Emily Werner

Dr. Dabback

MUED 373

5/10/22

Professional Reflection

Reflecting on my time in the music education program at JMU is striking. I have grown

and changed both personally and professionally because of my experiences, but also through

outside experiences.

Obviously the COVID pandemic was a massive part of my college experience and I am

grateful for the space that it forced me to take and the lessons that I learned during and because

of it. The pandemic caused me to take the 2020-2021 school year off to work and teach lessons.

As someone who finds a lot of identity in academic validation, it is always important for me to

take time to discover who I am without quantitative descriptions like a GPA. I also enjoyed

being able to take the time to build a small studio and put the ideas I had been learning about for

two years into practice. I taught violin, ukulele, and piano lessons to students from the ages of 6-

12 and it was so interesting to get immediate feedback about what worked and what did not. In

one case, in particular, I taught piano to six year old twins who had very distinct personalities. It

was so fascinating to see how a technique that worked well in the first lesson did not make sense

for the second. My experience teaching privately gave me a much better perspective entering my

final year at JMU and I highly recommend that all music education students find ways to teach

while they are going through the program.

I have grown a lot through the music education program as well. One thing that really

stood out to me as I went back and watched some videos of myself from my sophomore year was
how many unnecessary words I used. This is something that I am definitely still working on, but

I had not realized how much worse I used to be. This helps with classroom management because

if a student knows they do not need to listen to most of the words that you say then they will be

much more likely to tune you out, but if they know that you are saying concise and relevant

information they will pay more attention.

Another thing that has improved during my time in the music education program is the

way I write lesson plans. My old lesson plans had a lot of redundant information and did not

wind forward or backward. I am thankful for my experiences with Dr. Hammel who taught us to

look out for every student in the class and find ways to adapt to all of them. When I first learned

about the concept of winding, I was very overwhelmed and did not think it would be feasible. Dr.

Hammel helped us think of examples that make it work and I have begun to use these ideas in

my own lessons with good results.