Final lesson reflection

My final exam lesson was much better than my initial lesson, but still has room for improvement. I think overall I was kind of stumped by the topic of copyright as it was never taught to me in general music class. I do think that it is an important topic to teach and I will use these lessons in my future classes, but I would like to observe somebody else teach with this subject first.

Another area of weakness is my concept of assessment. I am used to teaching private piano and drum lessons and constantly informally assessing them. The goal that they are working towards is performing in a recital at the end of the year, not taking a test or quiz. I feel that this will be one of my biggest challenges as a music teacher.

I liked the fact that my lesson was centered around creating original music and the students were playing for the majority of the lesson. One detail to refine would be having headphones available for all of the keyboards. It was too noisy in the piano lab for my students to concentrate on what they were doing. Another thing that would likely backfire on me would be taking the students aside to record them while the rest of the class is by themselves in a room. I would probably not do that in a real lesson with 8th graders, but i trusted my fellow grad students to behave.

Teaching and observing these mock audition lessons has been very instructive and fun. I feel that I have a much better grip on how to plan a lesson after taking this class and also how to imagine how a lesson will go.