Practicum 5 – ISCI 312 101 (In-Person Course)

On October 29th, 2021, I taught a lesson on “Symmetry in Music” as a guest instructor for ISCI 312 – Symmetry. Of the 57 students enrolled, ~38 students attended the class in-person, and 2 students attended via Zoom. For this lesson, I wanted to do as little lecturing as possible to maximize time for active learning and formative assessment in a group environment. To maximize the in-class time, I recorded a 14-minute pre-lesson lecture, where I provided them foundational materials (i.e., examples of cyclic groups in music and their symmetrical operations) and optional supplementary resources that would help them to successfully participate in the in-class activities and discussions.

Teaching this lesson was incredibly challenging (content-wise, logistically, and power-wise), which made it a good learning experience for me, but under stressful and somewhat undesirable circumstances which may have negatively impacted the students learning experience. For instance, I am not familiar with concepts in music, so I had to try to teach myself fundamental concepts in music theory so that I was able to link it to symmetry and communicate that knowledge to my students. When teaching, my understanding of the concepts was not as solid as I would have liked. This made me feel less confident in teaching the subject as I was unsure if there were gaps of fundamental knowledge when I was teaching (which there obviously was). For example, the instructor of the course would keep interjecting during my teaching, which I appreciated to a degree because we both want the students to succeed in understanding the materials, but it also bothered me because I wish he could have supported me more before I taught the lesson by ensuring that I had all the essential material needed to align with the LO’s that he wanted the students to achieve (which were quite vague). The combination of feeling less confident and having the instructor interject during my teaching made me feel like I lost the trust of the students and in turn their engagement with the course materials. I have to teach for this class again for my final practicum, so it’s frustrating because I feel like I have essentially lost the “power” in the class, and this loss of control and respect may make the students less motivated to learn from me because they may think that I am not qualified/competent enough to teach them what they are expected to learn. To ensure this does not happen again I will need to set up clear boundaries with the regular course instructor about how they will act while I teach in their classroom; and to regain the respect of the students, I will need to be more assertive and confident when instructing them.

A technological issue occurred when I was lecturing, where the laptop I was using froze ~2/3 of the way through the lesson. It was slightly frustrating because this happened right when I needed to communicate new background information to the students so they could successfully complete the next activity and the visual aids on my slides would have been incredibly helpful to prepare the students for it. Regardless, I had to improvise on the spot, where I decided to refer directly to their activity worksheet and teach concepts using the first question in the activity as a demonstration for us all to work together on. This course of action was successful as the students were able to understand the ideas that I communicated to them and complete the activity with minimal struggle. My biggest stress at the moment when the laptop crashed was not that I could get the students to move on to the next activity, but that this was another layer of my lesson not going to plan, and possibly leading to my students disengaging from the lesson activity and not trusting me.

Logistically, an issue that I think really impacted the student’s ability to learn and participate during the lesson was the fact that the pre-lesson material was not uploaded until 1:30 am on the day of the lesson; this was not enough time for most of the students to both recognize that materials have been uploaded and go over the material prior to the lesson (at the beginning of the lesson I assessed this by asking them if they were able to look over the materials posted). For this class I did not have the ability to upload materials on the Canvas course, so to prevent this from happening again (if I am a guest-lecturer) I will try to give the course instructor the materials I need to be distributed at least a week in advance so that they have some buffer time to upload the materials to Canvas. Regardless, to accommodate for this issue during class, I discussed some of my summary slides of the pre-lesson lecture slides in more detail than I originally intended to, and I reviewed the assessment questions related to the pre-lesson lecture materials in detail by getting students to attempt to answer the questions and then discussing the answers as a class.

Another issue I experienced was with respect to the content I taught. After the lesson, the instructor and I debriefed where they realized that the students were struggling with grasping some of the concepts I was trying to teach about because he had not yet taught them about cyclic groups to the degree that I was expecting to understand them. If I knew that the students lacked this understanding of cyclic groups, I would have either taught the students about them in general first before applying them to music theory or I would have removed cyclic groups entirely.

At the end of the lesson, I handed out my post-lesson surveys (which are how I am collecting data for my SoTL project). A few of the surveys indicated that the lesson seemed scrambled and made things confusing for the students, causing them to disengage. Another survey respondent said the “Check Your Understanding” activities they completed in class should only be for participation marks because the material was “hard”. In contrast to some of these students’ experiences, a couple of students indicated that they were fascinated by the lesson material, very engaged in the activities and that they wanted to do their final poster project inspired by topics in this lesson; it was nice to know that this lesson was not a lost cause.

From teaching this lesson, I learnt a lot of lessons, which I will summarize in this paragraph. If an instructor gives me sample slides for their lesson, I should not feel pressured to use what they have provided me with to create my lesson, unless clearly specified by the instructor. If I am to use particular slides, I need to make sure the purpose of these slides is clearly communicated to me so that I can align them with the lesson learning outcomes and properly teach the students what they are expected to learn. If I am collaborating on an activity with an instructor, I need to ensure they are willing to meet some of my needs (e.g., clear communication guidelines, posting what I ask of them on time to Canvas). When collaborating, I need to ensure that I have enough time to read over their work to double-check that what they have done aligns with the learning outcomes of the lesson and is worded in a way that is easy for the learners to understand.

If I were to do this lesson again under the same circumstances, I would make some major revisions to the first ½ of my lesson. For example, if the students had not learnt about cyclic groups yet (or, at least had practice working with them yet), I would have introduced such groups and provided some generic examples of them, and then applied them to music where the students could work on practice questions together. Teaching the students about the fundamentals of a concept before applying it to a topic, such as music theory, would have made it easier for the students to understand how to apply symmetrical operations to a more abstract concept. I would keep the second half of my lesson, which was an introduction to symmetry in sheet music and identifying frieze groups in sheet music, more or less the same, because (despite the technical issues) this activity was really successful (minimal confusion, everyone completed it in the allotted time) and I think it was an easy to understand example of how to apply the abstract concept (frieze groups) to a real-world example in concrete-space (sheet music).

In contrast to the statements above, If I were to do the lesson again knowing the students were unfamiliar with cyclic groups, I would have applied symmetry to music through concepts they had already been familiar with (i.e., 2-D point groups, group theory, and frieze groups) and had activities with respect to those concepts. This way I could have just got them to think about how to apply familiar concepts to music theory to keep their focus on the application of concepts instead of learning new concepts and immediately applying them under new circumstances in a single class, which can be overwhelming and lead students to disengage from the lesson (as reflected in the survey results I received).

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