May 22, 2009
week 8
CNCA has fallen off the face of my teaching earth. They have been on field trips/ in testing with different dance schedules for the past several weeks, and it does not look likely that I will be able to implement any of my units or lesson plans into their curriculum before the symposium/ end of the year.
At GCS this week, the big excitement was that the power went off in the studio I was teaching in during the class! This is an underground studio, devoid of windows, which made for a very interesting several minutes. The building manager brought down a flash light until the back-up generators were able to fire up, however it was quite the scene. Chippy and I had the students retrieve their shoes one by one to ensure safety, however once they had been lined up appropriately, there were only 10 minutes of class left, which we used to calm down hysteria that had begun in the pitch darkness.
A high point was that one of the students referenced the Native American tale I had told about Crow bringing the light to them in the far north– she said “This is just like the Native Americans waiting for the sun!” Which I was thrilled about.
I also observed the “Company”s pieces and have video recordings of each of the 2 pieces which I will upload as soon as I figure out how! I will share them tomorrow in class.
May 15, 2009
week 7
Teaching dissapointment this week; CNCA is still working on a different testing schedule which conflicts with my classes here at UCLA, and GCS was also on a different testing schedule this week. This was quite fortuitous for this week because I have a stress fracture and had doctors appointments at odd times throught the week.
Next week I will be back at CNCA AND GCS which will be nice, and hopefully I will be out of this heinous boot monstrosity im trapped in.
For the symposium, I have not decided what to present on YET. I will be either presenting on the success GCS has had with implementing a dance curriculum for all grades every day, or if I will focus on my own experience over the past two years, and howI will continue my teaching experience in the GCS community next year with my senior honors project in the WAC department. I am anticipating some interesting points for both of these topics, and I am going to speak with Amy about both this afternoon. Keep you informed! I am thinking about focusing on integrated curricula in either presentation as a central theme.
May 7, 2009
week 6
This Monday I was unable to teach at CNCA, due to California state testing which is an ongoing process for the next two weeks. Their dance time was rescheduled to a time I was unable to come and participate. Hopefully I will be back at CNCA next week, and week 8 begin a mini, 3 week unit, perhaps on Yoga. As the school year winds down and their energy gets higher and attention spans shrink, I am not sure if this will be possible. I plan on speaking to Kris this weekend to talk about ideas I can utilize and pull from for my mini-unit. Perhaps I will use the West African dance unit I made for GCS, and see how that goes.
This Thursday I taught at GCS, continuing with the Native American unit. The students gain confidence each week, and are coming to express themselves with more full, confident movements; changing levels, speeds, and energy to convey various ideas. We also watched a video today, which they completed a worksheet for. I made the worksheet, and it was composed of 4 boxes: Box 1 was “What movements do you recognize?” Box 2: What do you notice about the music? Box 3: What do you notice about the costumes? Box 4: Draw a picture of what you see. On the reverse of the paper, we gave them extra credit questions including asking what the primary theme of this unit has been (Native Americans use dance to communicate with themselves and with Mother Nature).
Next week, I will close this unit, administer a quiz to adjudicate their learning, and the following week, week 8, I have been working on a unit plan for Flamenco dance, which we will begin.
For the symposium, I am thinking of using the company dancers from GCS. Many of them have been in my classes, and are very used to traveling and performing at new sites. I think they will be using some of their original choreography which incorporates and represents their dance training which I have been contributing to at GCS. My plan right now is to present at the symposium, and close that presentation with the performance of the Company kids.
I am still working on finishing typing up the Native American dance unit lesson plans, and I will post those as a group when they are all finished. They should be pretty awesome!
Also, i got a little carried away and just planned out a residency about the solar system. I hope to try them next year at GCS as there is close to no time left this year! I just uploaded this to a new page on my blog entitled “Solar System Residency”. Creative, riiiight?
May 6, 2009
Recipe for Teaching
10 heaps of energy, whipped
4 cups of confidence, softened
8 cups of interest, shaken
3 cups of dedication, minced
2 pinches humility, 1 of disregard,
Season to taste with passion, patience and intelligence. Effective when served hot, cold, room-temp or reheated.
