Name: Helen Snelgrove

Date: December 05, 2016

In fulfillment of 07:207:402 Practicum 1: Pedagogy and the Creative Dance Curriculum
Graduate School of Education & Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University
Prof. Martie Barylick

PRACTICUM 1 LESSON PLAN

1. ASSESSING & PLANNING

Lesson Title: Effort Qualities to enhance Gestures
Grade Level(s): High School Proficient
Duration/Minutes: 10 min
Class Demographics: 7 Students with little to no dance experience
NCAS Dance Generate and conceptualize artistic ideas and work.
Standards: DA:Cr1.1.HSI
b. Experiment with the elements of dance to explore personal movement
preferences and strengths, and select movements that challenge skills and
build on strengths in an original dance study or dance.

Learning Objectives: By the end of the lesson, students will be able to:
1. Use everyday gestures as a stimulus to generate movement.
2. Explore ways to enhance gestures by applying Laban elements.
3. Use gestures enhanced by effort to create original dance study.
4. Students will be able to explain what they have learned.
5. Students will be able to explain that they have learned how to use
gestures to generate ideas in choreographic tendencies.
Assessment Driven The students are having a hard time with choreography so I wanted to give
Rationale: them tools for choreography and different ways to see movement.

Supporting LMA Body

Element(s): Effort
Enduring Idea: Dance can relate to everyday movement as well as codified techniques when
using it as a choreographic stimulus.
Essential Question: How can we use different effort qualities to explore one gesture and use
that exploration to create a dance study?
Resources/Materials: White Board, effort quality cards, effort cups, markers
Language/Vocabulary: Direction- Direct or Indirect
Weight- Heavy or Light
Speed- Quick or Sustained
Flow- Bound or Free
Gesture
Preparations: Write eight effort qualities with lines for students to fill in (on white board)
Write and cut effort qualities into cards and assemble them into
coordinating cups

2. ASSESSING & INSTRUCTING

Diagnostic Assessment What are the elements of the eight effort qualities?
of students’ prior Is there more than one way to do a gesture?
understanding: What does the additional element add to the original movement?
Can you use this technique for choreographing movement?
Motivation & Ask the students: Do you remember what we did last week? Do you
Lesson Opening remember what the different types of effort qualities are? What do you
think a gesture is? What gestures do you do all the time? What gestures do
you not use as much?

I will explain how we are going to use these gestures to help create
movements/phrases for choreography by adding the different effort
elements to our gestures.
Episode 1:
- Welcome the students back to class
- Ask the students if they remember what we did last week
- Explain that we will be doing another exercise with the effort qualities we worked
on last class
- Ask the students to raise their hands and volunteer to write the different effort
elements on the white board.
- Ask the students if they then have any questions on the elements
- Explain that we are going to use the elements with gestures
- Ask if the students know what a gesture is
- Ask the students for a volunteer to explain to their classmates what a gesture is
- Ask the students to gather into a circle and to think of two gestures, one that they
use a lot and one that they don’t use so much.
- Ask the students for to show a everyday gesture they use a lot
- Ask the students to show a gesture they don’t use a lot
- Ask the students to collectively pick a gesture from the ones that were just shown
that they really liked.
- Ask the students for a volunteer to pick out of my effort quality cup.
- Have the student read the card aloud and have the class perform said gesture with
the effort quality that was picked.
- Repeat with a different student picking out of the cup.
- Explain to the students that they are going to individually decide on two gestures
that they would like to use and pick two effort qualities, however they are going
to be split into pairs for convenience for later in the lesson.
- Ask the students to decide within the pairs who wants to be number one or
number two.
- Inform the students that once they are in their pairs and they individually each
have two gestures and know who is partner one and two to come up to me and
pick two effort qualities per person. Partner one from direction and weight,
partner two from speed and flow.
- Ask the students to spread out in the space so that they won’t hurt each other
- Ask for volunteer to pick out of the cup
- Give work time so that the students can put the element and gestures together.
Explain when the students are done to practice three extra times and then take a
seat
- Teacher is observing students work and walking around engaging in their process

