I compiled all my lessons plans and documents for final submission. I put everything onto one document with everything relevant to my final product.
This week, I started drafting the final writing pieces. After finishing, I was able to revise and edit.
This week, I put my finishing touches on the lesson plans and started planning out the Cover Letter & General Practices sections.
This week, I got the chance to briefly meet with Dr. Hess and get some feedback! She loved my work, and mentioned that for formatting sake, I could move the Learning Targets around to show which step of the agenda they aligned with. Afterwards, she sent me what she has also been working on in the past year, which was also a curriculum accompanied with lesson plans.
As the first week of quarter 4, I spent more time working with my lesson plans, mainly focusing on those for East Asia and Classical Music.
As the last week of Quarter 3, I updated my website with the current weekly documentation, any relevant work and associated rubrics, the works cited, and continued strenuously working on my lesson plans, which would soon be brought to the eyes of my community connections for feedback.
This week, I worked on plans for the Caribbean and drafted approaches for various other styles of music or areas around the world.
I took up lesson plans and my first one was writing a multi-day lesson for Music From the Harlem Renaissance. I did research and put together activities and ideas for repertoire!
We realized that instead of writing a unit for the current curriculum, the main problem would be that my project wouldn't attack the core issues of the current curriculum, but rather putting bandages on it. In order for this to work, diversity and representation needs to be an essential part of the curriculum—it can't be token. Hence, we decided to write lesson plans teachers can use. I based it off the assemblages I currently had and took it from there.
I set up an interview with my own orchestra teacher, Ms. Bridget Haines, who is passionate about including social justice in our orchestra classroom. I took detailed notes and a voice recording of the interview and we mainly discusses why this work was crucially, and more importantly, how she approached it, especially being a first-year teacher. We explored what worked, what didn't work, and the ambiguous; this interview was really helpful as it gave me ideas for what I would be doing in the future—lesson plans.
I settled on answers for last week's questions and got to work creating assemblages, which are groups of repertoire choices accompanied with resources and explanations.
This week was mainly focused on debriefing on the focus groups with my advisor and figuring out what to do from there. Key decisions had to be made—I now knew what I wanted and what the students wanted. How could I tailor my final products to meet their needs? We had discussions on the standards, current curriculum maps, and how to approach the lack of representation.
This week, I had two sessions chatting with students! I took detailed notes in both and a full voice recording of the conversations. It was very insightful and helpful to hear the perspectives of fellow students.
I set up the logistical parts of the focus group, including the room, the groups, etc.....
After the mid-year presentation, I opened Quarter 3 with a reflection on it and submitted it. I also sent out emails to those students interested in the focus groups and waited for responses.
As the last week of Quarter 2, I updated my website with the current weekly documentation, any relevant work and associated rubrics, my personal resumé, finished up all my research, and worked on my second Q2 reflection.
Presentation time! This week, I presented to an FHS teacher and a group of fellow peers also taking Capstone. It was great to get some feedback from others and listen to students' Capstone project ideas and progress!
During this week, I continued heavily working on my mid-year presentation. I continued to practice and revise my presentation, and I moved the skeletal slide content into the final slide template. I put the finishing touches and finalized my speaker notes.
During this time, I started organizing my data using a spreadsheet in order to make sense of the numbers! I also looked through some of the written feedback students had written me. Then, I started preparing for my Capstone Mid-year presentation! I worked on some skeletal slides and began drafting my speaker notes!
Over the Winter Break, I continued getting more responses on my survey and I began looking through another resource for research that my advisor gave me—Critical Issues in Music Education. I read through the first chapter and took notes!
Here started Data Collection week! I was also fortunate to publicly talk about it and advertise my survey to my choir class, so I got a lot of great responses from there. I also began brainstorming for my Capstone Mid-Year presentation after taking a look at the requirements and what the committee was looking for.
I worked on revising my survey to make sure that the questions were worded correctly and were organized well. We did also have a bit of confusion as to how to collect the demographic information, which led into a bigger discussion to if the way the US Census does it is fully accurate. Regardless, we settled this by making the demographic questions short answer so respondents can fill it out in whichever way they were comfortable with. After working on this, I reached out to the music teachers to ask if they can post it on their classrooms!
This week, I worked on forming the survey questions for the questionnaire I would put out to all the students currently in the FHS music department.
I dove into my Quarter 2 research by starting with the Double Consciousness Theory and then found other resources, such as a Ted Talk and an intriguing short fiction by Langston Hughes about musical double consciousness.
During this week, I took the time to reflect back on my original goals of my project and what I've done so far to re-evaluate the direction I'm going in and what my next steps would be. I created a mini presentation detailing specifics about my final goal and what my Quarter 2 research would be focused on, along with continuing to reach out to community connections. This mini-presentation hence served as one of my two required Q2 reflections.
Here, I finished up the majority of my first section of research and updated my digital portfolio with pictures, all related documents, and my weekly log.
This week, I mainly worked through my two quarter reflections - one for the Community Outreach Event and the other on time management.
I started looking through my sources, namely the two books, and chose which chapters I wanted to focus on to research.
On Monday, I was at a BOE meeting and met a new community connection, Jackie Harris-Stone, while chatting after the event! This was also the week where I met with Dr. Hess for the first time! The meeting went very well (refer to Reflection #1 for more detail) and afterwards, I sent a formal "thank you" email along with a request to be my mentor for this project. She agreed!
This week was spent preparing for the upcoming community connection outreach event with Dr. Hess! My advisor and I met to research her work and prepare questions of discussion.
Most of my time was spent finishing up the design plan, namely the "Plan for Completion" section - which took the longest. I was also able to chat with Ms. Hettiarachchi to also give me feedback and ideas for my design plan, and she sent me contacts for two UCONN Graduate students I could reach out to!
This week was mainly spent workshopping through various sections on the design plan, including the driving question, learning targets, audiences, etc.... I would work on it myself and then direct any questions or requests for feedback to my advisor. I also sent a professional email to two community connections with requests to meet - one responded yes!
During this week, I was recovering from my surgery and hence was not able to work on my project. However, I did meet with my advisor to discuss the design plan so I could work towards finishing that document over the next two weeks.
Due to extenuating circumstances, I was not in attendance at school nor doing my schoolwork as I was getting surgery done.
I met with my advisor, Ms. Carrozza, for the first time and I loosely described what I wanted to do. I knew what I wanted to research, but during this time, we talked a lot about what I wanted my final product to be. I decided on writing new units for a curriculum and creating a resource bank for music educators.