Running Head: FINDING THE BALANCE

Maura Foley
Finding the Balance: Music Education in a Standardized World
Michigan State University





















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Finding the Balance: Music Education in a Standardized World
Beginning the Journey
Ella Fitzgerald once said, the only thing better than singing is more singing.
This idea permeates the culture of music education. Often, music educators work in their
own world, where music trumps all. At times, this means these directors ignore state and
national standards as the performance of selected repertoire ranks high. After leaving my
undergraduate program, I was prepared to teach my subject matter; choral music.
However, I was left believing that there needed to be more of an academic side to music
education in order for it to survive budget cuts and to prepare musicians with substance.
This belief led me to stray from the usual path of choral conductors in higher education,
who would usually pursue a higher degree in choral conducting or music theory, and
instead work towards a degree in teaching and curriculum with a concentration in
administration.
During my time in the Masters of Arts in Teaching and Curriculum, I found that I
valued three distinct aspects of education. The first was bringing an academic aspect to
music education. I found that I felt more valued as an educator when I could demonstrate
student growth with data to back up my claims instead of simply using concert
performances to validate growth. Secondly, I began to see that music education shared
the same types of struggles as general education. We have a need to include technology
and face issues of discrimination and privilege just like any other program, yet one often
only hears about these issues in the context of general education. Finally, I learned to see
the importance of myself as a teacher leader. When I initially thought of pursuing a
concentration in administration, I thought it would only serve me years from now when I
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go on to earn an administration degree. However, I found that considering new ways of
being a leader not only in my subject area of music but within the context of my classes
improved the success of my program.
Academic Music
While facilitating musical experiences is the core of my job, I have come to
believe that I do my students a disservice when I fail to introduce academia into my
choral music classrooms. In my first artifact, Assessments in the general Music
Classroom, which is my initial application essay for the program, I discussed how the
changing face of education in Michigan caused me to challenge the idea of music first in
my classroom. As a first year teacher, I have spent a lot of time working out exactly how
to balance my idea of presenting a curriculum with the realities of teaching in a
classroom governed by an administration that is working to align itself with the new
policies of our state government (Artifact 1, S2). Before entering the program, I knew
this was a bridge I had to cross, but was not sure of how to find a solution to the problem.
While academic work is important, I knew it needed to be authentically integrated into
my classroom for it to be worthwhile and effective.
In TE 818, I worked on an action research project (Artifact 2: The Use of iconic
Manipulatives in Rhythmic Dictation, S2, G1, G2) that began to guide my beliefs for how
academic work would manifest in a music classroom. At the time, I was working in a
general music classroom. As such, I encountered a lot of confusion from others in my
field when I stated my intentions to emphasize state standards in my classroom instead of
purely focusing on creating a fun class. However, I found that students could still have
authentic musical moments when the standards are emphasized in the classroom. At the
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same time, the level of my final performances did not suffer as a result of moving away
from focusing solely on the music. Instead of focusing on the finished product, as many
music teachers do, I instead chose to focus on the process.
Focusing on the process of working to the finished product, or performance, is an
idea that I continued to build on during my time in this program and something that I
have worked to bring into my everyday teaching. As an elective teacher, it would often
be easy for me to skirt around student achievement data as there is currently no
standardized test to measure what my students learn. As a result, I make all of my own
assessments. Too often, principals do not pay close attention to achievement data from
specials teachers, as that data does not affect the school ranking. Because of this, many
teachers create assessments that that determine only how students perform in a concert,
which is done as a group and not individually. While I could easily do this, I believe it is
not doing enough for my students, so I hold myself accountable, and push other specials
teachers in my department to do the same, by creating authentic assessments that focus
on content standards. Further, as part of my evaluation process I have to create goals for
myself, and since the school does not require me to present student achievement data at
the end of the year, I include that as part of my evaluation so that I am forced to both
administer assessments and provide proof that students achieved in order to have a
successful evaluation. To focus on the process in this way, I have to pull concepts from
the music I teach my choirs. For example, I may ask them to identify musical rhythms or
intervals from a certain section of a song. This still helps students to learn the song, the
product, but it teaches them to prepare the piece by learning the concepts that come
together to make the song, the process.
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Bridging the Gap: Universal Educational Challenges
Throughout this program, I completed classes with a majority of core class
teachers. At times, both they and I considered that my experience as an elective teacher
would be too far off from theirs as a core teacher to relate to each other. However,
without fail I found that teachers face universal challenges in education regardless of
their subject area.
As schools work to prepare 21st-century students, integrating technology into
lessons becomes vital. As I worked through this program, I had opportunities to both
utilize technology in new ways myself and to implement lessons that provided new ways
for my students to learn with technology. My fourth artifact, Re-purposing Technology
lesson Plan (S2, G2) deals with a repurposed lesson. Many teachers have trouble
integrating technology into their classes because they fear that it will take too much time
to set up, however, when done to provide the chance for students to participate in
learning in new ways that would not be possible without its use, the time investment is
worth it. Using technology is a universal need of all teachers, which helped me learn to
bridge the gap between my music class and the rest of the school.
