edTpa Sources

Keegan Whitney
1/31/19

Source One: Rethinking the Roles of Assessment In Music Education

Teachers are responsible for two things: providing students with valid and
reliable information of performance and providing feedback that is designed to help
students extend their understandings. This information should be given to the
students so that they have the opportunity to reflect on the information provided by
the assessment. This allows students to see how they are doing and how they can
grow. This self-reflection allows assessment to function as an extension of learning
(pg 31).
Now assessment has many different roles that can be useful for a teacher to
be aware of. The main three roles explored by this article are assessment of
learning, assessment for learning, and assessment as learning. The first, assessment
of learning, is the traditional view of assessment. It serves as an indicator for what
was achieved from the instruction. Its also evidence for grades and can create some
competition atmosphere for students to achieve the highest scores. This mindset of
assessment has some pros and some challenges to it however. This is good for
achievement over a long period of time, i.e. a whole unit. This style of assessment
could also drive students to show off their best work as their final grade. However,
this could give some students some test anxiety and cause them to not be able to put
their best work forward (pg 32).
The second style of assessment is assessment for learning. The main use of
this is for students to use assessment to extend their current level of understanding.
Teachers can also information gathered by this assessment to help modify future
instruction to fit individual needs. There are pros and cons with this frame of
assessment as well. The first pro is this style of assessment allows students to be
provided with an opportunity to extend their knowledge and understanding. This
style of self-extension allows for students to enhance their self-esteem and
increased positive attitude (pg. 32-33).
The third style of assessment is assessment as learning. This is more of a self-
reflective assessment often done by students. This allows students to monitor,
reflect on, and inform the student’s future learning. This can allow students to
slowly become more self reliable. This way does need some guidance to allow
students to gain as much as possible from this style of assessment, but this
knowledge are easily transferrable to other classes too (pg. 33-34).
Source Two: Planning for Success: Optimizing your Teaching

This article was good and had lots of information but the main sections I am going to
focus on that could apply to the edTPA are titled “Lesson Planning” and “Lesson
Components”. The first, lesson planning, explores what is needed to write an
objective. A good objective needs three things: a specific performance, conditions of
performance, and criterion. The first needed item is performance. This is the result
form the teacher’s instruction, what students will be able to accomplish after the
main point of the lesson. The second is conditions of the established performance.
This is either the given environment of the classroom or any limitations that can
cause students some trouble. The last is criterion. It is essentially the accepted level
of performance. The issue with the later is that hearing a student sing eighty percent
of music right can still be an issue. Therefore the criterion for most music education
should be mastery of the instruction. Now once you picked what the three things for
your objective you need to write it properly. An objective should be written in a
statement that describes what the student will be doing to demonstrate the
understanding of a concept or a mastery of a skill.