Adrianne Tomlinson

MUED 480 - Student Teaching

30 January 2020
Video Reflection #2

After watching back a video of my instruction later in my first block of student teaching,

I was able to get a grasp of things that I have improved and things that I need to work on. At the

beginning of class, I began with warm ups as I always do to warm up the singing voice. I feel

that I have gotten a good grasp of how long to warm up students for and how to vary the warm

ups so that students are building different singing skills. Something that I took from my

comments from my university supervisor is that warm ups should be done a cappella as well

sometimes to build aural skills and remove the piano as a crutch for the students. In this video, I

was able to move away from the piano and establish the subsequent keys with my voice. This

allowed me to hear the students better and remove the piano barrier between us. Next, I moved

on to working on repertoire with the choir. We had three main songs that we were working on:

“Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning”, “Pirate Story” and “Rhythm of the Rain”. With

“Keep Your Lamps”, I did a good job of scaffolding the learning so that the students would be

able to sing the two parts on their own. First we all sang the second part which was the melody,

then I had them sing the second part while I sang part one, and then I broke them into their two

separate parts and sang with the part one group since their pitches were a new harmony. Next,

we sang along with the recording of the piece that had singing voices. Then, I changed the

recording to accompaniment only. This allowed me to gauge where the students were and what

parts of the song were trouble spots. For the “Pirate Story” piece, I played the accompaniment

and had the students run through the whole song. I could hear when students would lose focus if
my piano accompaniment wasn’t its best, but then I would bring them back in by singing along

with them as I played. Then we stopped and fixed some of the more difficult harmony sections

and ran through the piece again. As a result, I was able to hear improvement in the sections

students struggled with and ascertain what still needed to be polished before the piece would be

ready. In the third piece, “Rhythm of the Rain” we worked on learning the form and being able

to sing through from beginning to end. This worked my part singing skills because I would play

one part on the piano and sing another to support the students. Sometimes I could hear myself

make a mistake in the video or the students would not come in at the appropriate time because of

lack of good cues from me. This has taught me that I need to be more clear, but I know that I am

not afraid of having them do something again if it is not their best.