MISTEC 2020: Music in Schools and Teacher Education Virtual Seminar

ABSTRACT:

Music educators who endeavor to teach composition face many challenges. Many do not self-identify as composers and have had very little preparation to ready them for work with students. Time, resources, performance demands, and the expectations of various stakeholders may hinder the best of intentions. Assessment, however, is perhaps the most daunting of tasks that educators wrestle with as they envision how they might best present composition study to their students. While teachers increasingly can access resources offering sample lessons and pedagogical models, clear guidelines for how compositions should be assessed are still quite difficult to find. Moreover, existing models too often have a “one-size-fits-all” set of criteria designed to evaluate how composers have used the elements of music and if originality or creativity is present. These criteria are falsely objective and misleading in that originality and creativity are not necessarily required for meaningful composition and musical elements can be used in any number of ways which are difficult to score on a scale ranging from “correct use” to “incorrect use”. What our profession needs is an assessment tool that draws upon the processes composers, auditors and audiences enact when they engage with compositions.

This session will introduce an innovative approach to assessing student compositional work modeled on processes enacted in the real world. The assessment methods which will be described are directly linked to pedagogies focused on the development of students’ compositional capacities as well as their understanding of connections between feelingful intention, musical expressivity, and artistic craftsmanship. The process of assessment will feature multiple assessors, open-construct rubrics, and the triangulation of data from student processes and finished products to provide insight into student learning. General guidelines will be offered for designing projects that allow all students to access experiences which foster artistic autonomy, the development of compositional capacities, musical ownership, and self- and peer-assessment skills.

OUTLINE

Workshop Objectives:
● Participants will be able to explain the importance of compositional capacities in the development of young creators
● Participants will discover how capacities-focused composition assessment can more meaningful to students and informative for teachers than current models.
● Participants will be able to use open-construct rubrics to collect data from multiple points to inform future teacher practice and student learning.

Workshop Outline:
I. Welcome & Session Overview
II. Teaching for the development of musical capacities
III. What are we measuring when we assess student composition?
IV. What are the shortfalls of commonly used composition rubrics?
V. How are compositions evaluated in the “real world”?
     a. Composer insights
     b. Auditor of the composition/score - performers, conductors, artistic directors
     c. Audience’s perceptual experience and reaction
VI. Introducing “Real World Assessment” (Multi-Assessor Triangulation of Compositional Process and
Product Data through the use of Open-Construct Rubrics)
     a. Multi-Assessor Triangulation
          i.Composer as self-assessor
          ii. Auditor (musical connoisseur) as expert-assessor
          iii. Audience (musical aficionado) as external-assessor
     b. Collecting Process and Product Data to better understand how and what students are learning
     c. Open-Construct Rubrics
VIII. Using Open-Construct Rubrics with students across K-12 settings
     a. Introducing key questions
     b. Thinking analytically about compositional work
     c. Engaging critical reflection on creative work
     d. How to answer the question “How many of these do I have to write?”
IX. Closer: What are we measuring when we engage with students to assess musical learning (in and
beyond composition)?
X. Question & Answer Opportunity for Participants (questions welcomed throughout)
Statement of Workshop Participant Engagement:

Participants will be actively engaged in discussion throughout this presentation as we:
● consider the overarching goals of music education, particularly as related to composition
● critically examine common rubrics for assessing composition to determine the assumptions
that underpin their design and use
● identify how compositions are assessed outside of educational practice
● practice using a model for composition assessment
● listening to compositions and examining how they have been assessed by students and their
teachers