Rebecca Negro
Student Teaching Portfolio
Fall 2023
Reflecting on Student Learning - “Where the Light Begins”
My students were able to learn through creating, performing, and assessing throughout
the span of these three lessons. Though a lot of what the students did in these lessons overlaps
with these three artistic processes, I feel that they got a full glimpse of all three through the series
of these lessons. The students created by learning the melody in the first lesson, and then
gradually learning the different part splits in the second and third lessons. They were not
presenting a finished product, but they were creating through trial and error. They also created
similarly as they applied the musical ideas that they came up with the class in the music. This
taught them to hear what they suggested, and saw whether or not they liked it. All responses
were positive to the class’ suggestions. The students performed as they finalized these musical
decisions and sung larger sections of the piece with those in mind. The students assessed their
own musical decisions as they tried them. They also had moments of discerning if they hear
musical errors on their end (this is shown multiple times in the video). Through this, the students
learned to aurally dictate their own errors and figure out what to change to make it sound right.
I feel that my musicianship was adequately displayed in these lessons, but there could be
much improvement, more in regards to my piano ability. There were stronger and weaker piano
playing moments in these lessons, and the weaker moments are not hard to discern. To improve
upon this, I will need to improve on my ability to multitask in rehearsal (playing, listening, and
teaching at the same time), and my general piano skills, which could always improve. I found
that as I taught, I got more confident results when I showed more clear and correct musicianship
to the students. They feed off of what I am giving them, musically. There were moments in the
video where I show vocal technique, especially as they are warming up. When I model it well,
they respond well, but when I do not model it for them, they have the tendency to go back to
their regular habits. Teaching takes a lot of energy, and that energy also must come out in quality
teaching on my end, so that they see the level of musicianship that is expected, and then they
meet that expectation in rehearsal.
The classroom environment created a more united promotion of learning, from what I
could observe. The ensemble I taught is an all soprano and alto ensemble (and all of which
identify as women). Over my musical career, I have found that same voiced ensembles bring a
deeper sense of unity than the traditional SATB choir. This created an open and safe space for
rehearsal. In the video, there were multiple people who shared their thoughts on how we could
make this piece more musical, and this environment gave them a safe space for them to share
their opinions.
As I reflect on these lessons, there are many areas in which I would improve this lesson
for a similar group of students. The first is related to the musical discussions we had. If I were to
teach this lesson again, I would want to make that time more structured by asking more
musically specific questions. These could include, “What can we do with the dynamics of this
piece?”, “What is this piece about as you read the poem?”, and “When the three parts are split, is
there a part that should be louder in dynamic than everyone else?” These questions could create a
more clear direction into how the musical decisions could be made by the students. I could even
have them prepare the answers to these questions before rehearsal so that students could have
more time to think, and then more opinions could be shared. Another way that I could improve
this lesson is creating a more clear assessment (that is also communicated clearly). In the video, I
had to change my assessment due to the lack of time that I had remaining in the third rehearsal. I
wish I had made the assessment clearer and even potentially put it in writing, so that they could
see it that way. This way, they could have prepared more intentionally for the assessment, and
then they could have had higher scores.
I learned a lot from this experience, and I appreciate having the opportunity to learn and
grow from this as I prepare this lesson and beyond for the future.
