Educational Artifacts

This artifact is a segment of a fifth grade lesson that demonstrates a extensive informal assessment. In the music classroom, informal assessment is vitally important to making sure that students are understanding and engaging with what you are teaching. Every time students perform in any way in the classroom is an opportunity to assess, and a teacher must make decisions on the fly about how best to help their students achieve the quality and accuracy of music making that we all strive for. In this lesson excerpt, the students are working on decoding, an element of Feierabend's Conversational Solfège, in which they have to assign solfège pitches to notes that they hear. The accuracy of their response informed what I said and did next moment to moment. The same was true when we sang "Ghost of John" in a round, and the students got to a point where they were able to do so very successfully.

Upon beginning my high school student teaching placement, my cooperating teacher expressed interest in a new set of pep band music to play at high school football games. Over the next week or so, I put together these brief, simple arrangements based on a combination of arrangements the band already had and some additional ones that I added myself. This was put together in Sibelius music notation program, which I had on my personal computer. This project helped me to feel like I was immediately making a contribution to the school's musical culture, and it allowed me to practice making well-written, well-formatted musical documents and to explore some features of Sibelius that I had not yet had the chance to use. Some of these arrangements were ones that I remembered using in my own high school's pep band, so this project also allowed me to connect my own musical background more directly to student teaching very quickly.

My high school placement included running the 11th-12th grade symphonic band at the high school. On some days, the entirely rehearsal was run by me exclusively, giving me the opportunity to work closely with a very skilled high school ensemble. The band was relatively small (at least by Long Island standards), having most parts only covered by one student. This meant that every member of the band needed to be confident in their own part in order for us to create a cohesive whole. Every rehearsal begins with a very similar routine: warm up with a Concert Bb scale followed by a Concert Ab scale (this day I decided to change it to an Eb scale to match the key of the first piece we were working on) and play a chorale from Claude T. Smith's "Symphonic Warm-Ups for Band." This was our second day playing this particular chorale, meaning that the chorale was not particularly refined and needed extensive work. While I did not stick exactly to what was outlined in this plan, it still gave me a baseline of what to work on in rehearsal. 

While a student at Crane, I was a member of the Crane Latin Ensemble, a large ensemble which regularly performed at the school and in off-campus gigs. For this ensemble, I wrote an arrangement of the jazz standard "A Night in Tunisia," which we performed at a concert in Crane's Snell Theater. To create this arrangement, I spoke with multiple professors with experience in Afro-Cuban music and Latin Jazz and read Rebeca Mauleón's "The Salsa Guidebook" and "101 Montunos" to ensure that I was creating something as stylistically authentic as possible. While I was writing this with the Crane Latin Ensemble in mind, the orchestration matches fairly closely with a standard jazz big band, which means that I could apply this arrangement, or ones similar to it, to jazz bands that I may have the privilege to direct during my career. I plan to continue creating arrangements and original compositions that could be used in my classroom and that can enrich my own personal understanding of different styles of music as this did. 

This narrative tells the story of a high school band student who I call "Michael," who taught me a lot about what it means to know your students and differentiate instruction based on that. It is a story of how, in spite of his many struggles to latch onto what we were learning, we found success through aspects of his musicianship that I had no idea were there. 

NYS Teaching Standards Element I.3 (HS)

This artifact describes a day in an IPC, or Intensive Program for Children, music class. IPC classes contain exclusively students with profound developmental disorders which inhibited them from being able to participate in a more standard classroom. These classes are extremlely small, never including more than 8 students, and provided me with the opportunity to work one-on-one with students who needed very extensive supports. This narrative details the activities we did in that class and the strategies we used to help our students to engage. 

NYS Teaching Standards Element I.3 (ES)

This lesson plan was from a high school music theory class and took plae around 10-12 weeks into the school year during my student teaching. The class was relatively small, about ten students, and every student was a member of the music department. It was a mix of wind, percussion, string, and voice students who had all been performing ensembles for many years. This is, however their first music theory class, so while they had begun the class already knowing (some of) their major scales and key signatures, they did not have a strong theoretical background. Most students, however, were able to somewhat intuitively understand many of the concepts based on their prior experience. This class was a great experience to teach and was a very different kind of class than the others that I have taught. 

NYS Teaching Standards Element II.1 (HS)
NYS Teaching Standards Element III.2 (HS)

This narrative, written very early in my college education, describes the reasons I entered the field of music education and the role that music education has played in my life. It demonstrates an ability to think critically about my own experiences and how they have shaped me. It also, within the context of other artifacts, demonstrates the ways that my philosophies and attitudes have evolved. Additionally, this demonstrates an ability to reflect on and utilize scholarly works in my own writing about music education topics.

Similar to "Why Music Education?", this artifact describes some educational philosophies I have and have developed in my time at SUNY Potsdam. This narrative is directly tied to the Literacy Education in the Arts course that all Music Education Majors take at Potsdam. It is an evolution of my existing philosophies but with some additional context regarding both general education and some concepts that tie directly into music education. For example, my understanding of "literacy" and "text" evolved tremendously during my time in the course, as I began to understand them as broader concepts outside of reading comprehension.

Music education majors at Crane, regardless of their ensemble concentration, all take a practicum course in teaching elementary general music. For this course, I created a 5-lesson theme-based unit plan and then taught it to a fifth grade student. For privacy reasons, no video of these lessons are included here. In lieu of that, I have provided a categorized reflection on the lessons. Specific lesson plans are mentioned in this reflection, and those lesson plans are also provided through buttons below. This series of lessons shows competency in Lesson Plan design, fluency in the language of education, ability to execute on plans, and ability to reflect on my own teaching. Not all of the lessons went exactly according to plan (in fact, many of them diverged greatly from what I had been aiming for), but all of the lessons delved into useful information and skills.