Lucas Hobson MUSED 355 11 October 2011 Slow Down and Breathe: A Microteaching Reflection I recently taught a lesson

on breath support; this paper gives me an opportunity to review that experience and glean areas for improvement in my teaching, as well as strong points. As I reviewed my lesson plan, there were some parts I found I liked. I am glad that I included actual leading questions in step five. This forced me to actually think about how I would lead the discussion during class beforehand. I am glad I chose the song that I did. The lesson was directed towards early beginners and the song was at the difficulty level I wanted. In addition to being technically very easy, Jaws has relatively long phrases for beginners, and is something they will enjoy playing. Unfortunately, its difficulty level may have been a little low for college music majors. One fault with my lesson plan is that it did not provide sufficient activities to fulfill the time limit. Had I presented this lesson in real life, there would have been two-three minutes of wasted time in class. Two-three minutes a day adds up to between seven and nine hours of instructional time lost over an entire school year. I need to be more precise with my lesson planning in the future. Further, better preparation could have helped my delivery, allowing me to focus more on my students reactions then trying to decide how I want to execute the next portion of my lesson.

In addition, and I mentioned this in my reflection for MUSED 353 as well, I would like to start organizing my lesson plans better. I think that I could use indents, text boxes, and even color to make my lesson plans more easily readable. I would like to be able to use them during lessons to jog my memory, without interrupting the lesson. I dont need to have to hunt to find which step Im on, or what term I may have just forgotten. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I want to make my lesson plans more focused on central topics. Students should come away from class with a sense that they learned something. Dr. Hourigan often talks about teachers showing a disrespect for class time. It seems to me that teachers can waste a lot of teaching time even when they arent just poorly managing time skills. For example, I feel like I got into musical interpretation more than breath support in this lesson. Musical interpretation is important, but if the focus of a lesson is breath support, than thats what the students should learn from the lesson. My video brings to mind several things that I liked and that I didnt like about lessons. Ill start with my positives. I started with a nonmusical introduction. I wanted to use it to include the eighth and ninth music standards into my lesson, but unfortunately, I didnt have enough time. If I work with instrumental ensembles out in the field, I may revisit and revise this lesson plan and teach about movie music. Still, I like the idea of creating musically competent students who are all proficient in every standard. I am quite happy with my modeling for this lesson. I felt that my voice was on pitch and of an acceptable timbre, and my trombone playing was very acceptable

as well. Modeling a lack of breath support went against everything I know, but it got the point across. Having solid skills on the trombone made teaching this lesson much easier. This is something I can easily develop outside of class for future lessons as well. I feel that modeling both the correct and incorrect ways to play instruments is really important, because it gives students a frame of reference to understand what actions they need to change, and the consequences. Consequentially, I modeled two ways to play Jaws as well. I felt that this really did make a difference in my lesson. I am happy that I incorporated multiple questions into my lessons. I particularly liked that I had the students construct the difference between my two examples rather than simply telling them what the difference was. My level of energy when asking the questions, though, might have been higher. I am certainly not a Dr. Gerrity yet. I addressed two concepts that were not on my lesson plan. First, I failed to anticipate that an accelerando might cause a problem in teaching this piece by rote. Second, I dealt with posture later in the lesson. I think that I addressed both of these concepts succinctly. I am glad that I addressed them, because they directly affected my primary objectives for the lesson plan. I need to remain flexible while teaching. I liked that I made the students try playing without breathing at first and then do it while breathing, but I think that I may have used this as an opportunity for individual give and take to create more rapport with the class, rather than simply talking to the entire group again.

I need to establish more familiarity with the class in other terms as well. I need to be able to listen to students playing while teaching. I understand that this is developed with practice and time. Ill keep working at it. I always feel like my shoulders are stooped slightly forward in these lessons (as in life, Im sure), making me look less confident. The first thing I need to fix is my posture. Also, I should wipe that ridiculous smile from my face some times. I made a few mistakes while modeling the piece to our class. First, I should have modeled the entire thing, and then broke it down into parts. Second, I should give solfege syllables, and a tonality (Bb-do) so my actual fifth and sixth graders dont get completely lost. If Im working with musicians at the actual experience level this lesson targets, I will want to give them the names of notes included in this song as well; their range and vocabulary may not include mi-fa yet (although this could be another focus of this lesson). Third, I should find a better way to address the changing beat in this piece. This might have been a good concept to address in my lesson plan. My teaching rubric mentions that I need to move faster between activities, and I certainly see that in my video. In the future, I will be trying to design lesson plans for better continuity. I will also try to practice lessons out loud more before teaching them. Overall, I think my lesson had several nice concepts that I would like to continue developing. I will be working on establishing more rapport with students, creating more continuity in my lessons, and keeping my plans more focused. This should help me to continue becoming better at teaching.