The basic idea of this piano lab lesson plan is to determine if students can successfully sight-read and integrate

knowledge in order to figure out the tonality of a new piece and play it through on their own. Strengths of this lesson plan include plans for both group and individual work, grade appropriate objectives, and a strong essential question that the students must solve. Weaknesses of this plan include not describing procedures, making little to no accommodations for different learners, and leaving out state standards. This plan would be a good lesson to teach, but the generic form that the teacher used to plan this lesson does not work well. However, this lesson does follow the basic outline of the Problem-Based Learning model. For the first phase, reviewing and presenting the problem, the teacher did present a challenging problem that was specific and concrete. The students, for the second phase, would devise a strategy as a group to solve this problem. While the lesson plan was unclear whether students would work individually, in small groups, or as a whole class, it was clear that the students would create, and implement, a plan to recreate sixteen measure of two-handed piano music for the second and third phases. Class discussion and reflection was included as the final phase. This plan deviates from the model in that it does not provide any review of prior information with students before presenting the problem. It also did not show how the teacher was going to guide the students in developing their strategies and did not show any scaffolding. To make this lesson plan stronger, I would review previous material for students and would list the specific skills and knowledge necessary for them to devise a strategy in order to give the students a focused starting point. The assessment could also be changed to evaluate student progress throughout the lesson instead of just the end result. This could be accomplished by monitoring students and assessing individual students by having them play through their piece halfway through their strategy to check for comprehension and improvement.