Middle School Band Observation

Clark Elford

It is clear that students are not engaged in the lesson for several reasons. To sum
them up, the teacher is boring to look at, boring to listen to, and has far too relaxed of a
pace. The teacher is sitting in a chair and not moving anything but his baton and left hand
(which are just doing a repetitive up/down motion). His non-verbal communication is
severely lacking in terms of energy, variety, and general quality. A metronome would be
just as effective at keeping the ensemble in time and just as expressive. His tone of voice
is relatively monotone, his pace of speaking is slow and stagnant, he does not change the
volume of his voice at any point, and his instruction is akin to running down a list of
activities. This verbal communication is highly ineffective because not only is the teacher
not engaging to listen to, but they give no feedback and make no effort to engage with
students in terms of content or inflection. All of this contributes to the languid pace that
the class seems to be moving. Though the lesson feels as if it is dragging, the pace
between repetitions is actually too fast. When the teacher begins counting off the students
to play Hot Cross Buns after instructing them to put their mouthpieces back in, there are
several students who are not ready and come in late. The lack of feedback or instruction
in the middle of this time contributes to the relaxed and slow feeling despite the time
actually being too short for students to adequately ready themselves. The students are
clearly not engaged with the lesson, many having relaxed posture. None of the students
are moving and seem almost robotic in their actions and playing. All of the factors listed
above lead to this lack of student engagement; the boredom in the class is palpable.

The teacher is typically asking questions that have one-word answers or could be
easily construed as a rhetorical question. They are often put in places where instruction
would be more effective and take less time. The questions are very surface-level and only
lead to shallow understanding of the music; the vast majority of questions deal with what
is seen on the page. The few questions that deal with listening are the previously-
mentioned one-word answer questions such as “could you hear the clarinets?”. There are
times when that specific question could send a valuable message to an ensemble and lead
to further discussion and instruction, but it is not used in that way in this situation. When
an open-ended question was asked, it was too open-ended. “What did you hear?” is a
vague question that could have potentially infinite answers and promotes meandering,
aimless statements, which is exactly what happened.

The closest thing to a cooperative learning strategy in this lesson is a brief class
discussion, which in reality was just having two students share their thoughts about what
they heard. Cooperative learning strategies not only allow students to demonstrate their
knowledge, but also get perspectives other than their own and the teacher’s. In sharing
their thoughts, they solidify their knowledge by having to put it into words and explain it
to others. Getting thoughts from others allows students to broaden their thinking and take
into account other strategies, ideas, and perspectives that they may not have considered
and may not take seriously when coming from a teacher.