Assessing Music Teacher Preparation: What do the Best Music Educators Look Like?


The Professional Literature Project of MENC’s Society for Music Teacher Education covers over 50 years of research, with 73 dissertations alone, in our profession. My initial question is what else is left to investigate? My very question, however, is whether we can be satisfied with what is already known. The problem with Music Teacher Education is that it is and will always be diverse, an expression of the kind of society we live in today; and dynamic, a reflection of the kinds of learners we want for ourselves and our students. Therefore, we, as a profession, must engage ourselves in creative innovations instead reactionary reforms.


If indeed a 21st century music educator


must possess certain qualities and competencies unbeknownst to the most successful of our19th what might these be?


century forebears, The National


Council for Accreditation of teacher Education (NCATE) evaluates four areas of competencies for teacher preparation programs: process, content, pedagogy, and field based experience. It is no doubt that technological advances have necessitated new instructional strategies. But has the content of music and the processes in learning music really changed? Research since the 1980s has clarified the distinction between musical novices and expert learners and why musical experiences are required for concept formation (Bamberger, etc.).


The question still


remains if today’s students learn differently.


Is if there a biological or


physiological basis for the shorter attention spans and difficulty in persevering towards long term goals? I believe students behave in those ways their teachers expect them to behave.


All teacher education programs in Alabama are required to create numerous versions of checklists and rubrics to assess all aspects of every program and from different angles (teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, university supervisors, and focus groups consisting primarily of school administrators). Data shows that we are pretty good at producing “experienced non- expert” teachers (Snow & Apfelstadt,


ala breve


Collegiate Faculty Advisor Moya Nordlund


2002) and the same small pool of talented and excited students.


actual practice. The experienced


non-expert tends to follow prescribed procedures and respond to challenges with predictable actions each and every time (p.201). After all, that’s the intention of all NCLB standards-driven assessment models. Instead, I believe we must instill an “expert-like mind-set” to teacher candidates and encourage them to experiment and improvise, even risking failure to further knowledge and understanding. To this end, I suggest we as a profession, look at adopting an “inquiry” paradigm to assessment (Serafini, 2001).


Common traits identified in literature on effective teachers include positive attitudes or optimism, authenticity or personal touch, patience and perseverance, creativity, and sense of humor (Colker, 2008, Ghiora, 2010, Phillips, 2004). Not surprisingly there are many overlaps between teacher and leader qualifications. However, what I often find among teacher candidates is the lack of vision, goal- orientation, or the willingness to take risks and admit mistakes. They may also lack have high expectations and flexibility (Ostrow, 2008). It appears that the rigid nature of requisite teacher competencies (at least that ones that count towards certification) is on a tangent to the qualifications of a teacher-leader, especially in the notion of risk taking.


Back when I was first certified as a music teacher thirty years ago, I made my share of mistakes and learned from them. I have tried to facilitate my students to vicariously learn through my mistakes but this rarely worked. Without a contextual framework, anecdotes are mere stories. The light bulb does not go off until a teacher candidate step into the same pitfalls. Unfortunately, the consequences of a first year teacher making mistakes are dire – they either quit or are fired, and the institution from which they are trained can be put on probation. This makes me re-think and re-evaluate own current practices in training music educators. I still think reflection is important and effective, but it must be coupled with a video recording of the


To


become aware of the discrepancies between our perceptions of how a lesson went and watching it unfold in real time is an eye-opening experience. Painful as it might be, it is the single most effective way of giving feed back to teacher candidates.


What does the exercise of frequent video- taping do? It shows us in the most honest way what our weaknesses are. Some of the most frequently cited failures of inexperienced music teachers are error detection, pacing, classroom management, and giving clear and succinct instructions. However, after years of observing all kinds of music classrooms, I have come to the conclusion that the cause for all the above failures is not a lack of pedagogy, but a lack of music competence and music preparation. Pedagogy is the product of understanding the learner and the processes of learning; it can be derived inductively by most reflective practitioners. Just like learning any new concept, one must construct it from many varied experiences.


So after a decade of pushing for best practices in the music classroom and emphasizing the latest strategies in teaching, I have made an about turn to push for better musicality in all my music teacher candidates. In addition, we must train these pre-service teachers to think. I must admit that while I was aware of Bloom’s taxonomy as a young teacher, I did not see its relationship to music learning. Yet, today I couch all discussions in and decisions about music in the Bloom’s hierarchy of learning.


I have


observed that the many successes of our music education graduates are due in large part to the rigorous admission requirements placed upon entering teacher candidates, which automatically eliminated our weakest candidates. Students succeed as exemplary music teachers because they are good musicians who are good thinkers, the two requisite elements for becoming expert teachers, not just experience non-experts.


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