsing lessons is a helpful strategy for me.

While these are the two biggest “take-aways” I learned from the audition lesson assignment, here is a list of some of the other helpful, noteworthy observations I made:

1. Mistake #1: I have to be careful of speeding up lessons by thinking and talking too fast. The first time I presented this lesson, I think I spoke at a calm rate and in a clear manner. Unfortunately, I felt myself rushing the second time because both I and the students had seen the information once before. This is something that I have also caught myself doing when I sub for teachers who only have one prep. By the third or fourth time I teach a lesson, I catch myself doing the lesson faster. I have to remind myself to slow down because while this is the fourth time I am teaching the material today, it is the first time this particular class of students has seen the material.

2. Mistake #2: Trying to rush students and fit too much in. I have to keep working on this audition lesson to get it to run smoothly. I really like the three day lesson plan that this excerpt comes from, but the audition lesson still has too much in it. The review portion is taking more time than I would like. In real life, this part of the unit would occur on day three, and the students would have had two days of review and practice with verse-chorus form. I believe the review would go faster in real life as a result. I also realize that my current audition lesson design is still trying to fit a thirty minute activity into a ten minute time slot. I need to continue to refine the audition lesson so that it is fits into ten minutes at a more relaxed pace.

3. Positive Observation #1: As a “student,” I loved when my classmates stated the day’s objectives in student-friendly language near the beginning of the lesson. It got us all on the same page.

4. Positive Observation #2: In my lesson, I tried a blind voting method to poll the students that Professor Schneider suggested.  The students closed their eyes and voted for the correct answer. I got honest responses from them because they didn’t have to save face with their friends. I was surprised to see that almost everyone answered the question incorrectly at first. If I had asked the class without asking them to close their eyes, they probably would have copied the first student or the “smartest” student and gotten the answer right. I would not have gotten an accurate reading of who actually understood the material and who did not.