Module 20- Blog Post #2

1. Expository teaching happens to be the method of teaching that has been most beneficial when used by previous teachers. I really like the idea of very organized notes and material because I find that students become more organized in that specific class/subject and therefore, do better in that field. By relating new knowledge to past knowledge, students also revisit certain concepts many times and it then is stored in their memory and becomes easier to retrieve when needed. The combination of this theory and information processing theory match up very well in that the expository teaching method makes it easy for students to store information in their memory because the information is revisited many times during the learning process. It isn’t just a one time taught concept, but is looked over many times in order to understand the full context of it.

2. In order to teach a music theory lesson, such as time signatures to middle school students, I would have some sort of organized poster that I hung in front of the class and used as a teaching device throughout my lesson. I would then pass out some sort of handout that would be filled in as my lesson progresses and is organized into sections, such as the 4/4 signature versus the 6/8 signature. I would have similarities and differences between the different signatures in one section as well along with a description of each signature. This method would be more beneficial to a music class because it’s hard for students to comprehend very abstract concepts (music is basically a different language) and remember them from learning them once. The handout and poster would help them resort back to the previous information in a way that is much more organized and easily processed into their working and then eventually long-term memory.