(1) what went well?

(2) what are you working on? Or Why is this important

(3) What next? Or What do you have questions about?

Many things went well during this practicum. I was able to hit my priority 1 goals of being a good influence, a source of positive energy, and a caring and patient educator. I was well prepared ahead of time, my lesson plans didn’t require extensive revision by my Coaching Teacher (CT), and the conducting part of being a music teacher went much better than I expected. Conducting has always been something that terrifies me. Not only are you having to keep a consistent tempo, trying to keep the band with you, and remembering when to cue who where to come in, you have to be actively listening at all times to what the players are playing and analyzing what you hear. Do the flutes know all their notes? Why aren’t the alto saxes keeping tempo with me? Why out of 40 students are only eight playing right now? What just happened? Again, conducting is terrifying, but it went a lot better than I expected. I applied my CT’s advice right away, and each lesson I made strides of improvement. I thought my adaptability was a huge asset during this practicum, and it was the main reason why I was able to succeed. When I shared my stresses over the last formal observation with my CT in the last week, she looked at me like I was crazy and asked, “Are you honestly worried about failing?” The way she said it made it became clear to me that the only one who was worried about me failing here was me. She shared very positive feedback but also gave me lots of areas to grow moving forward. All in all, I feel very fortunate that this practicum went so well.

Some of those next steps that my CT and I decided upon together were to pursue any opportunities to workshop my conducting skills. We never stop learning, and every festival I may go to in the future, my abilities will come into question in the conducting department regardless of how much it improves. It’s just a very subjective area. As my CT explained to me, it’s just how it goes for band teachers. They’re not just workshopping your band, but they’re also observing you, the conductor. Other steps for me moving forward are resolving social conflicts between students. There was a memorable incident in one band class where I should have taken more time out of the class to talk to each student that were having issues with each other, rather than hearing the story once from each and then deciding on the swiftest solution: separation. Sometimes, the easiest solution for us it the most upsetting solution for a student, and that was a valuable lesson for me to learn. My CT said that I didn’t handle it poorly, but there was certainly room for improvement for next time. Another thing I will be working on is being more obvious about how I am incorporating the FPPL and Standard 9 in my practice to the students. While it is clear in my lesson plans how these ways of learning are embedded in my approach and thinking behind the lesson, it isn’t as obvious to the students as I think I can make it in the future. I think one of the things that would help me in this is having an actually dedicated music classroom. In it, FPPL can be left on the board, or cute laminated texts can be switched each day depending on the one we’re focusing on today. However, in the revolving Gym setting of Band 6/7 in five different elementary schools in which each school only got two slots a week, it was difficult to try to build in that kind of consistency. Some schools had a white board or chalk board and others didn’t. Some schools had a class in there already straight up until the changeover, and I had little time to try to write my FPPL on the board for the lesson that day as I tried to get the students to set up as fast as possible to maximize learning time. In addition to these three main things, I have many other little things to work on, but for the purposes of this post I will not list them all.

As for what’s next for me, I have many. My guiding question leaving last semester essentially boiled down to “What are the things that I need to do/know in order to succeed.” I like broad-ended questions. They leave the flexibility to adjust your focus when new information becomes available or circumstances change. In this regard, I think I really want to improve on how to talk to students to resolve issues better in the future. I’ve seen plenty of evidence of this in one of the teachers I’ve observed now through two practicums at one of the local high schools. This individual is very good at talking to the students as though they are human, but also manages to keep things fun and interesting even while politely demanding respect or attention. I feel like I improved my GROUP classroom management hugely during this practicum, but the one-on-one conversations and conflict resolutions are what I feel in that area are one of my weaker points right now.