Overview:

The best planned lesson is worthless if the instructional delivery is uninteresting or unengaging, particularly if accompanied by weak leadership skills and ineffective classroom management. Although every music educator has an individual teaching style, effective instructional delivery should be practiced, evaluated, and revamped, if necessary, to consistently maintain student attention and a positive classroom environment.

Objectives:

Students will be able to:

• Identify the elements of instructional delivery,
• Describe why effective pacing is important in teaching,
• Identify effective teaching transitions,
• Describe meaningful introductions,
• Describe ways in which teachers monitor and adjust to students as the lesson progresses, and
• Compare and contrast effective and ineffective ways of implementing a music lesson.

Module Summary

Effective instructional delivery is based upon practice. This chapter identified and described elements that are integral to strong leadership skills. Key components include the ability to give clear directions, exhibit strong body language, and relate positive expectations of respect, honesty, and enthusiasm through the transmission of effective facial and voice qualities.

Of particular importance were the elements of pacing and use of transitions to keep students on-task, and the implementation of carefully sequenced lessons without gaps or skips in teaching procedures, clear and concise directions, and meaningful gestures. These help students to participate fully in music classes and enable the teacher to adjust the lesson in response to student understanding by re-directing the teaching approach as needed.