As the semester is slowly coming to end and our final teaching lesson at Fee’s Middle School has already past, reflecting on my progress in teaching is a must to end the semester! To state first, I have never seen such an improvement in anything I have ever done until this semester here in this very class. From day 1, although terrified at looking into our future plans in the course, I knew my experiences would be one to hold on to and take into future use. With that being said, let us now look back on my teaching progression and see exactly how much I’ve changed!

Backing up into one of our very first lessons, I have decided to bring forth the Do IT! lesson we all taught with our partners. Although we are supposed to reflect on one of the very first lessons from the semester, I choose this specific one for two reasons:  I felt I taught much more individually than compared to doing a group lesson (such as the brass lesson we started off with) and I felt I engaged more with the “students” and had a bigger chance of incorporating my own style of teaching in this specific lesson than I did with the FLSLLL lesson. Looking back at the Do It! lesson, overall, I really liked how Courtney (my partner) and I set up our lesson plan. I thought the steps we used in teaching “Amazing Grace” was a great way at teaching a song with the FLSLLL steps, while still including our own individual teaching aspects. Looking back at what I would change in my lesson, I don’t feel like I connected as much with the “students” as I would have liked. My lesson seemed unorganized and almost fearful, as if I was nervous the entire time and was trying to remember what came next. I didn’t give a tempo when having the “students” mimic me when playing certain rhythms, and continued to mess up, which I noticed from my facial expressions and a few short responses to myself that came through the video.

            Connecting this to my first two videos in preparation for our final teaching at Fee’s, I’ve noticed that many of my habits I had with the Do It! lesson are still noticeable in my teaching with the ensemble during my Pueblo lesson. With that in mind, I worked hard and made it a goal to take a few steps forward in releasing those bad habits and instead, replacing them with good ones such as preparing long in advanced with my lesson (knowing it back and forth) and, as many of us know the phrase, “faking it until you make”. Take a look at a clip from my final video at Fee’s Middle School and take into account what you see.

(4:55 – 7:22)

*Due to the safety and privacy of previous students, all photographs and video recordings have been graciously taken down as of August 4th, 2015. Please contact the creator personally to grant access if desired to view independently.*

Title of Video: Angelica Fees Final

            Keeping in mind my goals and expectations of myself while watching the clip, I’ve noticed that almost everything I had done, in some form or fashion, was something I received feedback on in all of my individual lessons! For example, the clip begins on me having the students who are not participating in playing the section asked to wind pattern. During one of my feedbacks, Nathan was the one who pointed out having me ask the teacher what she has them do in regards to wind patterning or fingering their instrument. Mrs. DuPlessis stated that they finger along. Nathan also made a comment about standing off the podium to better engage with the students, so later on in my lesson I stepped away from the podium and the music (since I knew my lesson from heart). This simple action caused my lesson to be much more interactive and focused compared to staring down at my music like I had done in the practice runs of the same lesson. Another aspect that I tried to gain a positive outlook on was changing my habit of ONLY giving good remarks (such as “awesome!” or “good job!”) to giving specific feedback instead. For example, there’s a point in the clip where I give feedback to the percussionist regarding accents and putting more weight into the stick/drum to bring the articulations out. I also gave a positive remark followed by feedback to the brass, resulting with a demonstration of how I wanted a certain rhythm to be accented and then “crescendo-ed” shortly after. In the short clip, I also questioned my students to make sure they were staying attentive while also dictating how much they knew (to determine what I needed to focus on or turn to in my lesson). Trying to be as clear as possible in my instructions and confident was much harder than expected, but after watching my video, I felt like I did fairly well compared to the first lessons taught at the beginning of the semester. Shockingly, it seemed like I knew what I was doing for once! Lastly, the one thing I aimed at progressing on was my pacing. When I first watched the entire video, I was a little upset that I still didn’t finish my lesson like planned. Then, I looked at how long my video recording was up to the time I stopped and noticed it was just shy of 10 minutes. With just a few more minutes in mind that I was expecting on having, my lesson would have ended up successful in terms of my number one goal: pacing!

            All in all, looking at how much work has been accomplished over this semester and how much progress I consider I have made in the past 4 months, I say this semester has been a definite home run.  As Colin Powell has once said, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure”.