It is my belief that to become a successful music educator you must have a thorough knowledge of music. As an undergraduate student at Virginia Tech, my education heavily focused on music history, theory, pedagogy, conducting, and performing. Through these classes and experiences I gained an extensive knowledge of music as a content area to apply in a classroom setting.
My first experience in a music classroom occured in the spring of my junior year in Elementary Methods. During this class I was given the opportunity to create and teach an Orff arrangement to my students at a local elementary school. The use of Orff techniques in a general music classroom is very common and is a great way to get your students making music! As you can see below, I used my knowledge of Orff techniques and musical knowledge gained from previous courses to create this arrangement.
The next opportunity I had to apply the knowledge I had aquired about arranging was for my orchestration class. Our final project in the class was to arrange a chorale for wind ensemble (image below). As you can see this arrangement is much more extensive than my Orff arrangement and I needed a much more in depth knowledge of each instrument in order to complete it. In order to have a successful arrangement I needed to understand the tendencies of each instrument and how they all blend together. In a music classroom you will typically not have perfect instrumentation and will need to be able to arrange a piece of music for the ensemble you do have. This project provided me the knowledge I need to be able to do that successfully.
An important skill in music education is being able to effectively convey how you want your ensemble to perform through conducting. This past fall I was enrolled in Graduate Conducting and was able to perform a Graduate Conducting Recital at the end of the semester. The ensemble was comprised of members of the University Symphonic Wind Ensemble, which gave me a great opportunity to rehearse and conduct a piece of music at a higher level. Without having to spend time fixing notes and rhythms I was able to focus heavily on my conducting. Below you can see a video of my conducting from the recital.
Lastly, below you will see an activity that I created for my students this Spring. I developed this lesson on Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 because my students would be seeing it in a few weeks and I felt that them being able to identify a few themes would be a way to keep their interest in such a long performance. As you can see in the listening guide below many questions are based on their previous knowledge of musical concepts, such as dynamics and articulation, which were concepts I was trying to reinforce. Below the listening guide you will see the lesson plan I developed for this activity. My students were able to follow the guide easily and also demonstrated their knowledge on musical concepts.