We met as a music group in November with the intention of populating the provided Curriculum document only to come to confusion about what we were expected to do. It appeared that the curriculum work at the high school level was considerably different, and at a different point in it's development than that at the elementary level. This was frustrating for the group because it felt like another month of time was spent trying to simply figure out what was being asked of us, rather than on the tasks that affect us directly like our unified festivals, our common assessments, and further developing our band curriculum. With some clarification in the weeks that followed, we learned that populating the curriculum document was not the hard directive we thought it was, and we were asked to choose an activity to compare to the HUUSD Learning Expectations.
So, I gave it a solid try with three of the activities I did this year. The first was a comparison of the LE's with a composition unit the 3rd through 6th grade started this year, the second with the common skills based assessments we do at the 2nd and 4th grade level, and the third was with the student-driven process of selecting music for this year's concert.
See a detailed application of the PS.02.02 Creative Expression rubric to the composition assignment. Scroll down to the second rubric to see my write up. A further extension of this assignment would include demonstrating the use of some basic rules for writing harmony as it applies to adding a second instrument. With this next assignment, or with a deeper revision process of the original assignment, I could apply PS.02.03.
I looked through these performance indicators to find a skills based one that could apply to the 2nd, 4th, and 6th grade common assessments for singing and instrumental, but couldn't find anything that is a direct hit. The skills based one (PS.02.02) is all about creating art, which is great, but the wording is certainly taken from a visual arts perspective. (Maybe PS.02.03 with some tweaking of this language to make it more relevant to skills based instruction in music?) PS.02.07 could work for students to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of their own performance according to our existing singing rubric.
See my attempt to apply PS.02.06 to the process 3rd through 6th grade students engaged with in order to select the pieces for our Spring concert. Scroll down to the 6th rubric. This rubric is much more applicable to visual arts but could work for music.
It is my feeling that these rubrics need some tweaking if they are to effectively guide music instruction. These ones are leaving out the specificity that music assessment requires. I understand that they are intended to apply to all subjects and, in my opinion, they are written for and by visual arts teachers.
