Practicum - Sharing a Lesson

Recently at my practicum site I had the opportunity to work with the flute section on a J.P. Sousa March that features a very well known melody (well known maybe 20 years ago) but none of these students had ever heard the march let alone this solo flute part featured in it. My task was to introduce it to them and begin working with them on it. I had about 15 minutes and we were relegated to a room where there was standing room only, and where I could not move around easily, also with the lay out of the room (a storage locker really) I could not easily get the attention of all the students because some students had to stand behind other students to make room for all of us. My strategy was to briefly play it for them at a very slow tempo and then have them all play together as many times as I could in 15 minutes, while selecting various students from time to time to play a certain section by themselves.

From the moment we entered the room I was sidetracked by comments ranging from, "I don't like this, why do we have to play it?" to "flutes aren't supposed to play that high, why are we playing what should really be a piccolo part?" Out of the ten students, 4 of them made comments along these lines. There are no quick satisfying answers to these questions, and so I could only push forward and at least get them focused on trying to play the piece at the moment.

What worked for me was to have a student that I knew could play it, do so. That got everyone's attention, and even the students that were resistant at first gave it a greater effort. We played through it twice without any comments from me. Afterward, I noticed that there were 3 students of the 10 that clearly did not have the fingerings under their control and would not have been able to play it at that moment at any speed, so I enlisted the help of my 'complainers' to take the next 5 minutes to work with those students to write in fingerings so they would have the correct material to practice at home.

At this point we are about 10 minutes into the short session.

After this I had the group play together again. Then I asked someone I hadn't engaged yet to play a particular 4 measure section. This served as one of my checks on learning because then I asked the two students next to him to play together.

So 15 minutes is not a lot of time to work with 10 flute players who are learning a short solo section they've never really seen before, but as the minutes wore on I was able to assess the ability and motivation level of the individuals within the group. Collecting bits of data in this way helped me focus on the strengths of the students by asking them to be examples for the group, and to deflect/diffuse the poor attitude of a number of the other students by asking them to coach/mentor the few students that were struggling with simple things like the fingerings for common notes.

Had I not been paying attention, or had I let the initial comments from some dissatisfied students corrupt my intentions for the instructional period then I might've spent the entire time lecturing about why the piece was important to learn instead of letting the music speak for itself.

Were I to relive this session, I would have identified some key notes that have multiple fingering possibilities to avoid confusion right off the bat for my inexperienced players. I would have brought in my Ipad with a really awesome rendition of the piece cued up to the flute part so the students could have the full experience of what they are working towards, and I would not have had the full group playing all at once. I would have had students play in pairs, and would have kept things moving more quickly. Pacing is very important and I would like to get better at keeping the momentum.

My site supervisor asked how the session went afterwards, and just as I was about to tell him that I really didn't think we accomplished that much, one of the students that had said she didn't like the piece because it reminder her too much of circus music, came around the corner and said that the session was really helpful and that she felt like she got a lot out of it. Kinda made my day!