After a Performance: Celebrate Student Success and Reflect

After a performance students are excited and inspired. It is a great time to celebrate their successes as well as reflect upon their hard work, dedication, growth, and progress/ Often, I’ve found it very helpful to assign students some questions to reflect upon after a concert performance. I think it can be insightful to hear the voices of students as they share their insights into the ensembles performance, their own progress, and their thoughts about music making.

Generally speaking, I will begin a class period after a performance informally and allow the students to express their excitement from the previous night’s performance. We discuss their thoughts and experience, laugh, and share in their accomplishments. I will then have students complete a formal written assessment and ask them to dig deeper into their concert experience. If the performance has been recorded, I may have the students listen to their performance first and then begin their reflection. If not, they will have a time to think back on their impression of the performance and share their thoughts. There are so many aspects of a performance for which we could receive student feedback. Here are just a few questions I may ask my students to consider and respond to after a performance.

Celebrate Success

All too often after a performance I am guilty of focusing on what needs to be improved that I forget about what went well, I am sure many can relate. Therefore, I will ask students to reflect upon what they feel we did well in our performance. This is to help students think about and celebrate the successes in their performance. This question could be more open ended or I may ask the students to focus more specifically on ensemble skills such as our dynamic contrasts, intonation, rhythm, articulations, balance, or blend. I like to get the students thinking about the aspects of our performance they are proud of and also identifying some of our ensembles strengths.

What Can We Improve?

As a follow up question I will ask the students to think about areas of our performance we can improve upon. Again, I may ask students to reflect on ways we might need to improve our dynamics, intonation, rhythm, articulation, balance, or blend. The goal is to get students thinking and recognizing that there is always room for growth and improvement. This question is also a way to get students to critique and assess the music making process for themselves. Furthermore, I want to encourage students to take ownership of their music making, something I discussed in the last post.

Personal Reflection

In addition to asking the students to reflect upon the ensembles performance, I may ask them to think about their own personal progress as they prepared in the months leading up to their concert performance. One question I may ask students is, what skills did they gain while working on their concert music? While concert music does not teach all aspects of music, pieces are selected with specific learning targets and skills in mind. Additionally, I may ask students to think about the musical concepts or skills they need to continue to work on from the concert music. We may be done with the concert, but they can still “get” something out of the music and keep working on it and improving upon it.

Additional Thoughts

In the past I have also asked students how they felt leading up to, during, and after their performance. I have asked them what do they enjoy about performing and what do they enjoy about music. After a concert is an excellent time to gain insight into how our students feel about music, their own music making, and their experiences in our classrooms. This feedback can be used to shape our teaching and build deeper relationships with our students.

What reflection activities do you like to do during the year or after a performance?