Week 6

This week was a busy week. The before school and after school bands have started sight-reading Christmas music. This is the first time I have walked a band through sight-reading, I know how to sight-read and I know what to tell students to get them to understand sight-reading, but it is still difficult to try to get this idea across to the band. They are not going to play it well the first time they see it and instead of powering through the piece and trying to play as much correctly as they can, most of them give up. The point of sight-reading is to figure out what is going to difficult in a song so that you know what you need to practice. My students got discouraged pretty quickly and kept saying that they hated the pieces that were picked for their Christmas concert.

A big thing that I have been working on is being able to comfortable work with a large group. I am very good at teaching the students the mini-lessons during the day, and I am also pretty comfortable in front of the 5th-grade band, but the symphonic band and concert band I am struggling a bit with. I know what to do and what I want in the lesson, but I am mainly having a problem with my conducting which confuses the band and keeping the band on task. When I stop to fix a section I lose control of the band. My cooperating teacher claims that I will get better at it with more experience, and it is ever so slowly getting better, but it is frustrating. I forget that I am student teaching to learn and that I am not going to do everything correctly the first time, or even the second time. I am going to have lessons that I plan really really well and still come up short and fail at. I am starting to accept it but it was frustrating for a long time. 

This week the school did ALICE training, which is active shooter training. On Tuesday the school had a drill with students, and then on Wednesday, the students had an early release and teachers had an in-depth ALICE drill. We were told to continue business as usual, have meetings in your departments and use the day as a plan day and sometime during the next hour or two something will happen. The police and fire department were there and they were using two by fours to simulate gunshots and they were trying to break into rooms, we needed to figure out what to do and when to evacuate. It was very lighthearted and fun before the drill, everyone was slightly on edge but we were all joking around and not taking it seriously. But when the drill started everything became really real, and I couldn't help but imagine what it would be like if it was real and we had twenty-something students to keep safe. The fact that the world has come to his is mind-boggling to me. Our students have to do drills just in case someone comes into their school to hurt them. It is one of those things that you don't learn in school but is a possibility and something that every teacher needs to think about. 

Chapter 8 of this weeks reading resonated most with me because you can think of music history as social studies in music. So much of music history can be paralleled with what is happening in history. Certain eras of music were directly impacted by what was happening in the world around the composers. Most of the composers that are studied in music history had extremely interesting lives and learning about their lives gives a good idea of why their music sounds the way that it does. Getting students interested in social studies of music history is the tricky part. There is a lot of cool things that happened in music history, my challenge as a teacher is to try and paint it in a way that students will want to learn it.

Week 5

This week was rough. My cooperating teacher and I both got the head cold that has been going around the building. Teaching beginning band students with a sinus headache was pretty awful, especially the woodwinds. I almost finished my EdTpa this week, I only have one more video that I want to do and one more lesson to teach. I think that my cooperating teacher was correct about teaching half notes and quarter notes for my EdTpa lesson, the students were engaged the entire time because this was a completely new concept for them. When we got to quarter notes and they saw their first real song "Hot Cross Buns" they were so excited and could not wait to play it.
That moment of excitement really snapped me out of a bad week. The whole band was excited that they finally made it to a real song. They begged me to play it and even though it did not go as they thought it was going to, the happiness that they got from playing reminded me why I want to teach music. They were so proud of themselves for getting to a real song and being able to move their fingers fast enough to change notes and have a real song come out of their instrument, they talked about it with me all the way to the bus that takes them to the elementary school. That excitement was super contagious and it kept me in a good mood all day. My cooperating teacher and I go to the elementary school in the afternoon to do pull out lessons and during the mini-lessons, with me, my students begged me to only play real songs and wanted to know when they are going to play more songs and when they are going to learn more notes to play more songs. Going into student teaching I thought that I wanted to teach high school, but seeing the excitement on these beginning band students is starting to change my mind. I really like how excited they are about everything because everything is new and shiny and fun. Most of them want to be there still and want to learn as much as they can as fast as they can.
This week I also taught the worst lesson so far. I was teaching the concert band after school and I lost control of the whole band, they were not playing, and they were talking to each other, and everyone was confused and didn't know what we were doing. It got so bad that my cooperating teacher had to step in and take the class back. I was really embarrassed, but I wrote a different lesson plan and the next day I tried again and it went a lot smoother. I have taken over all of my cooperating teacher classes and I forget that I'm still learning and things aren't going to go as smooth as I want it but it still stung to have something go so poorly even when you plan it so carefully. But I brushed myself off and got back up in front of the band the next day.

