What are your thoughts on this article? Do you assess your students daily? If so how did you make changes to your plans for the week? Explain. Discuss a situation that happened this school year. Was your mentee helpful? If not what help do you think you would need to ensure that your students are learning your intended learning target for that day or week?
This article was pretty much a recap of a class I took as Roosevelt as part of my undergrad. The fun yet challenging part of music is that you have to be creative with the ways that you assess your students. Much like other subjects, the standard you are working on will determine the type of assessment you give. I've said this before and I'll repeat myself a little bit here, but I assess my students every single day, and most of the time they don't even know it. Much of my assessment revolves around the music making process, rather than the product. I focus heavily on performance skills, so reading music and playing the recorder. Music reading is pretty cut and dry, and paper and pencil assessments work well for that. Playing the recorder is where I'm a little more fluid with my expectations. Not every student will be able to play the music alone, in time, with perfect accuracy. I do push every student to get to that point, but if I notice a student really struggling I will slightly alter my approach to their playing test. My main goal is making sure every student feels successful while also holding them to a high standard of performance.
ReplyDeleteI really loved this article. It gave me some new ideas about how to assess students during music class. I already did know how important it is to assess students in the music classroom. For me, it allows me to see what the students know and do not know about music. I do tend to change my plans if for example, we are learning about eighth notes. If students are not able to identify the eighth notes, then they do need more practice on it. Usually eighth notes are one of the first notes students need to know in my opinion. My reasoning for this is because once you get passed the eighth notes, than the notes either get longer or faster. This is truly the first fast notes that students learn. An example from this current school year is I am teaching kindergarten about sol and mi. I want them to be able to have the understanding that one is higher than the other. My quick assessment that I did is I had students whole up fingers if they think sol is the fifth 'floor' and then depending on what they said we would then do the something with mi. Another quick assessment I have done with the students is I would have students sing back to me first what they hear from when I sing. Then, I have students look at a song. The song currently only has mi and sol in it. I have the students first put on their "thinking brains" and then I have them sing what they see. If they sing mi high and sol low, I know that this is something I should keep going over. I have done paper to also see if students are able to look at a note and can tell if one is higher than the other. A lot of my students have struggled with this. I am changing up my lesson tomorrow to help students be able to tell when a note is higher on a musical staff, that is sol. If a note is lower on the musical staff, than it is mi. I really want my students to be able to understand this at an early age to get them ready for the next grade where the notes and rhythms they learn are going to start get harder. I also want them to put the concepts they are learning into practice. This is why I have set up a donors choose campaign to be able to get more instruments so the students can practice it. My mentor has been really helpful. We talk almost daily and if I have a question about something district wise or our school, she either knows the answer or guides me to someone with the answer. I do feel like I am able to ask her about different strategies to better help my students. She is especially helpful when it comes to trying out different strategies for behavior.
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