Week 6

PART I: Clements & Klinger 2.3 (I’ll answer these as myself, since there’s no CT)

1. How does your cooperating teacher monitor student progress over time?

In middle school classes, I monitor their daily journals to see what things they start to notice in the music they listen to over time (i.e. can they tell when a song is a cappella or not, can they tell how many parts there are). I also monitor their progress in sight-reading as a group, but I’m planning a system where they will also come sight-sing for me individually so I can give kids more help or more challenge if they need it. For all groups, I informally monitor how they are doing with learning the repertoire just by listening to them sing and working on parts that they don’t have down yet. In high school I am starting to have them write in their solfege which is something I can check during or after class, and I can see how they improve over time in their accuracy and speed of writing it in.

2. How does your cooperating teacher determine grades for music classes or ensembles?

In middle school, students do not receive letter grades, so we don’t have a specific grade we have to determine for them. We still do report writing about their growth and learning, so I do a lot of informal check-ins with them but emphasize that these are not for grades. For example, with their journals, I will write a note to them every month or so to let them know how they are doing, and I give them a plus, a check, or a minus (which is really mostly for completion – are they showing up to class and participating in the activities). In high school, students do receive letter grades, so I determine grades through attendance, participation, and a few written assignments (i.e. fill in the solfege for your part in Asimbonanga).

3. Collect documents pertaining to grading policies and procedures from your student teaching site. List the documents you have collected. Compare and discuss these policies and their relationships to implementation or practicality in music classes or ensembles.

So far I actually haven’t gotten a lot of information about grading policies and procedures, but this is what is in our handbook:

Middle School
Comments are used on Middle School reports to assess student growth, performance and cognitive progress.

Upper School
Letter grades are used to evaluate scholastic progress throughout the Upper School. In those few courses in which a different reporting pattern may be used, students will be informed in advance of the procedure used by the teacher. Letter grades in conjunction with checklists and comments are used to indicate cognitive progress on Upper
School reports and transcripts: numbers are used to indicate affective performance.
Self‐evaluation is a process in which students are sometimes asked to complete a written assessment of their performance in particular classes. These may be reviewed with the cluster advisor.

As discussed in my answers above, there isn’t a lot of formal grading going on in the middle school, which is kind of nice in music classes/ensembles because we can really focus on the process and make a lot of mistakes so that we can learn without the pressure of the letter grade. In the upper school, I do need to give them letter grades, and I’ll admit that it is sort of hard to implement that in a music classroom, given the fact that everyone comes in at a different level and I can’t have any expectation of their musicianship or singing abilities. The best way for me to think about it is to think about whether students are improving from whatever their baseline was, and whether they are putting in good effort as participants in an ensemble.

PART II: Reflection

This week I noticed a lot of small successes for many of my classes and students, which was really exciting!

1. My vocal workshops class (upper school) FINALLY feels invested in the changes I’m trying to make in the class, which is a nice feeling. And honestly I expected it to take longer for them to adjust to the new set up of the class, so it felt really great on Tuesday to have four of the seven students volunteer enthusiastically to share what they had been working on in their solos. One of the things they were very intentional about when we wrote up some norms a few weeks ago was that the feedback should be both positive and specific, and they really held to that in the feedback they gave their peers. They gave specific praise about things like tone, vowels, registration, and even individual runs, and it created a really great energy in the room where it felt like if someone shared their voice, it would be received with praise and affirmation and encouragement. I followed up with some students later in the week during their lessons, and it was especially great to hear from one student who had shared with the class that she really didn’t like where her voice was right now. When I asked her what she thought of the workshop, she said it felt really good to have people giving her positive feedback when she was feeling not great about her voice, and she said (and I noticed in her lesson) that it helped her just be more confident about her singing and her song choice, and she wants to share again next week already!
2. In my 8th grade group, which only has four kids now because one had to drop, we are moving pretty naturally into a unit on songwriting. We’ve done sound circles a little bit which is definitely a big ask with so few students, because it means they all have to participate in a way where they can’t really hide behind anyone else. On Wednesday, we did some sound circles and then decided to start work on writing a song together (I had given the option for them each to work separately, but they wanted to try together), and it just started happening! There is one student who is definitely way more vocal than other students (so I’ll be looking for ways to get the voices of the other three students more involved as well), and once we had all gotten a nice pattern going with rhythm and a simple harmonic structure, she just started singing – improvising words, rhythms, and a melody all at the same time! There were definitely points where it got silly, which I don’t mind because I think it helps with the relationship-building part of being in an ensemble, but it was fabulous to see the quieter students find singing roles that really suited their desired level of engagement in the ensemble.
3. My 7th grade group is pretty crazy and almost never stops talking, but they are also all really talented musicians – and I really do mean all of them. We are learning harmony parts for Rise Up right now, but I wanted to give them a chance to try out the solos so on Tuesday after we learned the harmony for the prechorus, we just ran that a bunch of times with different soloists at the beginning each time. It wasn’t necessarily the best day for them in terms of actually learning their notes, but it was so great to hear so many of them take the courageous step to sing in front of 23 of their peers, and to watch them encourage each other to try it if they had a friend who wasn’t sure. On Thursday, we worked on Rise Up for a bit and then went back to check on Shosholoza, which is a South African piece we had started about 3 weeks ago and hadn’t reviewed yet this week. They were really quite solid on the harmonies (in 3 parts!) even though that day in particular we were missing about 6 kids who had left early for sports, and when I asked them to all sing the middle part, they all could sing it without reviewing it! I guess I shouldn’t be surprised – we learned this song with everyone learning every part, starting with the bottom, then the top, then the middle – but I was really pleasantly surprised that they could all remember which part was which and then could sing it correctly without needing to review. The challenge with this class is that they are all so good, but they force us to move so slowly because they can’t stop talking so I feel like we are working way below their ability level right now. On Thursday before class I had decided I was tired of reprimanding them because it always makes me feel really negative and annoyed, so I was intentional about choosing to keep moving even if I didn’t have everyone with me, and to laugh with them when things were amusing. As a result, I left the class in a much better mood and I think they did too – and, I think we actually accomplished more as a group than we normally do. So we’ll see if that mindset change continues to work, both for me and for them.

There are still plenty of things I notice that I could do better, or that I could fix for the next class, and I’m realizing that I think teachers are people who just get used to dealing with failure and rising from it! I was thinking to myself – I fail at things all the time, every single day in this job, and I’m strangely okay with that. I was expecting myself to fall into perfectionist tendencies like I tend to do in my academic life, but so far I’ve been able to be gentle enough with myself to really believe that failing is just learning, as long as you can move on from it.