Review, Assessment, and Problem Solving

I decided to do a review class because I have taught a lot of new concepts to the students. Also, I'm hoping to create some more substantial dances soon and they will need to remember all of the elements of dance that they can use. For a review and a warm up I came up with a story about going on a grand adventure which incorporated all the locomotors, axials, shape forms, and concepts of space that they have learned so far. This was a great part of the lesson. The students were engaged and committed to the movement. After we did the grand adventure I did a assessment by asking them if they remembered the terms that they learned in previous weeks that were part of the grand adventure. They did very well remembering and I think it was great that they had something specific from the adventure to link each term with. I left the rest of the time for working on group dances because I really wanted to work on problem solving and teamwork. I made the mistake of splitting them into groups before giving the assignment because by the time they were all spread out it was very hard to get the details across. I had planned a 6 part dance and each part gave the group a chance to choose one thing from a category of dance elements. We only had time to work on the beginning shape because again I found that some groups could still not work well enough together to decide on a shape. Some groups were done very quickly and then had nothing to do so the room felt a little bit chaotic. I feel like I gave some good feedback and additional challenges to the waiting groups, but I definitely needed to rework how to organize this group work. In talking with my mentor Marilyn we came up with a plan to have the 6 part challenges laid out and when each group got done with a part they could have me check it off and then I would send them to get the next part and work on it. Also, we talked about narrowing down the choices for each part so that the groups could make decisions more easily. I am planning to work again on this next time with some revised management strategies.