Activity 2 Feedback

Service-Learning Activity 2

1. Who you received feedback from:

   • Audio/Visual Tech from Sanders-Brown Center

2. Date of activity implementation and date of feedback:

   • Date of activity: 4/13/22

   • Date of feedback: 4/13/22

3. Briefly restate the needs or goal that you are striving to address 

The primary needs that I am striving to address are giving people a way to provide engagement for their loved ones, providing an option for respite for client’s care partners, increasing cognitive stimulation, providing opportunities for physical exercise and social connection,

4. Blog

Introduction

My third time filming with the Sanders-Brown Center on Aging was my second time filming an activity for my service-learning project. Since at this point I have had the opportunity to get to know the folks with whom I am working and have gotten a great amount of positive feedback from them already about what I have been doing, I began to feel less nervous. I also felt prepared for this intervention since I had lots of printed materials ready and I felt that I had a good handle on what I would need to do for this intervention. One of my reservations was it being a basic music lesson which was a type of intervention that I had not previously led.

Experience

My experience so far with my service learning has been a smooth one! I have been so grateful for the folks who I have had the opportunity to work with,  and I feel that I have accomplished quite a bit since starting this project. While with each step along the way, there have been things that I could improve, I feel that overall, I have been able to be effective in my design and implementation of activities.  What was cool about activity two is that I was able to get feedback as I was filming so that it could be implemented right away. This meant that I was able to improve the activity to be more suited to the needs of the folks at the Sanders-Brown Center in the moment, which I think was mostly due to the type of project that we are recording. 

Something else that made me feel especially successful in the second activity was securing space to film at the Niles Gallery. While it had been okay to film in my office, filming in that setting seemed much more conducive to the overall aesthetic of the video and allowed the filming team to have more space. I am happy that I was able to reserve the space for activity three as well!

Assumptions

When I was creating activity two, I had to make a couple of assumptions when it came to thinking about what content I wanted to include in the music lesson. Other than delivering a "basic music lesson" that would include the piano, I had not gotten much other instruction from the creative team. This gave me quite a bit of freedom to decide how I thought that it would be best to design the lesson, but also it meant that I had to use my critical thinking skills about what information folks with mild to moderate cognitive impairment who may not have had any previous musical experience would find most valuable in a beginning music lesson. Here are a few of the assumptions that I operated under when creating the activity:

• I needed to use royalty free music that is not under a copyright, as the people I was working with had mentioned this being ideal

• I needed to create some type of modified sheet music that would be accessible for beginning musicians who were also older adults with dementia

• I would need to provide clear and concise explanations about the different components of music such as rhythm, pitch, tempo, dynamics etc.

Despite all of these assumptions I had that ended up being correct when it came time to film, I quickly realized that what I thought I had planned did not fully align with what I had actually planned. This disjunction was highlighted gently and kindly to me by  the people who were filming. I was so thankful to have their expertise as the people who knew exactly who would be the recipients of these activities certainly were more keen on the needs than I was. While not everything could be solved in the moment, it still gave me a great picture of how to proceed to complete the activity and plan future activities.

Knowledge and Skills 

The biggest insight that I got while receiving feedback from the filming team was that the musical concepts that I was explaining needed to be further broken down. When I used words like "beat," "note" and "pitch," I was told that I probably needed to explain exactly what those terms meant in a way that would be meaningful to someone who had never heard them. Additionally, I was given the feedback to play through each of the pages of music that I had created while explaining exactly what I was doing. Some of the things that I think were successful included:

• My song choice - "Take Me Out to the Ball Game"

• Providing simple visuals that I created myself to go along with the concepts I was explaining

• Breaking the song down into smaller 8-measure sections and working through them each at a slow speed

Some of the things in my activity that I could have improved on included:

• The labels I made for the keys were sticky notes, so they kept falling off. I could have used a better label

• Thinking through better ways to explain some of the more "basic" musical concepts in an accessible way

• Providing examples for the different tempos and dynamics that I was explaining – this is something that I plan to provide to the filming team before our next activity!

I am so thankful that this project has not concluded yet as I still have the opportunity to make some of these necessary changes!

 Action

For my next activity, I want to be mindful of the feedback that I received during activity two. In addition to providing the additional materials that my partner site requested, I also want to make sure that when I am planning I fully think through all of the things that could make my activity more complex than I intend and in turn, simplify when necessary being aware of the needs of the population the activities are for.