A Year In Review

As the final few days of the school come to a close and the chaos wanes, I can finally take a moment to reflect on the entire course of this year.  And as I look back, I see that I am a far better, more effective teacher than I was on day one of this school year.  The evidence of this is clear, as I think through the triumphs of my students and grade their final exams.  This has been a year of growth and rigorous learning for all of us.  I am thankful for their graciousness as I tried new techniques, tried new lessons, attempted new assessment methods, and planned more discourse.  There were growing pains during much of the "change," but in the end, when I look at the joy on their faces, hear the beautiful music they perform, watch them sight-read a new piece of music in minutes, and listen to their intelligent and academic discussions, I'm in awe of the amazing things these students have accomplished.  So here are the three things, I'd say are the biggest changes in my development as a teacher that led to this beautiful result.

1. It is worth the extra time to slow down and empower students by giving them opportunities to tell and show what they know or are learning. 
2. Music literacy skills are only maintained if they are worked on daily. 
3. Simplify, simplify, simplify! Seriously, you don't need to do it all today!

So there is it folks.  This list is obviously not the complete index of what I've learned this year (I'd need a least another 50 pages to list all of the learning and growth), but it is important to note that these particular elements really made an impact on student engagement and learning.  So I will count that as a win, and continue to strive to be a better educator each day.  

Coursework & Practice Reflection

Internship Performance Criteria 4 states “The teacher uses content area knowledge, learning standards, appropriate pedagogy and resources to design and deliver curricula and instruction to impact student learning.”  In other words, the teacher must plan and implement successful instructional methods and strategies. 

During this course, we walked through nine themes relating to content knowledge: 1) assessing prior knowledge 2) integrating student assets 3) teaching academic language 4) scaffolding 5) supporting 6) deepening 7) providing and responding to feedback 8) student reflection 9) teacher reflection. When I began the course, I believed I had a pretty good idea of how to assess prior knowledge, scaffold learning, and reflect on my own practices.  That said, the biggest areas of growth for me were in integrating student assets, supporting, deepening, feedback, and student reflection.  My classes definitely benefitted from my learning in this course as I provided more inquiry based instruction, meaningful feedback, and opportunities for student reflection.  One of the ways I implemented inquiry was by asking students to identify the weaknesses in their performance rather than pointing them out myself.  The students were able to practice academic language and classes consisted of more opportunities for student voice.  Students also felt more confident and competent when they were able to evaluate their own performance and they deepened their learning by thinking critically about how to improve our ensemble sound. 

Additionally providing more meaningful, specific, and timely verbal and written feedback for in class and on assignments students were given the support necessary to reflect on ways they could improve.  I also made a point to reinforce and support academic language when providing feedback.  For example, I may re-state a student’s comment using correct academic vocabulary or ask the student to restate his or her comment using academic language.  Though painful at first, this commitment to consistent use of academic language has made each student more active and confident participants in our classroom discourse.  

Finally, by differentiating elements of my lessons, I was able to support all the learners in my classroom.  For example, I had a student struggling with melodic dictation.  In order to support her, I worked would come by and sing her whatever melody  she had written on her staff measure-by-measure and then play the original melody again.  She was able to compare the two melodies and change the “wrong” notes by noticing whether the “right” note was higher or lower.  Eventually, after a few weeks she was able to sing the melody to herself and self-correct the wrong notes.

Clearly, it is important to incorporate all of these themes when planning and implementing instruction.

Concepts vs. Facts

The term "concept" and "fact" are often used as synonyms in our society.  However, concepts are abstract ideas that are generalized by specific criteria or evidence, whereas facts are simply bits of true information (Scheuerman, R.).  Concepts require inductive reasoning and inferences, while facts can be memorized just as they are.  This distinction is important to note as educators.  By knowing the difference between concepts and facts educators can teach with concept attainment and memorization models in order to deepen student learning and better inform instructional strategies (Joyce, 2015).  

The concept attainment model provides positive and negative examples of concepts and allows students to make inferences and hypotheses about what qualifies the concepts to be categorized this way.  Then students are encouraged to test these hypotheses by identifying additional unlabeled examples and generating their own examples.  The teacher then facilitates discussion by asking students to describe their thought processes (Joyce, 2015).  This model of teaching allows the educator to gain valuable insight into how their students process information and gives students the opportunity to practice inductive reasoning while categorizing and learning the attributes of new concepts. 

The memorization model focuses on creating associations between previous known information and new facts. Mnemonics, link systems, ridiculous association, and substitute-word systems are all strategies that aid in memorizing facts (Joyce, 2015).  By teaching facts in a way that allows students to create strong associations with sensory images or past experiences, students can better recall the information they learn.  It is also important to note the practicing this recall is essential because memorization takes repetition.  

Clearly, educators can help students learn and retain concepts and facts by practicing these models in their classrooms. 

Sources: 

*Joyce, B., Weil, M., & Calhoun, E. (2015). Models of Teaching. Boston: Pearson Education. Ed. 9.

*Scheuerman, R. (2017). EDU 6526: Survey of Instructional Strategies. (SIS Session 3 Lecture notes on Bloom’s Taxonomy).

General Inquiry Reflection

4.1 Demonstrating Knowledge of Content and Pedagogy. In order to demonstrate mastery of this program standard, a teacher must plan and implement lessons using a variety of pedagogical practices.  Figure 1 illustrates the relationships between planning, instruction, and assessment as it relates to student learning.

Figure 1: Cycle of Effective Teaching (EdTPA)

During this course, I learned how to create clear and measurable learning targets, scaffold and differentiate lessons, communicate high expectations, plan informal and formal assessments, ask open ended questions, and incorporate student voice and academic language in my lesson planning.  This new knowledge will help me better plan, instruct and assess my students this year.  

Before beginning this course, I was unsure how to differentiate lesson activities and provide learning support for the exceptional learners within my classes.  Now I am excited to go back through my school curriculum and design lessons that provide opportunities for students with a variety of abilities and styles.  I plan to utilize questioning, reflection, cooperative activities, multiple assessment formats, nonlinguistic assignments, and student-led discussion to keep my students engaged and active in their learning (Marzano, 2007).

*  Marzano, R. J. 2007. The Art and Science of Teaching. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD