Activity 1 Feedback

Who

Classroom teacher

Date of Implementation: 3/30/22

Date of Feedback: 4/1/22

Needs/Goals: Needs that were expressed were; regular routine, working with students with differing levels of abilities, and transitions into activities

Blog:

Middle school students can be the most interesting to learn from at any level of teaching experience. The classroom teacher that implemented this activity was a substitute teacher that has worked with this group before but not often.  She described how the students were hesitant to participate in a new activity with someone they are less familiar with. There were a lot of comments from students that disagreed with doing something different and new  while their regular teacher was out. 

My experience so far has been that I have good activity ideas but the explanation has not been as clear as I want it to be. When I gave the activity plan to the classroom teacher to implement she had several questions and was unsure of how to implement the activity. In the future, I would provide a sample video or meet with the classroom teacher to verbally explain the activity. It has been a different experience to provide a music therapy based activity to someone with no music therapy experience. 

Some assumptions I made about this activity was that it would be easy to implement in a music class setting. I have realized that music educators do not necessarily think about music the same way as music therapists but that is the beauty in combining the two. I have learned that with this population the simpler the instructions the better. The classroom teacher mentioned there was a lot of down-time between giving instructions and the start of the activity. I think it could be improved by using less words in the instructions and more modeling. 

My knowledge and skills were interesting to notice while making this activity. I was able to pull from my experience in internship and previous classes when coming up with this activity. My annotated bibliography also helped me to think of how I can best support students with disabilities. Some gaps in my knowledge were the specifics on learning disabilities. Most of my experience with students were with similar disabilities but I have not had much experience with a wide variety of disabilities. 

My next steps are to simplify my instructions and learn more about a wider variety of disabilities. I want to make my next activity more applicable to students in the specific intended classroom.