SOS Analysis: Divergent Production- The students are engaged in producing multiple
discoveries to a movement problem.
Episode 2: - Once the teacher has realized that all the students look confident in what they are
doing the teacher will ask the students to put their listening ears on so that they
will be able to know what we are going to do next.
- Explain to the students that we are going to teach our partners the two gestures
that we created by themselves and then with the additional effort element added
to them. Then explain that the students will be asked to connect the four gestures
and the elements added to them together to create a fluid count of eight.
- The teacher will explain that there is no particular order that the gestures have to
be shown in, but whatever ways the students like best.
- The teacher will remind the students that each gesture does not have to be two
counts each but they can use any type of rhythmic pattern they like as long as it
does not exceed one count of eight.
- The teacher will then tell the students that they can get back to work with their
partners, but to not turn their listening ears off all the way just incase the teacher
needs to give them any helpful hints.
- Give the students a couple minutes to put the movement together experimenting
with different arrangements of the gestures.
- While pairs are working teacher will walk around and observe the students work
making sure that they stay on task.
- Once the teacher sees the students start to finish their movement discovery using
the gestures and efforts the teacher will look around and pair the groups together
to show what they created.
- The teacher will pair the groups together by evaluating who is in each group and
when the groups finish working.
- The teacher will ask the students to look at their classmates movements and see
the efforts how it affected their movement while observing the other pairs and
share what they have seen.
- The teacher will then ask the students to come over to the white board again to
close the class.

SOS Analysis: Guided Discovery- The students discover a predetermined target or concept
by following a sequenced set of questions designed by the teacher from the
knowledge learned in episode 2 and the questions asked in the lesson
closure.
Divergent Production- The students are engaged in producing multiple
discoveries through a movement problem.
Lesson Closure Once the students form around the white board the teacher will ask the
students for volunteers to answer the questions on the board:

When observing groups:

1. What about the gestures changed when the efforts were added?
2. What differences did you see when we did the gestures with the elements
in the circle versus the elements in pairs?

The teacher will then ask the students:

1. What can we categorize the use of adding effort elements to movement?
(resource, tool, etc.)
2. What do we use tools for? (choreography)
The teacher will then ask the students what this tells them?
3. So since we know we can use tools such as adding efforts to gestures and
making them lead into the next gesture what does this show us about
choreography? (we can find ways to choreograph by using other tools as
well as codified techniques)

This is showing the connections between using gestures and effort qualities
as a stimuli for creating movement.

The teacher will then thank the students for all their hard work and the
movement that they contributed to the class. The teacher will also explain to
the students not to forget what we worked on this class and that the teacher
is excited to continue working and seeing what the students will contribute
to the class.
3. ASSESSING AND REFLECTING
Evidence of Student - Reflecting upon my teaching experience I would say that my students were on
Learning: target in terms of my learning objectives. I believe this because they were able to
stay on task as well as come to the conclusions that I expected them to when they
finished their movement discoveries.
- I saw evidence of learning from my students within the lesson by the completion of
tasks as well as inventive ways of movements the students brought to the table.
- If I were to be able to instruct this lesson again I would try to condense the first
episode so that I would allow the students to have more time exploring the
assemblage of the four gestures with effort qualities along with trying to add
different efforts to gestures or the addition of different gestures. I would also try
and stay true to my lesson plan to the best of my ability. I found that in some
instances I did certain things before others in my lesson plan.
Teacher Reflection 1: - What I found worked well in my classroom management skills were the way I spoke
Classroom to the students, the layout of the lesson, and the responsibilities I gave to the
students. For example, the students had a lot of responsibilities because if they did
Environment not contribute to the class there would not be any content to use. I also felt that I
did not give much time for the students to fool around in the way I transitioned
from task to task. I also found that I spoke to my students with the respect and
acceptance of all the information they gave me as I wanted to receive from them.
- One thing that I was not satisfied with my classroom management was the talking
the came up when some of my directions were not clear. Since the talking only
arose when there was confusion I would try to rephrase my instructions to keep
the students fully engaged.

Teacher Reflection 2: - What I found worked well was the content that I used. I found that the use of
Dance Content gestures that were used a lot and gestures that weren’t used as much allowed the
students to have fun and reflect on things that they do that they may not realize. I
also felt that the use of gestures allowed the students to relate their everyday lives
to the movement they create while in dance class.
- If I were able to teach this lesson again in the terms of creative process I would
make sure that I also the students more time to dive into the movement and the
process they were doing making sure that each level went back to the previous so
that they could see and understand the connections and the reasons why we did
each episode.

Teacher Reflection 3: - In my reflection on my implementation of pedagogical techniques such as the

Pedagogical Spectrum of Styles I found that the use of Guided Discovery and Divergent
Production were most prominent in my lesson. I found that Divergent Production
Techniques was a very helpful technique in allowing the students to find more than one way to
choreograph and transform movement.
- Something that I may do differently in terms of creative process learning if given
the opportunity to teach this lesson again was to try and incorporate more styles
than the two and switch between them interchangeably allowing more ways for
students to connect especially due to the fact of different types of learning styles.