This lab was a very big eye opener for me. When I was told that I would have to teach a lesson on hip-hop, I had no clue what I was going to do. Other than not being a dancer of any kind, hip-hop isn't on the top of the list of music genres that I listen to. Not only was I supposed to teach hip-hop, which was hard enough since I don't know much about it, but I also had to use technology in my lesson. This was all a big challenge to me, I had met with my professor and we began running through ideas. I had to put more into this lesson than any other I had done. I went through many songs until I finally made my decision to teach the song "Teach Me How to Dougie" by Cali Swag Group. I chose this song because of the popularity the song and dance had. If anybody needed to learn 'how to Dougie' it was me. I had seen the dance but in no way could perform the dance. I had to spend alot of time watching tutorial videos on youtube before I could actually do the dance. For the technology portion of my lesson, I used a projecter and speakers to show different videos, tutorials, and music. Other equipment that I used were ropes and blindfolds.
I wanted to start the class with a hip-hop theme, so for my instant activity I had the class do the Cha-Cha Slide but with a twist. Since I was going to be teaching "Teach Me How to Dougie," which is an omage to Doug E. Fresh, also known as "the human beatbox," I had each person in the class beatbox during the instant activity. I followed this up with a video of Doug E. Fresh beatboxing to show the class who he actually was. It was then time to get into the lesson, I had expected most of the class to be shy, which they were, but they then loosened up. After a few minutes I noticed that people were coming up to the windows of the gymnasium to watch, this caused most of the class to regress and become embarassed. When this happened I had the students dance with the blindfolds on, not only was it a task variation but I felt it would help if they didn't feel like all eyes were on them. This allowed the students to relax. I then stressed the rope pull cue using the ropes and comparing the move to tug-o-war. Slowly progressing and giving alot of feedback, which I made sure to give feedback to each person, allowed the students to become increasingly confident throughout the class.
As I mentioned before this lesson was a big eye opener for me. I previously didn't realize how much work went into these lessons. I really needed to prepare myself for this since I do not have any kind of hip-hop background. I actually impressed myself by the time the lesson was over, it really helped my confidence knowing that if I had to teach something that I wasn't familiar with, that I could do it. Although this lesson was so successful, I felt the most pride during the next class. The next class I had over have of the students I taught come up to me and tell me that they actually went out over the weekend and used my lesson to dance.
Lesson Plan
Task Progression Sheet