May 1, 2009
week 5
Monday was much the same at last week– we did peer conferences between two groups of dancers as they performed the piece for their partners. The students created a rubric for themselves, and gave their partners grades accordingly. Kris and I met with each of the groups (separately) to ensure the students were following instructions. 7th week I will begin a new unit all my own with the 5th graders at CNCA, which I really look forward to. Today at GCS really got me thinking about what i will continue with the students at GCS, as well ad an CNCA.
Today atGCS, I told the story of how the raven brought the Inuit native americans light, or the sun. This quickly morphed into a crude demonstration of the tilt of the axis of the earth, and why Canada and the North Pole are light for only 6 months of the year. I am considering elongating this unit and exploring the geographic angle of this Native American folk tale. Perhaps with mapping, topography, and the axis of the earth. I will flush this idea out, and look forward to perhaps presenting the resolution of this unit at the symposium in june.
also, I plan to give the students at CNCA the pre AND post evaluations, which will begin next week. This way, I can evaluate the impact my teachign will have on the students. We shall seeee!
April 24, 2009
Week 4
Monday at CNCA was much the same as last week. It was only my second visit to the site, and but even returning was more welcoming and I am even more excited to explore new teaching ideas and techniques with this class for a few weeks at the end of the quarter.
Thursday at GCS was interesting, as we continued on in the Native American unit. After warm-up and a review of what we learned last week, moving across the floor we asked the students to “communicate” something.
“Native Americans use dance to communicate with each other and Mother Earth” has become the mantra of this unit, and teaching the vocabulary (only ‘communicate’ actually) was interesting through dance. We focused on encouraging the students to utilize their entire body and to dance with conviction. We finished the class with drum circle; one student played a rhythm on the drum in the center, and the rest of the class beat out the rhythm on their bodies and the floor. I continue to learn teaching strategies and classroom management ideas even though at the moment I have not been integrating my own lesson plans this quarter.
I contacted Stephanie and I’m still not sure who to contact to look for more information on Native American dance, however I’m not sure if that will be necessary. I’ll speak more with Chippy and Stephanie this weekend.
April 17, 2009
Spring, week 3
Already week three?!! This is terrifying. I am starting to worry about my time-line, and what I can actually accomplish with either group of my students before the symposium in early June.
I met the 5th grade class I’ll be teaching, and I am really excited to begin working with them. I met with Kris about 20 minutes before the class began, and I was able to get my bearing in the space before the large class of 37 5th graders bounded in. the students are very well behaved, and seem to be interested in the piece they are performing for the end of year show. The entire year (they only get dance once a week) they have been doing a study on Jazz dance. Kris explained to me the process of how she decided on the traditional big-band style of jazz dance and music. The students are drawn and motivated by the music, and the styles of movement they have been focusing on including the Swing step and the Jive can be performed with a partner or without, which has been empowering for the students who are at such a funny age and on the cusp of becoming an adolescent. They have also spent copious time on ‘Dance Sentences’ focusing on the differences between literal and abstract movements. I think I will probobly work with some strain of movement sentences when I begin teaching them, however I am not sure how or what that will be incorporated into the class.
One challenge I am interested to greet, is that six of the students are mentally challenged, and have other courses led by a separate teacher. I enjoyed being able to watch Kris interact with these students in particular, and was able to gently observe how some students react to different kinds of contact. This will be a great challenge, and I look forward to this opportunity to grow as a teacher.
Next week, I will be helping Kris ‘clean’ the dance for their end of year performance
Kris suggested these strategies for revising performance dance:
allow the students to experience leading
allow individual demonstrate sections and classmate provides feedback
utilize partnerships: teacher/dancer: gave criteria for “teacher” to look for
Kris uses -’love notes’ which are actually post-it notes she pre-makes before class which say things like “great job” and “fantastic energy”, etc : encourage cooperative learning
-Create a performance rubric the students can see, which they are actually graded on, and then have them grade each other and their partners on their personal performances.
