Brennan Harris 11/13/13 Elementary band/ GM, Highland arts elementary Reflection on Assessment

My Initial Ideas To be completely honest I have mixed feelings about assessments which stem from my experience as a student in both k-12 and as a college student. I understand that assessing the knowledge and abilities that your students have gained is essential to both the teacher and the student, but sometimes I think that is too much emphasis on teaching towards the goal of passing a test and not enough emphasis on making sure that the students fully understand the subject. Part of the reason I have mixed feelings about test is that I believe many times there are factors that can affect the performance of a student during a test and therefore give an inaccurate reading of their understanding of subject. For example, during a aural dictation test at my community college I remember that despite the fact that I could normally do well in class, when it came time for the test ( the majority of our grade was determined by 2 or 3 tests during the semester), I had a bad case of test taking anxiety and was unable to perform like I did on normal class days because I knew that the stakes were high and that I had to do well on that test. I think that, if there is a way to do it, teacher should try focusing on more passive ways of assessing ability. The Voice of Authority To find out what that experts say about assessments, more specifically musical assessment I just did a quick google search and found this article http://www.stthomas.edu/rimeonline/vol6/fisher1.htm this article actually really helpful to gaining an insight into the debate about assessment in music education. From what I could gather, there is a huge debate about how to assess knowledge in music education and whether or not there should be a nationalized test for music. Some hold the belief that if music is going to considered equal to math and science that it should be tested in a similar manner (i.e high stake standardized testing). Others believe that assessment in music education should be more subjective, while still arguing that music should be considered a core subject on par with math and science. It is an interesting debate, and I have to say after reading that article I find myself agreeing with both sides on different points. My Initial Observations From what I can observe, my mentor teacher doesnt do a lot of quizzes or exams, I have only seen him grading one time for his band class, and as far as I can tell there are no formal quizzes given in his general music classes. One thing that I have noticed is that at the end of each general music classes he gives recognition to the students that were participating and didnt misbehave and he makes note of it on his seating chart.

Brennan Harris 11/13/13 Elementary band/ GM, Highland arts elementary Reflection on Assessment The Students Voice For me its difficult to get an accurate reading on the attitude of the students on the this subject for two reasons, 1. the band student that I talk to want to be in band therefore they almost uniformly have good attitudes about band and the tests that he administers, and 2. the general music class that I observe are kindergarten and 1st grade, so obtaining any real information from them is difficult. But from what I can gather they dont mind the small quizzes he gives out (the only ones who seem to have any negative feelings are the one who dont really want to be in band)

Mentor Teachers Voice So after talking to my mentor teacher about assessments and his opinions on the matter I get the sense that he doesnt like to give too many written formal tests and likes to keep playing tests to a minimum. He prefers to assess the students based on effort and preparation rather than the quality of their playing, though I should add that he believes that the students who are enough to try generally dont have any issue except for small techniques issues which he works on with them during lunch or before school if they want extra help. For his general music classes he says that he likes to have those classes be entirely participation based. Based on what we talked about I get the sense that he prefer a more passive approach to assessment and tries to asses how the class as a whole is grasping a particular subject. My Voice From what I can see, there are a lot different philosophies regard assessment and the best approach to it, personally I think that when I have my own classroom a lot of what I do will depend on the class that I am teaching, for example if I end up in a general music I think that I would probably be more passive with my assessment instead of testing each specific individual on every single subject that we go over, but on the other hand if I am teaching a beginning guitar class (not an ensemble) I probably have more tests on notation and playing ability so that I can assess where the student is before they move on to higher level guitar class or to the guitar ensemble. To summarize my thoughts, I think there is a lot of room for debate on the subject, I think it should be left up to each teacher to decide how they do it (i.e I think a standardized music test would be a bad idea)