Evaluation of in class peer teaching

Goals: my goals for the lesson was to have the students be able to audiate and identify solfege syllables while reading and singing music, both familiar and unfamiliar to them.

Activities: I started off with a vocal warm up with following call an response of some small patterns of solfege syllables and hand signals. I did this to warm up their ear and familiarize them with where each syllable fell. I also did some interval training and kept in mind the little songs I had planned for later, and made sure to include all intervals that would come up in the remainder of the lesson. Next I took them to the board and we did some more exercises, just this time turning solfege into readable notes, using the scale and some simple songs. This section was much more interactive for the students because it was there job to figure out the solfege. My teaching strategy here was by having them internalize the information, they would learn faster, as opposed to me just speaking the information at them. I find this method to be very affective.

Outcomes: the students did achieve what I wanted them to achieve, but I think that was largely due to the fact that they are college music students. I think if I was to actually  teach my lesson to sixth graders I would go much slower (with the hypothetical assumption that I would have more than ten minutes in a real life situation), and supplement the lesson with cute games and solfege songs. I could tell that my lesson was successful because when I turned the tables and asked them to internalize the solfege to twinkle twinkle little star and tell me what it is, they were able to do it successfully.

What would be different: If I had to do my teaching episode over again, I think I would restructure the plan a bit and make it more introductory, as opposed to comprehensive. I would spend more time doing the solfege call and response game to help beter internalize the pitches. I would also slow the lesson down, because in retrospect, I seemed to have thrown the students a lot of information in a short period of time. While college students handled it easily, sixth graders probably would not have.