Summary and Reaction #5

Chapter 8 discusses curriculum, assessment, and grading. Curriculum is a broad term and is hard

to define for each individual teacher. Because each individual teacher, school, and district have their

own curriculum, it can be hard to give exact points on what should and should not be on a curriculum.

However, most well-developed curriculums set learning goals for each level and ensures a smooth

transition to the next grade level, curriculum goals guide the selection of repertoire (not the other way

around) and create useful consistency and continuity between grade levels in terms of counting

systems, vocabulary, tonal systems, and teaching strategies. The use of national and state standards is

essential for the development of a curriculum. They should also be based on different types of learning

like declarative learning, procedural learning, and conceptual learning. The standards for music

education are laid out and given in a clear and concise way to help teachers develop a consistent and

helpful curriculum. The text gives guides to curriculum and elaborates on different standards and the

use of them to develop a well-rounded curriculum. Assessment and grading are talked about next.

Assessments in an ensemble setting are usually given to the entire group and not usually set on an

individual basis. However, concerts and large ensemble assessments do not provide data to show

progress of individuals. Formative assessments are regular and individual assessments that can occur at

any point in the lesson or learning objective to gain knowledge about student progress as individuals.

Make sure that you are doing is sparingly and not worrying about assessing every individual everyday

but also doing it enough to gauge understanding. Formative assessments should be non-threatening and

in the form of simple questions that test declarative, procedural, and conceptual learning. Summative

assessments can be a variety of things from live playing tests, recorded tests, concerts, paper tests, etc.

If it is gathering data on how the students learned and the culmination of their learning so far it is good.

Rubrics for formal summative and formative assessments are essential and can help the teacher and the

student evaluate progress. The chapter gives many examples of assessments and the uses of these
assessments. Grading is a part of assessment, and the chapter works through different ways of

approaching grades. One of these is the demerit grading system that has students start with a certain

number of points and they lose points based on certain criteria. Merit grading is the opposite and

students gain points based on the grading criteria.

Thinking about a curriculum is hard for me because I can see how individual lessons and

objectives are taught but in college we haven’t really touched on full-year plans and other curricular

things. So, it is hard to say how I would want to approach my curriculum when I am teaching. I know

that I would like it to be consistent throughout the different grade levels and classes because I would

not want to create any confusion for myself or my students. In my EDPS class we are talking about

learning objectives and assessment, so this is helping me figure out how I want to approach the

objectives of my classroom. I want to use a type of backwards design so that I can figure out what my

goals for my students are and then develop the activities, repertoire, and assignments around them. As

for assessment, there are so many different ways to approach formal and informal assessments,

whether those are either formative or summative. I want to be able to check my students progress along

the way and make sure that what I am teaching them is actually getting through to them. I do find that I

tend to think more about the informal assessments because those are the everyday kinds of

assessments that music educators do without really thinking about it too much. It is more of changing

the way we structure the formal and summative assessments that is tricky. I want my students to feel

comfortable while also being challenged by the assessments I am giving them. However, to do this I

would need to think more innovatively so that my students are not always doing the same types of

assessments and are not getting overwhelmed by them. My grading is not something I have thought

about too much, but the grading policy that we are doing for this class is interesting and it makes me

think about very specific things that need to be established for my classroom. I am not sure whether my

grading system will be more demerit or merit based because it could go either way. I could do a mix of
the two and establish some rules and rubrics based on my grading system for different aspects of the

classroom.