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.