Learning to recognize and work against privilege, discrimination, and bias is
another topic that I encountered during my program that related to all teachers
universally. During my coursework, I explored issues ranging from gender differences to
socialization and privilege. In Artifact 3, a blog entitled Accommodating Differences that
I completed about my struggle with gender differences, I described how though I work to
treat my male and female students the same, there are physiological differences with their
vocal development and ranges that require differentiation. In my fifth artifact,
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Socialization and Privilege in Social Justice Education (S1, S3), I explored issues that
related to identifying and working to fight institutionalized discrimination. These types of
issues often go unnoticed as we are socialized to see certain actions as normal when in
reality they favor those from the group with power. One example would be that schools
follow a Christian calendar, always having school off for Christmas, whereas students
who follow other faiths may need to skip school to observe their personal religious
holidays. Being able to discuss these issues with my peers in class helped me to see that
these types of individualized lessons, based on gender, would still be acceptable and
necessary. Other teachers had similar issues, whether the need to prepare for potential
behavior problems or to handle gender-based conversations, which helped both of us,
core and special teachers, see that we share stake in these universal educational issues.
During my time in the program, I switched from teaching kindergarten through
fourth grade general music to teaching fifth through twelfth grade choir. Along with the
change in grade levels came a change in the type of school. My first job was a small
district, serving less than one thousand students, in a rural farm town whereas my new
school was a large, urban district where the population was overwhelmingly from low-
income families. As I began to navigate the new issues of privilege I faced as a middle-
class, white teacher in this new district, I had the opportunity to share my experiences,
successes, and needs with many other core teachers who faced similar teaching situations.
We learned together how to identify times when our tests showed bias or when the
institution of school worked against our students and brainstormed ways to alleviate these
problems. Though our subject areas and schedules differed completely, by focusing on
shared goals within education, we found commonalities.
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Developing Leadership
My greatest shift in thinking during this program came in the form of classroom
leadership. When I began this program, school leadership was something that I saw only
happening at the administrative level. While I saw teachers being leaders in their subject
areas, I did not see it as a vital part to the program or school success. However, as I
progressed through the concentration in leadership I completed as part of this program, I
began to see that teacher leaders are essential. I began to see that to have a choir that
worked together as a team for the common purpose of having a high level of
performance, I needed to see myself as the leader.
Leaders, I learned, can only perform their job when their followers trust them.
The most important step in building a cohesive and functional team is the establishment
of trust because followers will only get behind someone they trust (Artifact 6:
Leadership Philosophy, S4). In the context of my classroom, this idea extends further.
Singing is a very personal activity. An instrumentalist can hide behind their instrument or
blame it for squeaks or out-of-tune notes. A singer, however, has only their voice. As a
result, students will often not sing, or will refused to experiment with new singing
techniques, when they do not feel that they are in a safe, trusting environment. Building
such a space is the direct responsibility of the director as a leader of that group. I learned
to see that students looked to me when other students laughed or made fun of another.
That little act of disrespect became nothing if I was quick to respond with an appropriate
consequence as students saw that I valued the safety of the room enough to stop a lesson
to maintain the environment.
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Artifact 7: EAD 860 Unit 2 Essay (S2, S4, S6, G3) is a report on the book that
probably had the biggest impact on my leadership philosophy. Better: A Surgeons Notes
on performance by Atul Gawande (2008) described how Gawande never settles in his
work. Over and over he insists that being good is never enough when one can be better.
In my own life, I saw that I often come across as a competent teacher, and because of
that, my principals have never given me much critique in my evaluations. It would be
easy for me to settle for the status quo, but instead, I see that to be the best leader I can, I
need to constantly push myself to be better in every aspect of my job. This pushes me to
explore self-directed learning opportunities, like learning parts of musical braille when I
had a blind student (Artifact 8: EAD 860 Unit 3, S2, S4, G3) and consistently working to
be a teacher leader, even though I am still relatively new to teaching (Artifact 9: Final
Reflective Narrative Outline, S4). Being a teacher leader, I have learned during this
program, is less about the number of years one has been teaching and more about how
willing they are to strive to be better. I see veteran teachers settle with following the
group without ever challenging themselves to do more, and I know that I would never
stay happy in this profession if I let myself settle in the same way.
Conclusion
During my time in this program, I went from being a first year teacher with lots of
questions to a third year teacher with even more. Though I have learned insurmountable
lessons over the two years, I also have found that there are places where I still have a
desire to delve deeper. Learning to bring music education into the mainstream values of
my school is a job that is not always easy, but I have already seen improvements in my
program because of these efforts, so I stay motivated to continue down this path. Many
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times, it is other teachers who give me the most pushback as I work to bring music up to
the level of core classes, but when we can find ways to relate all subjects back to the
overriding educational challenges, they often see that I am working towards the same
goals they are in their classes. By being a teacher leader, both within my specific program
and in my school in general, I can help to get other teachers to follow my vision of music.
While I do not see this program as my terminating degree, it was an essential part of my
learning journey as I work to become a teacher leader.