Chapter two this week was all about Eptness and behavior.  Laurel Schmidt's Classroom Confidential states: "Eptness is a combination of capacities and meaningful activity. It resides in potential in all students, but it's unleashed through the deliberate efforts of their teacher."Eptness is mainly achieved when the teacher is putting an effort into their teaching. 
I plan on using and have been using, expectations, encouragement, and feedback in my classroom. 
I choose these three because I feel like students in order to succeed need to know what is expected of them, once they know that they can be encouraged to meet those expectations and use any feedback to meet expectations. I feel like those three create a nice chain of events that allow for successful student learning. 

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Week 4

I went into the week for excited but also very nervous. I started my EdTPA lesson this week with the 5th-grade band. The 5th-grade band is starting to learn how to count half notes, half rests, quarter notes, and quarter rests. My cooperating teacher and I decided that the best bet would be for me to complete my EdTPA with the 5th-grade band because they will show the most improvement over a learning segment. The 5th-grade band has only been playing their instruments for a month and they have only learned about whole notes. In my learning segment I will be teaching them how to recognize and count half notes, half rests, quarter notes, and quarter rests. After learning about half notes and quarter notes the students are going to mainly be learning individual notes on their instruments and working on their range. So if I was going to use the 5th-grade band for my lessons it needed to be sooner rather than later. 

On Tuesday I introduced my unit and started with a pre-assessment counting exercise that I will have the students re-take at the end of the unit to show growth. Everything on my pre-assessment my students have not seen before. A few of my students were so flustered that they did not have a clue how to count the rhythms in the exercise. I told them that this was not going to be graded, that it was only going to be used to see how much they know before I teach the new content, and so that at the end of the unit I can give them the same exercise and show that they learned something. Having the students fill out the exercise took up most of my 25 minutes of class but I had planned on that, I wanted my students to take their time and think about it. 

On Thursday I taped my lesson, I introduced half notes to my students. I introduced the note first, then how to count it saying "half note" then my students counted it using numbers. They seemed excited to learn something new but they really did not have a clue how to count it. I planned on taking them back to whole notes so that they can make that connection that there are four beats in a whole note and two beats in a half note. So there are two half notes in a whole note. They started to understand and I asked them to count exercise #7 and after they counted it I asked them to sing it. By the end of the lesson the students were understanding how to count half notes, but playing them was a different story. By adding half notes some students forgot how to tongue, or what note they needed to play. Which I anticipated because they are thinking about a lot and the muscle memory is just not there yet, they have to think about everything twice as hard as more experienced players and whenever you throw a new concept at them they tend to forget the other things that they have learned. 

Overall, I think that choosing to teach my EdTPA lesson with the 5th-grade band was a good choice, they are still excited and enthusiastic about music and learning new things. 

The reading this week was about cultures in school. The part of the reading that stuck out most to me was the part where it talks about how in order to teach students to be more culturally aware, the teacher needs to make sure that they are not letting any biases or exclusion get in the way of their teaching. I do not get an opportunity to student teach in a diverse school, both of my placements are prominently white schools, but I grew up in Merrillville Indiana, which is basically a part of Gary Indiana. So I grew up in a very diverse environment when I moved to Manhattan, which is a small farm town I had quite the culture shock. I remember thinking that there are so many white people. I am not saying that I do not have biases and preconceived notions of culture, I am just aware of it, growing up in a very diverse school environment.

