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Culturally Responsive Music classrooms attend to the identities and unique strengths of learners, and also move them towards independent musicianship through skillfully crafted instruction and learning experiences. A key factor in high quality instruction is assessment. Not to be confused with grading, assessment is an on-going process of examining progress and patterns in learning over time.
Assessment leaves a bad taste in many music educators’ mouths, but it doesn’t need to! High quality, culturally responsive instruction necessitates assessment because it helps teachers to better attend to the unique needs of our learners, and it helps our learners to think about their own work to reflect and refine it. This process of reflection and refinement is key to helping our learners develop independence.
Today, I’m sharing two quick tips for authentic assessment in our culturally responsive music rooms!
Tip #1: Craft learning objectives that are clear, and provide options for students to show what they know
A key component of a Culturally Responsive Music classroom is student choice. When we make space for students to choose the best way for them to show their understanding, we are showing respect for the diversity of learning needs and supporting students in becoming expert learners who can increasingly make decisions to be more independent.
Here’s an example:
- Original learning objective: Students will sing a two-part harmony using a melody and descant.
- Revised learning objective: Students will maintain their own part in a multi-part vocal ensemble.
Both objectives do require students to advance their singing skills, but in the revised objective, they have choice in how they want to sing in harmony: it could be a melody and a descant, or it could be a 2 or 3 part canon, or even a partner song.
By writing the learning objective at the beginning to be flexible enough for students to engage with in multiple ways, we set our instruction and assessment up to be responsive from the start.
Tip #2: Embed assessment tasks into authentic learning tasks
The best learning tasks are themselves a way for teachers and learners to assess their understanding. Instead of thinking of assessment as a separate thing to do after the learning has taken place, embed the assessment right into the learning task. This type of learning is how the real world works, and by making our learning tasks more aligned with how learning happens in the real world, we help students to see how our instruction is relevant and meaningful.
Here’s an example:
Students explore movement and form as choreographers who are tasked with creating a video to be used for music class warm ups that show musical form. Through the task itself, students need to select music with a clear form, analyze the form, then select movement choreography to demonstrate the form. Not only is this task an actual real world scenario, but through the various learning tasks the learners are in fact showing their understanding (assessment!).
Authentic Assessment: An important factor in responsiveness
Remember, culturally responsive music classrooms work responsively to the frames of reference, assets, and needs of the learners. Disconnected exercises to “test” student knowledge don’t contribute to a robust, and multifaceted approach, however when we incorporate assessment authentically into the learning tasks we not only make learning have more meaning, but we make it more relevant, too!
How do you embed authentic assessment into your instruction?
I would love to know how you’re embedding authentic assessment into your instruction! Share below or share on social media and tag me: I’m @ACuthbertson10 on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
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Until next time,
Ashley
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Thank you :). It was very interesting to listen and read at once. Assessment for me a big problem, when I must see every learner at once. So, I am happy for your offers and hope to choice in my class, too.
You’re welcome, Rita! So glad you found it helpful. Yes it’s definitely a challenge for us music educators to assess well when we have so many students all at once, but it can be done! I’ll be sure to talk more about accomplishing that in a future blog post.
Thank you for the tips! I look forward to exploring your website more.
Hi Brandy! You are very welcome!