Leadership
One of my first experiences in leadership at JMU was the MakeyMakey Project that I completed with Lauren Bristow. We spent hours brainstorming and creating prototypes for our project, trying to think of the most creative interactive musical experience possible. We came up with the Remix Racetrack, and inventing and leading such a project was a very challenging and rewarding experience. In Fall of 2019, I started learning more teaching strategies in my music education courses, such as our experiment of Teaching Without Talking in MUED271. This assignment challenged us to teach a musical concept without any explanation, pushing the idea of focusing students on "doing" as opposed to sitting and listening. When classes went virtual, I gained experience in teaching music via Zoom, which I planned and reflected on here. Over the past few semesters, I have definitely become much more comfortable talking in front of a large group of people. In my teaching experiences, it was difficult at first to calm down and be myself, but the more practice I get, the more natural it feels to lead a group of students. I have found recently that the easiest way to calm nerves when teaching is to remember that my job is just to create a learning environment for my students -- the focus should be on them, not on myself.