Week 3

This was my toughest week yet. I started to take over more of my cooperating teachers classes. I really am enjoying teaching and having control over more classes but it is exhausting. My normal day consists of symphonic band in the morning, then the beginner band, then five periods of small group lessons that are 45 minutes each, then we travel to the other school to pull the beginners out of recess, then we go to the PLC meeting, plan period, and then after school band. The good thing is that most of the individual groups are on the same schedule and are working on the same things. So I get to learn what is going to work and by the later periods in the day I have a pretty good idea of what is working and what was not working. The only bad thing is that I only see these groups once a week, so most of my lessons each day are repeated multiple times a week. This makes lesson plans easy but also I have to make sure that I don't skip things in the lesson because I thought I already got to it but it was the lesson the day before or the period before.

I also have been planning my EdTPA lesson plan. My cooperating teacher and I agree that if I am to show concrete student learning and growth I need to work with the beginners and work with them as they learn how to count and play half and quarter notes. After the beginners have learned half and quarter notes there is not any concrete thing that they learn that I could show real growth and be able to hand out worksheets. They are mostly learning notes on their individual instruments and working on correct embouchure and fingerings for their instruments. By teaching the beginners half and quarter notes I can give out a counting worksheet before I teach them as a formative assessment and then give them another counting worksheet at the end of the three lessons learning segment. I am going to break it up into lesson one is introducing the new lesson, with a quick review on how to count the notes that they already know, lesson two will be introducing half notes, and lesson three will be introducing quarter notes with another counting worksheet at the end. These lessons seem short but I only get to see the beginners for about 25 minutes before I need to end the lesson so that they can catch a bus back their school. Because of this, I need to keep my lessons brief, only introducing one concept at a time. Also, I only see the beginners twice a week. So I will start my EdTPA lesson on Tuesday and not finish until the following Tuesday.

only hurdle that I am going to have to go through this week is getting the video permission slips back from my students. I sent it home and out out of 21 students only 9 gave the slips back to me. My cooperating teacher also emailed the parents the permission slip explaining what it is and when I needed it back. So hopefully having it sent home and emailed I will get the rest of those slips back. If I do not get them all back I do not know what I am going to do, because the group is so small I do not know if I will be able to videotape my lesson.

Week 2

The second week was a whirlwind of a week. My cooperating teacher and I decided on the lesson I am going to teach for my EdTPA, and we have almost finalized the week that I will teach it. I should teach my EdTPA lesson starting next week on September 10th. This week I also started to take over one of the band classes, the 5th-grade woodwind band. It consists of 20 5th graders who all started playing their woodwind instrument this summer.

Tuesday I taught my first solo lesson with this group. This was their first rehearsal since summer so I spent the first lesson reviewing what they learned. The group has already learned three notes and were working on tonguing each note before they play it, the fingerings for each note and hitting the note when they start to play. I thought that the lesson went okay, I did have some issues with time management and figuring out what to do with the section that I am not working with. I had a lot of talking from the other sections when they were not playing. As for the lesson, I was teaching the band sounded better after the review lesson then they did before. All of the sections knew their notes and most of the students were tonguing their notes before they played.

After the lesson, I talked to my cooperating teacher and she told me that I needed to be more specific when giving directions and make sure that everyone in the band knows what exercise we are playing and what is expected of them. She said that I was treating them like an older band and needed to treat them like they do not understand anything and be very specific. She also told me that I need to really focus on giving out tasks to the students who are not playing to stop the talking and have them be productive throughout the entire class period so that no time is wasted. My cooperating teacher told me that overall the lesson was good and the things that I need to fix come with time and practice. And if I try to fix those things in my next lesson then it will go more smoothly.

The next lesson that I taught was on Thursday with the same group. I had planned on quickly reviewing and then moving on in their book but once we started playing I realized that the band forgot what we reviewed last time and we needed to review again. We spent most of the lesson reviewing the same exercises from last time, but this time I remembered to be more specific in my instructions and to give tasks to the section that is not playing. If they weren't playing they were supposed to go over exercises that we have not done yet and make sure that they know all of the fingerings and what note is being played.

After the lesson, my cooperating teacher told me that I improved on being clear in my instructions and I also gave good tasks for the students when they were not playing and overall the lesson went smoother and the band talked less and stayed on task more.
Next week we have another parade on Labor Day. The students are very excited and it helps me because the more they see me doing things with them the more receptive they are to me when I am teaching a lesson.