Practicum Reflection 5

This week I got to observe a music theory class. This was interesting because the teacher began instruction on guitar. The instructor started by drawing the different strings on a white board, and explaining what note corresponded with each string. She then explained the different notes on each string and drew them on her diagram on the board. I think this was effective because she was able to engage both auditory and visual learners. After she finished explaining it the students took a quiz she made through Musictheory.net This allowed her to design the number of questions the students got and see a complete report of every question they missed. As the students worked on the quiz she has two of the students who play guitar teach their peers, and allow them to play. This engaged the students who already knew how to play guitar, and allowed the other students to play around on the guitar. If students finished the quiz early she had them review what they worked on last class with key signatures. This ensured that none of the students were sitting there at all during the class, or working on homework for other subjects. After all students had a turn playing guitar, and finished the quiz the teacher had all the students work on rhythmic and melodic dictation. Since some of the students in this class had never read music before, she had to keep it pretty simple. She gave them all the rhythms included in each excerpt. She sang or clapped through the entire thing and then broke it down measure by measure to make sure everyone was able to keep up. A lot of the students were able to dictate each of the melodic and rhythmic dictations. Overall, i liked the way this class was run because there were activities that reached students of all abilities and kept everyone engaged throughout.