Video Reflection 7: Assessment

Date: 11/16/2022
School: Lee Elementary School
Grade: 2nd grade
Class: General music
# of Students: 17
Cooperating teacher: Gretchen Hartsook
https://youtu.be/bjlgSa-SNUw

This lesson is another continuation of the second grade Carnival of the Animals unit, this time
with new animals. I already summarized the general process for these lessons in the previous reflection,
so I won’t go into too much detail, but this one has some variations to spice things up a little. For the
second animal of the day, the tortoise, we have a Dalcroze-style freeform movement activity to go with
the song.
The lesson starts with a basic form of pre-assessment, which serves the dual purpose of recalling
the material students have already learned and showing me how much the students remember. I’m
informally assessing their memory and ability to aurally identify the music they (should) already know.
While this is informal, I’m still making use of the information, even momentarily. If students get any of
them wrong, that shows me that the movement in question might need more review for it to really sink in.
Even though I’m only calling on one student to answer the question, just the number of hands that go up
shows me roughly the level of unanimity and confidence that the students have in their answer. Usually,
the movements have particular characteristics that are memorable enough for them to recall. Also, while
the questions I’m asking are informal, this aural identification of every movement is extremely similar to
the way they’ll be individually tested at the end of the unit. I hadn’t thought about it much until helping
my CT with this unit, but I really like this approach to what I’ll call “assessment priming.” The big test of
their knowledge occurs at the end of the unit, but at every lesson along the way the students are exposed
to the same process as their assessment will be, just with lower stakes and a little more help. At the
beginning of every lesson they get an increasingly realistic practice round for what their test will be like,
and they don’t even know it yet.
Similarly, every lesson ends with the students writing their reflections in their workbooks. While
listening to the music of a specific animal, students are asked to write what they notice about the music
and how it makes them feel. As second graders, their reflections aren’t particularly deep or articulate, but
that’s not really what’s being assessed. What matters is that they’re thinking about their own feelings and
practicing metacognitive processes, maybe for the first time ever in a musical setting. At the end of the
unit their books will be collected and graded based on completion. By the nature of the questions, they
can’t really be gauged on accuracy or correctness. However, they’ll indirectly be assessed on how
sincerely they engaged with the questions, and that they were paying attention. In summary, at the end of
the unit students will be assessed in two different ways: their ability to identify the animals that
correspond to each movement, and their level of engagement and participation with the material
throughout the unit.