Brandon Haskett
PDP #2
How to give comments without
letting the class get off task
Once I got into this project, I realized that if I was going to be able to maintain order while giving comments, I would have to rely somewhat, but not solely on student leadership. While this student leadership doesn’t come overnight, and ownership of work is a hard concept, by reinforcing the concepts below consistently students will begin leading themselves in some respects.
Ways to establish self-discipline and ownership for students
-Make it the students’ organization
-music making is a group activity in the classroom so let them have ownership of their work(if they know it’s their work then they’ll care a lot more about their friend next to them who is disrupting rehearsal)
-Have students help is setting up classroom rules and consequences, as well as rewards
-if they help set the rules they can not very well gripe about them (although they will still try)
-Make the students realize that every one of them is absolutely essential for the
organization
-it is easy for a student to not feel important if there are 80 other students
in class with them; it is essential for educators to make students realize that they are all important and the organization can use their I abilities in many ways(class officers)
Assuming the students are carrying out their part in classroom management, here are some suggestions which I obtained from either the MENC website, Prof. England, Jim DeCaro, Tom Cox, Brian Grenadier(Wheeler Middle School/High School), or this class which will aid in comment giving during rehearsals
1. Make comments direct, specific, and concise. The less time you take to make comments the less time there is for talking to start.
2. Save overly technical problems for sectional work.
3. Know your fingerings. If you are fumbling through a chart that takes up time, and allows for conversation.
4. Know the music. Don’t fumble through the score, know it! If you can find the measure or don’t know the form, how are you going to really help your students.
5. Keep all of the percussionists busy. Students sitting with nothing to do can be a really bad idea, ESPECIALLY WITH PERCUSSIONISTS!!!
6. Change the routine. If you keep the class more interesting the students are less likely to get bored.
7. Don’t storytell. It has nothing to do with rehearsal and only gets your students off track.
8. Give compliments to your students. If students feel like they are doing something well, then they will be more likely to enjoy class and behave better.
9. Let students know of your expectations of the behavior during rehearsals
10. All of these pretty much fall under this category, but if you respect your students, then they will in turn respect you as the educator.
Websites on this topic
http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/resources/staffpages/shirk/k12.music.html
-website contains many links to useful pages
-has some useful information and articles
http://www.education-world.com
-provides a search engine for musical topics that are pretty handy
While these websites were somewhat helpful, and there are listservs that can be used to obtain advice, I found the best way to obtain the information listed above was just to observe and ask questions of people who have taught for a long time.