Alexander Cheung Word count: 478
Professor Joel
English 135 (31704)
May 27, 2015
First Year Teacher of First Year Teachers: A Reflection on Teacher Training in the Field of Piano Pedagogy:
The following of which the author (Kristin Elgersma) describes her experiences in creating a curriculum in piano pedagogy at the University of Idaho and to help those in need of teaching experiences. Elgersma decided to write this journal because it is still a new topic. She started out as an assistant professor of piano at the University of Idaho to restructure the piano pedagogy curriculum. Elgersma knew that for student teachers to learn meaningfully was to give them real students to teach. She then recruited six students in between the age of six to eight in the community for the first semester. She would supervise the lesson while the student teacher was teaching. In the second semester, she had recruited different skill levels and ages for the student teachers to teach. This wasn’t a good idea because everyone would teach at a different pace and during the lectures, she could not teach a very specific topic.
Elgersma then had described three errors that she had made for which she could change for next the next year. The first one was that she used her own experiences as examples had changed the view of the student teachers so they would not have the same experience and understanding of the situation. In the second mistake, she realized that there was too much content which would go off track from the main topic. The better way is to let the student teacher figure the problem out during class time. In the following year, she added something called “reflective practice” which made the student review the lessons that the student teacher gave. This allowed the student to find out what went well and what went wrong. The last error that she had made was that she had miscalculated her students’ level. She saw that the student teachers did not notice that some of the things that they were teaching was hard to understand for the student that they were teaching.