Assessment
The teacher understands and uses multiple methods of assessment to engage learners in their own growth, to document learner progress, and to guide the teacher's ongoing planning and instruction.
One of the most difficult responsibilities that a music educator is tasked with is properly assessing students with methods that can be recorded in the grade book. It is quite difficult to apply kind of “unsubjective” grading scale to all students when music is such a subjective subject. Every student is unique and grading them on ability is simply unrealistic. This puts teachers in a sticky situation with both the school system and students (and their parents). School systems always want to see grades in a grade book, but since music is subjective, the music educator is often left to try and grade them on what they believe their level of ability is, which is - you guessed it - very subjective. The best way to achieve this type of assessment is by making individual growth the center of your rubrics/grading. Participation grades are a thing of the past. If CMP is the pedagogical stance that you take in the classroom, students can be assessed on their content knowledge such as the music history, theory, composition, etc. of any given piece or genre that is discussed in class. This type of assessment can be both formative and summative. Another great form of assessment (my personal favorite) are what I call self-reflection sheets. These types of assignments ask students to reflect on how they are doing in the class themselves as well as give them the opportunity to ask questions or give comments without the entire class' knowledge.
In the area of assessment, I feel like I’m decent at the informal side of assessment. Informal assessment is happening constantly in the music classroom. How else do we gauge where students are and what to do in rehearsal? However, creating formal assessments is another thing. The formal side of assessment is an aspect of my teaching that I need to improve upon.
In order to grow in this area, I plan on doing research into what other music teachers do for their formal assessments as well as go even further back and learn about different units that I can do on areas of music history and theory, which are easier to assess on a more stable scale. My biggest goal is to accurately assess students where they are and actually meet them where they are on their learning journey rather than try to grade them on an unfair scale.