I’m sort of proud of the way my peer teaching lesson went. It was a significant improvement from my first ever lessons, where I was very disorganized because I didn’t write down my goals. This time, I wrote down my goals: check students on their ability to sight read, give students vocabulary to discuss tone and style, and to begin the process of learning a new piece of music with my students. I organized exactly how I was going to do that too, going from easy confidence builders (long tone warm-ups) to something intense and new (performing 8 bars from a new piece with a complex rhythm).
My main strategy was to let students guess at what I was talking about, and then either congratulate them on a perfect answer, or explain how they were close but not quite right. This gave students the opportunity to engage throughout the entire class period, and it gave me a chance to both assess student understanding and keep myself from spiraling on a tangent.
We worked our way up to performing by first just exploring what tone was, listening to a great example by Pavarotti. Then we did our warm-up, long tones first because that’s something everyone can do, and we paid special attention to tone over everything else. Then, we tried the warm-up with a new rhythm that the students hadn’t seen before. The rhythm was pulled directly from the piece we were learning, which I think was a pretty smart move. That way students have extra reps on the rhythm without even realizing that they’re working so hard. I had students try to sight read the rhythm, which was fun for everyone involved; then we played the scale, repeating the rhythm on every note for a total of 8 repetitions before we even looked at the piece. Then we looked at the piece, and students nailed the rhythm on the first try! I was very happy with that, but we lost a little bit of the warmth of tone that I was going for. So we ran it again, and it went very well.
The next time I give a lesson on tone, I will definitely try to model what I’m asking for more. We had the Pavarotti model to go off of, but a recording is no substitute for a real life musical experience. I would also play the long tones with my students, both to warm me up for the day’s practice and to give the students a sound to match and blend to. I might sing the tricky rhythm while conducting the piece if we were in person, but as it stands I think letting students use their own metronome was a much better strategy over zoom because it avoids any sync issues.