Philosophy of Assessment in Music Education Kaitlin Borden Westminster Choir College February 2013

As a teacher, it is important to assist learning in the classroom. In order to most successfully assist learning, it is important that the teacher is teaching subjects in a way that the students are able to follow. A teacher can assess their teaching skills by assessing their students. For a music teacher, this is still very much true. By using both group and individual assessment, the music teacher or choir director can gauge how the skills of their students are developing. In the choir rehearsal, a director should be assessing students informally at all times. However, when the choir director wants to assess their choir formally, small group or individual assessments can be much more beneficial for diagnosing most issues. In the general music classroom, formal assessment has a chance to be implicated more often than in the choir classroom, and it is currently regarded as more acceptable to be graded here on skills or projects than in the choral setting. In many choir departments across the nation, grades for choir rely solely on attendance as opposed to musical skills. It is my belief that this is a perfectly acceptable way to handle the situation. Many choirs are struggling for greater participation, and fear that students would leave their programs if they were graded on skills. In my classroom, I would probably handle grades in a participatory manner as well, but have smaller participation style grades throughout the week, grading students on requirements such as: whether they had their pencil for the days rehearsal, whether they were willing to participate in

an individual or small group assessment, and whether they had written in their translations or various markings. I feel that these sort of requirements should be in place for all the choirs that I should come to teach, and certainly for any sort of audition choir I would have the pleasure of teaching. In a choir where I felt the overall consensus of the students wanted to just sing something and have fun with it, I might both assess this choir and grade them in a different way than I would the choir that has a yearning for higher musical understanding, though of course teaching them the skills they would need to do so. For assessment in relation to the New Jersey Core Curriculum Content Standards, I would be administering these assessments differently in a general music classroom than in a choral music classroom. I would formally assess for a grade the standards in a general music or theory classroom setting, and would informally asses them in a choir setting. I feel that there is a very strong influence in what matters in the West in the NJCCCSs, and I am not sure of how much I want to employ those values in a choir classroom. In a general music classroom, I feel there it is a more acceptable place and that I would have more time discussing with students the different values of different cultures within music in order to test and grade them on these standards and their knowledge of other standards throughout music.