Showcase
When I began the MAED program with MSU, I had a different set of goals. At that point, I wanted to improve my teaching for both my private music lessons and my educational bird show. However, during the course of the program, I decided to put the bird show on hold, and focus on starting a family with my husband. So while I started out interested in teaching science and music, now I'm interested in teaching all subject areas, with an emphasis on music, as my husband and I plan to homeschool our children. So, I chose the following pieces and projects with this more holistic approach to education. These six projects display what I learned about teaching science, the motivation of learning, my own creative development, and how I further explored music and how to teach it.
Lesson Planning: Teaching Science
During this project, I volunteered in Wilkeson Elementary School with a fourth grade classroom. I came in once a week, and was supposed to teach them a lesson sequence on inquiry. This was one of many lessons I learned on how to appropriately plan lessons. I originally planned on this sequence taking about a month or two (4-8 meetings); it ended up taking all year, and the "Inquiry" part of it didn't even work out! While I do not consider it a very successful lesson sequence, I do consider it a successful learning experience, for both me and the students I was working with. The link above is for the website that went with the webquest. Here is my write-up of what I learned.
Motivation
Something that every teacher must contend with is the motivation of their students, and I am no exception. During my private music lessons, and I'm sure later on with my own children, I constantly have to work and rework lessons I am teaching to make them more motivating for my students. To that end, I include here two examples of what I learned about motivation.
To complete this analysis, I took one of my students (name changed for her privacy), and analyzed her motivational problems. What I found was a promising violin student with high goals, but lacking confidence. With what I learned from the course, I was able to design a motivational intervention to address the problem. Now, over a year later, this student is showing even more improvement.
This paper analyzes the practice of rewarding students, both the pros and the cons of using rewards. I also go into when and how best to use rewards. This assignment was particularly relevant to me, as a private teacher, as I am very frequently giving my students rewards. Everything from simple praise for working hard, a sticker for a piece well done, all the way to prizes for bigger accomplishments. Learning about how best to reward my students, and the pitfalls to watch out for, was very educational and helpful.
Creativity
As a music instructor, creativity is very important, but oddly, something I always struggled with. I consider myself a very analytical person, and enjoy the mathematics in music, as well as the technical part of playing. So I frequently look for the musical, or creative way, to work with my students and with the music. The following three examples show my efforts in this arena.
While taking "Creativity in Teaching and Learning," I was required to keep an online journal, in blog format (new entries on top), in Google Documents. I was supposed to post once a week on developments and improvements in my own creativity. At the end of the class, I took all of these entries and pared them down to the essence of my creative development, which is presented as more of a formal paper at the top of the document. However, all of my original entries are still there, and they are much more informal and relaxed.
Work of Art Project
In order to complete this project, I had to take something that was important to me, and make it more compelling. As a violin teacher, I LOVE Bach's unaccompanied Sonatas and Partitas, and they're very important. I took one of his Partitas that had the potential to be rather boring, and analyzed how I could take it from boring to compelling in just a few simple steps. Since I am constantly helping students prepare for performances and auditions, this process is very important, and making it explicit has been very helpful to me.
This assignment was for my Creativity in Teaching and Learning class, and we were asked to find patterns to teach with. A common pattern in music is the interval of the third, or a skip. It's the most common way to harmonize a part, and most music is built off it. So I wanted to experiment with something a little different, and instead composed a short piece built off the interval of a fourth.