At GCS Chippy started a unit on Native Americans, which the 3rd graders have to learn according to the standards of california. As I can only be at GCS for a short time every week, I am going to be observing the classes and teaching the warm up, however observing and critiquing Chippy on HER teaching strategies. So far, this will be the largest challenge for me to face the things that can improve her (and subsequently my own!) teaching.
Thats all for now… can’t wait to get back into the classroom!
Spring Has Sprung!
This quarter will be an interesting experience for me in ArtsBridge. Quite unlike my experience last year, where I had been working with the same group of students and guiding teacher for months. This week, I had a meeting with Chippy, and talked about this comign quarter, where I will be working with Kristen, a colleague of Chippy’s at Camino Nuevo Charter School because my new class schedule does not work with my old teaching schedule.
For the next few weeks, I will begin going to CNCS to observe the new 5th grade class I will be teaching for the remainder of the quarter. Until that point, Chippy will remain my guiding teacher, and once I have begun teaching at CNCS, I will be working primarily with Kristen. This will make my new schedule: Monday mornings 10:40-11:30 at CNSC and Thursday mornings from 8:15-9:00 at GCS with Chippy.
In our meeting, Chippy and I discussed my teaching strengths:
-more classroom management skills – attention getters, more confident
in teaching, more diverse teaching content, confident teaching
material that is new.
And discussed my new teaching goals for CNCA:
-integrating more subjects: for example, providing more cultural
context. Providing more prior knowledge, setting the “Stage”.
-Flushed out weekly lesson plans: provide to Kris weekend before, Kris
reviews and provides feedback. Lindsay reflects after teaching lesson
(add “changes for next use” and add observation criteria”)
-Observation Assessment: Whole class checklist of set criteria &
individual observational assessment at some point in unit.
-improving on the delivery of instruction – most effectively reach all
the students
During my first observational lesson with Kris, chippy wants me to think about the following questions
-look for good teaching stratagies
-similarities in students learning between the schools
-differeneces in student learning
-tune into the students that loose engagement and at what point they
loose engagement
-each observation choose 1 or 2 students to “shadow” and reflect on
your observations
-notice the differences betwen the GCS class you are teaching and the
CNCA class you are observing
This will be an interesting time as I transition from teaching at only one location to two, and I cannot wait to meet the students I will be working with! My first day is Monday, April 13th. While I am apprehensive about teaching in a new location, I feel this is almost serendipitus and I cannot wait to see the differences between schools, and how these differences affect my teaching styles and the outcomes.
March 15, 2009
final west african culminating lesson plan
This week was the final lesson of the African Dance unit I taught at GCS. On Wednesday morning, the 3rd grade students came to UCLA for the Lula Washington performance and a dance class in Kaufman hall. The performance was informative and they loved it, however for me it was most interesting to understand their response to dancing in Kaufman hall. While these students have dance class every day, this Wednesday was the first lesson they had had outside of their own studios at GCS. As one of the questions on my culmination quiz, I asked What it was like for them dancing in the UCLA studio. The responses I got were incredibly varied– they ranged from excited, to nervous, to embarrased, to “shy, because I was not wearing any shoes”!
Honestly this was the first time I had given a quiz at the end of a unit that I have created (Chippy has administered other tests for some of the other units) and it was such an enriching experience! While the kids looked terrified when I first passed out the tests, I really have concrete evidence of what they learned, and now I know better where to pay attention to in my teaching for other units, because of what they did not really grasp at the end of this unit.
4th lessonplan
This fourth lesson was the last lesson before the students came to visit at UCLA for the Lula Washington Dance Theater performance. For a culmination discussion, I asked how the dances we have been learning throughout the unit would be modified if they were performed not in a performance circle, not collectively as a group as we have been practicing, and not individually. What would these dances represent about the african culture if they were performed differently?
The students came up with pretty insightful responses for 3rd graders, which encompassed family and community values as the strong-hold for african communities.
