PTE Reflection

​Overall, I think our groups teaching went smoothly. However, there were several things we could have improved on. When we created our lesson plan I think we wrote it to be effective when there were more people in the class, so when we actually got to teaching we switched up the second part of our lesson plan and instead of breaking off into individual groups to learn melody, harmony, and rhythm, we just taught everyone all at once. I think we used good rehearsal techniques because the other group didn’t have a hard time learning the introduction and the main melody. They picked up each part of the song really quickly.  We used the piano and a recording to help the students learn the song. I think playing the recording, singing it, then using the piano to figure out how to play on everyone’s instruments was a good way to sequence learning the song. It was effective because if someone was having trouble remembering the tune we could wind it back and play the recording. Something adaptive we used in our lesson was writing it out on the board so that the students who learn visually could have something to look at. Then because we have to continue our lesson next week we can just use this to review what we learned last week for those who are having trouble remembering what we talked about.  We continued doing this throughout the lesson. The second part of the lesson involved learning the melody.  I believed this part also went smoothly. The group didn’t have a hard time learning the tune, but they weren’t really feeling the music. We had them dance and move to the music without playing to get into the style of Funk. Then we added the instruments in again. I think this was affective because we addressed not only how to play the tune but also how to play in the style of the song.  The next portion of the lesson was learning the harmony and rhythm. I think this portion was not prepared enough. I know we could have spent more time before the lesson preparing the harmony and rhythm we were going to teach. I think we could also have spent more time listening to the song to become more comfortable with it. If we were more solid ourselves then it would have been easier for the other group to understand. I think some things we could have done more of when planning was how to involve Jon more throughout the lesson. Since he already had all of the stems sequenced on his Gameboy he mostly sat there while everyone else learned their parts. While we did have him play the Gameboy along with other people, there was nothing to do before that. I think something else we could have done was create an activity for the group to do after we learned the aspects of the song. For example, we could have allowed the group to improv in between the introduction and first verse. Or we could have started with the rhythm and harmony after learning the introduction and had them improv before we learned the main melody. Overall, I think our lesson ran smoothly, however, there was more we could have done to prepare and involve more of the group.
 
Feedback for the other group:
I really liked the other group’s lesson plan. I enjoyed how they explored the different aspects of a song and had student’s explain each one to the other instead of them just talking to us. I also liked how they introduced us to different parts of the song by playing some various tunes and having us pick out different aspects of the song. I believe this led into the rest of their lesson well. However, I do think they could have applied what they taught more and had us play some of what they were teaching us instead of just explaining it.