Hello all!
Today was the first day of a two week band camp, where I am the color guard instructor. The band director is studying abroad in London this week, so running things is left to me. This week is solely based on marching fundamentals. There is no music or drill yet. Normally, the leaders are just told to break up with their sections and teach. This led to leaders fighting over the "better" way to teach, and other leaders just standing in the background.
To help address these issues, I broke things up a little differently. I assigned each leader 2-3 band members to teach. They will work with those specific people all week, and only come together as a big band at the end. This helped with really getting down into the details because the leaders no only have to look at 2-3 people.
Another thing I did, was break all of the fundamentals up into modules. The leader much get their group passed off with one module before moving on to the next. I like the way that I broke up the modules, but as the leaders pointed out, more direction and detail is needed. Next year, I will print each module on it's own piece of paper with every little thing that they need to look out for. I might do it for tomorrow, but camp runs 8 am to 8 pm so time is limited. I will update later in the week with how this teaching method and break down is going.
Cool! This is scaffolding in practice!
ReplyDelete