Impact on Student Learning Project Reflection

For my project, I chose to take a week to teach my students about accidentals and key
signatures. I planned to spend a brief period of time at the beginning of each class to teach about what
key signatures and accidentals are, where to find them, and how to identify both sharp and flat key
signatures. I started by administering a pre-test to assess where they were with their knowledge of key
signatures and accidentals before we began; doing this allowed me to see where individuals struggled
and where the class struggled as a whole. After this I began to teach from my lesson plans, and most of
the students seemed to be engaged at the beginning while we reviewed sharp, flat, and natural signs. I
made sure to let students who were familiar with the material define and explain concepts to the class
rather than teach everything myself to keep the more advanced students from getting bored, and I also
made sure to use a variety of teaching modes to include all types of learners.

Once we moved on to defining key signatures and the Order of Flats, students became more
confused than I had anticipated, and class moved slower than I expected it to. Most of the students
were very engaged in this lesson, and they were doing well during informal assessments. I made sure to
encourage question-asking and to have both solo and full-class responses for examples provided. I
learned that the percussionists didn’t know how to read the lines of the treble and/or bass clef, so they
were confused about the majority of what was covered in this lesson. At this point I realized I should
have taken more time at the beginning of the lesson to review the lines and spaces of the bass and
treble staffs to prepare for this lesson. I took some time to review with them, but it was challenging to
try to learn line and space names as well as key signatures at the same time. A part of my lesson was
having students work in groups to come up with mnemonics for the Order of Flats, so learning that
mnemonic on top of the others for the staves was very challenging. I made sure to work with these
students one-on-one during class while the others were working on something else to familiarize them
with the names of lines and spaces, and then when they were comfortable with that I retaught them the
Order of Flats. At the end of the day, I talked with Major Corey about how to adjust my teaching to
include everyone, and he recommended that I should stray away from overexplaining the topics and to
keep my definitions clear and concise.

In the next lesson, I made sure to review the concepts we had gone over before and to
informally assess what they remember and what they don’t. This took much longer than I had
anticipated, and we spent more than double the time I had planned on this review. I made sure to go
back and review everything we had gone over using very specific definitions and explanations, but some
students were able to recall a lot of the information where some couldn’t recall any at all. I asked them
if there was anything they wanted me to do more or less of to better prepare them for the post-test,
and many of them were surprised that there was even going to be a test. I had one student tell me, “I’m
not going to lie, I never really pay attention in class unless I know it’s going to be on a test.” I wasn’t sure
how to react to this in the moment, but I did realize that I needed to create more interactive content
that they have to all do individually. I also realized that I should have made the material more fun and
age appropriate; my material was fairly dry and standard.

The next lesson I did started with a review of everything we had learned, and I made sure to
specifically ask from students I knew were struggling. I didn’t want to put them on the spot, so I made
sure to get their attention, explain exactly what to do, and then have them answer an example on their
own. After reviewing everything one more time, I had them label a piece of paper 1-10 and gave them
10 examples of key signatures to find. After they completed this, I checked and graded everyone’s
answers and then reviewed them all again as a class. I noticed that many students were having some
trouble with labeling sharp key signatures with unnecessary sharp signs (A#, E#, etc.) After addressing
this, I let students who got answers correct explain what they got and why for each question and made
sure to use both the staff and the Order of Sharps/Flats as well as different colors to explain. I also made
sure to let the class know I would be posting a study guide they could access through Google Classrooms
and to bring in questions they had next class.

Before administering the post test, I allowed students some time to ask any final questions they
had about finding key signatures. After clearing up some confusion, I presented a large image of a piano
on the Smart Board to supplement the smaller one on their quiz, and I labelled the white keys only
which Major Corey suggested that I do that morning. After assessing the post-test, each and every
student made significant improvement in understanding how to find key signatures and accidentals. I
noticed that there was still an average confusion about sharp key signatures from the results, so I know I
will need to find a better way to approach that in the future.

On average, students scored 44% higher on the post-test (~81%) than they did the pre-test
(~38%), so there was significant improvement in understanding key signature and accidentals. Although
students did learn from this set of lessons, there are many things I would do differently. I would start off
much slower and allow more time to understand concept; the way I set this up, I ultimately rushed
students into understanding the topic rather than helping them take time to conceptualize it. I would
also use more example materials from works they’re more familiar with. I also learned that I need to be
clear about when assessments are happening, and that to prevent students from only learning for the
sake of test-taking by including more interactive and age-appropriate material such as games like
Kahoot, Jeopardy, and other informal assessment tools.