Student Teaching: My First Week!

 

Madeline Bame Branham

Week 1- January 8, 2021  

  Wow! I can't believe that my first week of student teaching is complete. I would rate this week's difficulty as a 3. I was pleasantly surprised by my comfort level when interacting with my students. Since I am teaching in a high school setting, I do have some new students this semester. However, I have many familiar faces and I have been pleased at how many of them I remember. More than that, I have been happy with how much I have gotten to know about them in just two days. It is essential that I establish a positive relationship with each class before I take over teaching full time. 

     This week, our primary goals have been to meet our new students, establish procedures and review foundational music literacy concepts (ta-ka-di-mi and solfege). I also planned and taught my first lesson segment our advanced class, symphonic chorale. This was be helpful for establishing a teaching relationship with them before I teach edTPA to their class. We also finalized and distributed our repertoire to students this week. With the sheet music in hand, I have been able to begin practicing both conducting and accompanying my students. I have prepared to play the piano with the pieces that are being covered in class next week. My Clinical Educator has unfortunately had unexpected absences this week, so I have had more teaching experience than we originally anticipated. While this has been a challenge, I do believe that it will benefit me in the coming weeks. Next week, I will build upon my experience from this week by enhancing my relationships with students, and by introducing the repertoire that we have prepared. We will build upon our teaching of music literacy concepts by incorporating them into the way that we teach the repertoire. My short term and long term goals are more aligned than ever because being in school every day has started to become my routine. Since we are aiming to have an outdoor concert in May, our long term goal is to prepare students for a spring concert. My short term goals are to prepare meaningful lessons that adhere to COVID guidelines while addressing the NCES. These goals are aligned because we are intentional to teach contextual understanding and musical literacy through the way that we teach the pieces for the spring concerts. 

    To boost productivity, I could have spent more time working on my edTPA planning commentary. Since my CE was unexpectedly absent, I have spent more time this week adapting and preparing content to teach students. This experience has been valuable, but I know that I need to spend some additional time this weekend catching up on edTPA. I have been apprehensive about beginning to take a more active role in cueing students to begin patching rhythms or singing solfege. I am very prepared in regard to my content knowledge, but I need to truly believe that and teach as such. I also want to be more confident so that I am a more commanding presence in my classroom. The first logical step for next week is to prioritize finishing my edTPA planning commentary so that I may then shift focus to planning for my first course takeover. I can shift the mental clutter of apprehension, preliminary assignments that have been submitted, and piano practice because I have accomplished those tasks this week. 

    This week, we sent out a student information survey with a variety of questions to students and we have begun to gather responses. Questions included contact information, interests, expectations for the class, and things that students wanted to share that give insight into their home situations. I have also examined the School Improvement Plan and have evaluated ways that I can support the school-wide goals in my classroom. 

    I demonstrated leadership in my classroom this week (NCTCS 1) by jumping in and teaching the content for my clinical educator when she unexpectedly had to leave. I was a respectful leader for my diverse students (NCTCS 2) by learning about their needs through conversations and student interest surveys. I have already learned about students' differing needs, beliefs, and interests and I have worked to embrace their diverse beliefs and adapt my teaching plans for the semester to benefit their needs. I have demonstrated content knowledge (NCTCS 3) when I recognized areas for content misconception with my sixth period class and created/taught a warm-up that addressed those areas and scaffolded the content. I taught students about ties, slurs, and syncopation in a warm-up and introduced examples before teaching challenging excerpts from the piece in the warm-up content. This helped students to grasp the content much quicker, and provided them with the foundational knowledge essential for reading music more independently. I facilitated learning for my students (NCTCS 4) by creating section groups to practice reading rhythm for a rhythmically challenging piece using ta-ka-di-mi. This investigative based way of learning rhythm was far more effective for music literacy learning.  I reflected on my practice (NCTCS 5) between cohort A and B and restructured the order of my sixth period lesson to provide scaffolded direct instruction before allowing students to investigate and apply knowledge in small groups. 

          I have begun to read through the portfolio elements and develop a plan for creating it this week. My clinical educator and I may need assistance from Ms. Suttle and Dr. Johnson this week in navigating strategies for my teaching and planning if her absence is prolonged. Otherwise, we are having a great time and I believe that I am off to a good start!