Teaching Recording Self-Assessment Reflection.

For my Jazz Band lesson, we worked on writing out chords. Students recently had a test on this

subject and about half the class didn’t do very well so I decided it would be beneficial to spend time to

review the information again and allow students to take the test again if they wanted to. Most of the

issues with the chords was that students don’t know all their major and minor scales. Instead of trying to

memorize scale by scale, I used the order of flats and sharps to help students have a way to write out

their scales. This was helpful to students having a little trick to be able to figure out scales based on the

order of sharps and flats. We went through every scale and practiced going between flat and sharp

scales. During this part of the lesson, the students were very engaged and asking questions at the

beginning of it, but I felt like I lost students towards the end. I think that finding a way to keep students

more active during this would be great to making sure everyone is still on board with the material. For

the next part of the lesson, we practiced writing out the notes for different chords. I think that this went

well because we could highlight the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th of each chord based on the scale that they had

written out. Students were all involved with this part of the lesson and were helping each other out with

different questions. I think that overall, this lesson went well. I was comfortable with the material and

able to help students with any questions they had. If I had the opportunity to teach this lesson again, I

would make it much more engaging for students. I did not think that students would “check out” so fast

and I wanted to be able to set everyone up to do well on the test re-take next class. Another thing that I

would do different would be to have students put their music stands away and write on a

notebook/folder so that I could keep students off their phones. This was a big issue because students

would not be paying attention at all, and I would call on them and we would spend a lot of extra time

starting back at the beginning of learning the material. I am comfortable with asking students to get off

their phones, but I am not as comfortable taking them because I am not their actual teacher, so I am still

continuing to improve on being a little bit more strict with phones when it comes to class time.