Kansas Music Standard #1: The teacher of music has skills in teaching and evaluation techniques for vocal, instrumental, and general music.
Knowledge:
- The teacher understands repertoire appropriate for various developmental stages.
- The teacher knows representative works of the past and present from the solo, small ensemble, and large ensemble literature.
Performance:
- The teacher performs alone with musical understanding and technical proficiency sufficient to interpret representative works of the past and present.
- The teacher performs in small and large vocal ensembles or instrumental ensembles.
- The teacher demonstrates the ability to access musical and literary resources for vocal and/or instrumental music.
- The teacher develops instrumental pedagogy appropriate for various developmental stages.
- The teacher demonstrates singing effective for instructional purposes.
- The teacher demonstrates functional knowledge of various band and orchestra instruments.
Rationale:
Kansas Standard for Music Education number one is as follows: “The teacher of music has skills in teaching and evaluation techniques”. These are two very valuable skills for a teacher to have, and almost single-handedly define the position of educator; teaching students is our primary objective, as they rely upon us to know the information that we’re teaching very thoroughly. I believe that this is a crucial aspect of the standard, and it is imperative that a teacher understands this. I would say that being able to teach properly and effictively are much more important that almost any other quality a teacher can have, because interpersonal relationships and working with people to enhance their learning experience can define how they see the subject in their later years. As a music education student, I’ve had many opportunities to demonstrate my skill and knowledge in this field, through: Conducting and Rehearsing a collegiate ensemble in University Band, Teaching primary education students a concept through a singing/drumming game, Leading ensembles as a section leader and coach, Rehearsing small groups of musicians and Holding sectionals for various performing groups, and Hosting private lessons in a variety of instruments both wind and percussion.
The second part of this standard focuses on “evaluation techniques”, which goes hand-in-hand with teaching skills and techniques in the classroom. After teaching a topic, a teacher must have a reliable way to assess the learning of that information from their students, so knowing how to properly evaluate students’ absorption of knowledge is important to the proper education of such. If a teacher can balance effective presentation and repetition of material (teaching) with assuring the connection of knowledge to memory in students (evaluation), they are effective, indeed, and can say that they have mastered this Standard for Music Education. Evaluation has played a vital role in my college education, as many of the tasks that I outlined above, at the end of the “Teaching” paragraph require much evaluation to succeed, and I have also evaluated performers as they play solo or small group pieces as an adjudicator, graded auditioners for entry into ensembles, and lended my evaluation skills to the ensembles that I have been a part of through my career.
Artifacts may include:
- Lesson plans created by the teacher
- Videos of teaching episodes
- Sample assessments created by the student
- Written observation reports by cooperating teachers during student teaching or field experience
