Your Role in Music Teacher Evaluation


Many of the issues we face in the today’s educational systems are a direct result of the call for accountability in the United States. That call is the direct result of a cry of concern about the integrity of people in our governments, businesses, sports, religious entities, and even nonprofit organizations. While we cannot easily compare the education of children to the practices of a lending institution, there are some interesting similarities.


Doug Orzolek


Generally, there are three parts to any basic model of accountability:


• a description of the ideals, goals, aims or objectives of the entity


• a list of resources needed to act on or develop those ideals, and


• an explanation of any consequences or outcomes related to any actions taken.


Clear and concise communication of each phase is critical to success.


The good news is that as a professional community, music educators have considerable experience in every stage of accountability as described in this model. We have learned to describe our goals and objectives through national, state, and local standards, and we are able to adapt them for application in our classrooms. We are skilled at using technology and other tools as resources to improve our work in various settings. Over the past decade, our profession has developed and learned to implement myriad assessment tools that allow us to evaluate our students’ work and improve our own. In spite of this, we have not yet established a suitable means of reporting the learning that happens in our classrooms.


Look at What Students are Learning


Why is this sharing of what our students learn so important? As Scott Schuler notes, “Across America, policymakers are turning to the results of student assessments as a means of measuring and improving teacher performance. The best of emerging teacher evaluation initiatives push us to do better what we should have been doing all along.”1 I could not agree more with his assertions, and I believe that one of our profession’s largest goals should be establishing archetypes that present evidence of student learning in our music classrooms. Ultimately, I would much prefer to have stakeholders gauge my work on what students are learning rather than any other factor. But that means I will need to spend some time figuring out how to expound upon the


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amazing learning in music and related areas that’s happening on an ongoing basis in my classroom and community.


You might wonder about the extent to which someone at a higher education institution should be ruminating about any of these things. But the truth is that the accountability movement is also alive and well at the college/university level, and the result is that professors are being asked two questions: What do students learn in your classes? and How do you know they have learned it? Many discussions and seminars are being held on my own campus to help professors heed this call and, for the most part, we are working together to find solutions and sharing our results with one another.


Articulate a Clear Position


So where do we go from here? How do we help one another with this issue? If, like me, you believe that our best work starts in the classroom, then it falls on each of us to consider the implications of this crusade. First, we should each be able to articulate a clear and concise position on how we would like to be evaluated and how we should share those ideas with one another as well as those who will be judging us. Since each of us would want to be evaluated by the good work happening in our classrooms, we should be able to describe what high-quality learning looks like. We all need to develop and use carefully-designed assessments that allow us to report on our success in helping students meet standards and objectives. And since this call might require us to articulate how/what we might change in our teaching, we must all learn to reflect deeply and communicate how we will improve our work. Finally, we need models on how to report on all these things. For example, take a look at the model I developed in the late 1990s and described in the November 2004 issue of Teaching Music.2 It’s not perfect, but it might help you to start thinking about how you could do something similar in your school.


These are things that most of us already do and do well. The new part is that we must find ways to articulate and report these things to our leadership and stakeholders. But if we hope to improve the entire profession, we must be willing to share our individual work in these areas with one another. We might start by focusing on one of the previously listed ideas (for example, our home-grown assessment tools) and dispensing them to our music-educator colleagues in our school district for discussion and analysis. We


Michael Eckern


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