Google is offering 200 people involved with education to their office in Boston for a day of training. They have asked anyone interested to apply to attend this event by publishing how 2015 will be the best year for student learning! For me, this is a year of clarity. I've been teaching music for seven years and lately have seen a group of teachers in Massachusetts and surrounding states working on new common assessments for music. I was interested in it at first and then the more I looked into it, found that assessment became the cornerstone of the music class and took over the curriculum, much like what it is doing in other subject areas which have high stakes testing. I was looking to simplify the expectations, take out the randomness in the assignments I was giving, and provide clear definitions as to why I was teaching what I was teaching. One day I was on Pinterest and saw the Recorder Karate curriculum...and thought, oh yeah, this works for 3rd and 4th graders why can
.....musings of a music educator.