General Music Lesson Reflection

My assignment of giving a series of 8th grade general music lessons on Louis Armstrong has been more difficult than I initially expected. Most likely this is because of my thought process that Louis Armstrong, while an incredibly important person in music and our history, might not be especially relevant to our students. My aim is to find an overarching concept that allows me to incorporate his innovations in music with historical context without having it seems like a purely academic endeavor. I have been using many of the common anchors of the national music standards to facilitate discussion, and to generate questions and activities in an attempt to humanize Louis Armstrong, the artist.

The 10 minutes of the lesson that I presented was the introduction. I was worried somewhat that my ideas would be a little too abstract, and I think that played out. I don't think there was enough structure to the initial exercise, and I also forgot to explicitly tie it in with the Louis Armstrong quote. However I do think it could be augmented with a little more direction and feedback to speak more accurately to what I was intending. Perhaps using cards, magnets, or some kind of props, as suggested by Professor Schneider, would be beneficial. In general, I think I could have been a little more succinct with the lesson outline regarding what awaited the students. I like the idea of a long(ish) introduction. but with only three 40 minute periods, I'm afraid there wasn't enough concrete information and too much abstraction to justify the time spent. I think it would be better to jump in after the first common anchor idea into some history or possibly "set the scene" to add some context to our discussion.

I also forgot to ask what the class knew about Armstrong so as to generate some communal understanding of who we're talking about. I had that in my plan pretty early, but I accidentally skipped over it.

This run-through gave me a little better of an understanding of how to steer discussion, but also how much time can be taken up doing this when a hands on activity might have been better. It was observed that I "lost the class" at some point, and this is especially a problem in the introduction to a long lesson. I need to add more structure to these discussions and with structure comes easier assessment of the students. These self-observations, along with much of what I saw other students do with their lessons, have given me some idea of how to better approach my lesson for my final.