PROFESSIONAL PORTFOLIO ARTIFACT 5 Hailey Aguirre

March 20, 2021

EDUC-555-EDO1

Assessing Student Learning

Assessing student learning means that the teacher is actively monitoring student progress
and checking for understanding and comprehension. In a music classroom assessment can occur
in numerous formats, but most often the teacher is easily able to assess student understanding of
the notes and rhythms of a song, because the choir or band usually always responds and plays or
sings the musical material after it has been presented to them. For TPE number five I included a
rubric for a formal assessment that the students were distributed at the end of a unit we did on
Jazz. For this assessment the students were asked to use a virtual resource known as bandlab to
create a short, twenty second, composition that incorporates some of the elements that we
discussed earlier in the Jazz unit. At the beginning of the Jazz unit, we discussed the six most
common elements of Jazz: improvisation, syncopation, call and response, instrumentation,
virtuosity, and scat singing. For this project the students were asked to actively incorporate these
elements into their composition. The rubric lays out the things that the students were graded on
and provided the students with a written template of what they need to include with their
composition. In order to receive full credit on this assignment, the students needed to create a
twenty-minute piece with three tracks. For the three tracks the students were graded on adding
different things. In the first track the students needed to have a drum machine track and they
needed to have reset the drum machine track to either the “Jazz” or “Blues” setting. For the
second track the students needed to either record themselves scat singing or they needed to input
a Jazz or Blues loop. For the last track the students needed to include an instrument track and
needed to improvise a melody on an instrument of their choose. Lastly, the students were graded
on their effort and their understanding of the different elements of Jazz. The students were also
encouraged to think about syncopation and call and response and include these elements in their
composition. I choose this artifact for TPE 1 because a rubric is a great device to assess students
and to allow them to visualize what they are going to be graded on.