Anna Shelow recently completed her Level 3 SongWorks Certification Teaching Practicum to become a SongWorks Certified Educator. Here she shares her reflections on how the experience has enriched her teaching practice.
I am extremely grateful for the experience of Level 3 SongWorks Certification. It is so rare as a music teacher to be able to discuss the fine details of music teaching. As stressful as it was to record and watch myself teach, I enjoyed being able to plan and discuss the lessons with my mentors, Sandy Murray and Molly Feigal. It is one thing to know that a teaching strategy is time-tested, but it is another to see things working in your own classroom. Going back to watch and discuss my lessons really highlighted what is working well and where I can improve. The best part of rewatching the lessons was seeing the little moments of joy that pop up. Seeing my students skipping, singing, smiling, laughing, and being playful with each other was heartwarming.
For my goals, I chose to focus on teaching melody, reducing teacher talk, and incorporating instruments more organically into my curriculum. I have always felt confident about teaching rhythm but was unsure about melody, so I spent less time with melody study. I had also taught ukuleles and guitars as units completely separate from the SongWorks-style singing and music literacy sequence that I use for most of the year. It was a nice change of pace for a few weeks, but it felt disjointed from the rest of my curriculum.
One thing that I have struggled with is letting the children lead the music. During the first years of Covid, we were not allowed to sing indoors, so we did a lot of instrument playing, rhythm study, and music history rather than singing. When we were able to start singing again, many of my students were hesitant because they had not sung in a group for a long time. Because of this, I had gotten in the habit of always starting songs and almost always singing with my students to help them with their confidence. In watching my lessons, I have noticed the difference it makes in my students’ voices when I hang back and let them sing. Since making this change, my students have been a lot more confident about their singing. I have noticed more students singing an answer to a question or choosing to sing a music map alone rather than with the class.
Going forward I will also continue to work on reducing teacher talk. A good portion of my lesson plan meetings with my mentor teachers were spent refining my directions down to 7 or fewer words (or no words at all). There was a clear difference in the engagement of the students when I had scripted the directions ahead of time. If I am distracted during a lesson, I tend to use more and more words in my directions. I can’t always give the same amount of time to planning every lesson as I did to the six lessons I recorded, but now I have a bank of phrases that I can use.
We had great conversations about the developmental steps towards hearing and notating music. The majority of my students are dyslexic and read below grade level. The roots of dyslexia are in sound processing differences, and we were able to see this come out in some of the lessons. My students sometimes struggled with identifying rhyming words in songs, echoing rhythms accurately, and figuring out how to play a melody on their own. We discussed the power of starting with a song game. The playful repetition of the whole song sets the foundation for studying parts of a song later. There were a few times that I moved from the introduction of a song to studying too quickly, and it was very clear from the students’ responses that it wasn’t in their ears yet. Analyzing the students’ incorrect answers gave me a lot of information about how they were thinking. For example, identifying rhyming words in a new song might seem easy, but not if the students are still processing the song as a whole instead of as individual words. Counting the “du da di’s” in a phrase only works if you are processing those syllables as one chunk. I will be more mindful to check that the students really have the song in their brains before studying parts in the future.
The mentorship I received during my Level 3 Certification experience has really helped me to step up and continue working to be a better teacher. I am in my 11th year of teaching, and it is easy to get stuck teaching things the same way. Thinking through my lessons in this amount of detail made me shake out of some old habits and continue working to be my best for my students.
