It's the end of the 2nd practicum , looking back, I feel really lucky for the opportunity of teaching both the primary and intermediate students rotary music. For a rotary music teacher, It's very common that you may teach the whole school and See every single classroom.
During this last week, the intermediate students have been working on their culminating task which is to improvise sound effects for the picture book Where The Wild Things Are. Overall the presentation went well. So far i was impressed by one really creative group with very organized and unique sound effects. I observed how that group worked together, at the beginning, they were not very organized and each member was just exploring sound effects on their own instruments and they weren't interacting or discussing with each other, so I thought they would be like the other groups, panicking the last minute and just roughly pull the presentation together, but during the 2nd class where they had about 25 minutes to work on their presentation, the group really worked together, they didn't talk much, but they were listening to sound effects that each other made and added /responded to the over all sound. The problem with other groups were mostly: struggling with time management and staying on task without going off topic.
Hi Yilin,
ReplyDeleteI assigned a group project to my grade 7s too. I had to make the groups too but some students just don't work well together. I also noticed some problems with group work. For example, they need constant reminders to stay on task. And in some groups one to two students would have do everything because the others won't do anything. So for some groups I had to give individual marks to students to be fair to students who did do the work.
Hi YiLin,
ReplyDeleteWhat a great culminating task -I love that the project combines music with a story / book.
I related to what you wrote about the challenge of staying on task during group work. You want to give your students an opportunity to work on projects in class, but what is an appropriate level or percentage of engagement for this? Even for us, as adults at OISE, it's hard to keep on task 100% of the time in group work. As teachers, I guess this is something we figure out as we gain more experience in classrooms.
See you next week!
Janice.
Hi janice, thanks for the reply.
DeleteSince it was rotary music class, I got to teach 8 different 7/8 classes, and they are all very unique, some classes you could tell has done more group work than others. For this assignment group work was weighted a bit more, but I still has to give them individual marks. And yes, as we gain more experience and know the students and how they work together , it would help us for the assessment.
Staying on task is always a challenge - this good be due to the age, the students, and sometimes because an event at the school.You have to decide sometimes - is staying on task in the best interest of the students.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it is not. Sometimes they have something on their mind that they need to discuss. Most of the time its just that students are easily distracted. You start to develop strategies especially teaching rotary music that assist you in getting their attention.