Assessment is an ever-present part of teaching, particularly in the age of data-driven supervision and evaluation. I am assessing my students each class, on myriad concepts and skills, and keep a running "grade book" in my head for every one of my 300 elementary students. I watch, listen, correct, and critique throughout solfege warmups, Orff accompaniments, recorder playing, and responsive movement activities. While I can see how my students are progressing, it is difficult for me to show others without tracking data and plotting graphs of their accomplishments. While this is very important, I feel it gets in the way of authentic music making for my young students.
Last year, my colleagues and I created district-wide elementary assessments to gauge yearly growth in first, second, and third grades (we still need to create Kindergarten and 4th Grade...). These assessments are mostly authentic, but still a bit forced when applied as standard assessments in ELA and Math are in the regular classroom. I administer a pre-test in the fall, which as we all know is giving the students a test on material they probably don't know, and telling them to, "Try your best - this is just going to tell me what I still need to teach you." I collect the data from these pre-tests and then administer the same assessment in the spring as the post-test. That is basically the extent to which I comprehend standard pre- and post-test assessments. Here are the questions I still have:
1. Should I be showing the pre-test results to the students?
2. How do I give feedback to my students after the post-test?
3. Do my students have accurate self-awareness of their abilities and understanding of concepts
and skills? Are they musically self-aware?
While technology neither helps nor hinders my discovery of the answers to these questions, I feel I am pondering more broadly the process of assessment and evaluation of student learning. Bauer (2014) cites Marzano's 2006 goals of classroom assessment include clear feedback, feedback that helps students to see their progress and ways to improve, and encouragement to keep working toward their goals. I try to give constant feedback through formative assessments, but I am not sure how to give the same feedback for summative assessments. The text offers some interesting suggestions for giving feedback for summative assessments, but I do not see their application clearly in my general music classroom. For my Instrumental Music students, I could certainly have them submit a video of their playing and dub commentary over top, using an application such as a screen capture software (QuickTime on my Mac).
Designing instruction to support the "standardized" assessments we created will absolutely benefit from technological programs and devices. I am a textbook lesson plan writer who starts with the activities and builds the plans from there. I am the teacher Dr. Bazan (https://learn.kent.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-4192442-dt-content-rid-36989602_1/courses/21569.201510/Week%205/Lecture/index.html) was speaking about when he listed all the reasons we do not plan backwards as suggested - it takes time, my textbooks are sufficient, I assume my students are getting it, and I do just as well planning on my feet.
My biggest takeaway from the readings was that I NEED to work on plans from back to front in order to help my students get the most out of their lessons. Of course it makes sense to begin with the learning outcome, plan how you will know if the students have met the goal, then create activities to support the learning. However, I get brainstorms for activities to support learning outcomes while I am teaching, and I want to try them out immediately. Usually, the students are open to trying my activities, and they help me figure out what needs to be tweaked to be a valuable experience. The lesson is - I should be doing the figuring out WITHOUT the students so each time I teach the lesson it is at its peak.
I know this is my Music Technology blog and didn't write much about technology, but the readings this week took my thoughts in these directions. The technology out there I use already in my lessons and assessments will continue to be helpful whether I'm teaching by the seat of my pants or through backward design. My Interactive Whiteboard will continue to help my classroom move toward student-driven learning. The iPads will continue to provide authentic documentation of student work and learning through audio, still, and video recording. The instruments in my classroom will help students of all abilities to explore and interact with music concepts in a tactile and immersive manner. I am thankful for my resources and will tap into them to continue growing as a music educator.
Bauer, W. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding
to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
I feel like we are in very similar positions after reading your post. I do try to see how the students are progressing but sometimes all I want to do is sing and play instruments with the kids and not worry about assessment. I would be interested in what your district came up with to gage the growth in those grades. If I were to do a pretest I don’t know that I would show the students. I don’t feel like there is any need for them to know specifically how they did, but maybe to say “as a class” we need to review this. My main goal at the end of the day is for the students to appreciate music. They might love music, they might not. I would be thrilled if every student just absolutely loved music and many of them do. However, I’m also realistic in knowing that music just doesn’t speak to some kids the way it always has for me. But at the end of the day, if they can appreciate music, then I’ve accomplished my goal.
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