A DOE tool for reflecting on your music program
This is a 27-page pdf file of another colorful and beautifully-designed DOE document that teachers and administrators and others can use to reflect on the practice of teaching and learning music in their schools (click the picture to download it). This link is to the Music Reflection Tool for elementary schools, but there are equivalents for upper grades as well.
It’s organized into four areas:
- Organizational Practice: School Environment: including the school’s physical resources/space, staff/instructional time, teacher support, arts data use
- Instructional Practice: curriculum, teaching and learning
- Student Outcomes: student engagement, demonstrated arts skills, knowledge and understanding
- Arts & Cultural Service Providers: school’s use of in-school residencies, exhibitions and performances
The Music Reflection Tool is made available for your download and perusal from the Office of Arts & Special Projects webpages, where you can also download the Blueprint for Teaching & Learning in Music, and learn about upcoming professional development events.
Music Education Standards in New York City
Below are links and descriptions of the following:
- National Standards for Music Education
- NY State Arts Standards for Music
- NYC Blueprint for Teaching & Learning in the Arts
For NBPTS standards for teachers, see the Professional Development page.
About the Standards
National Standards for Music Education
1. Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.
2. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.
3. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments.
4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines.
5. Reading and notating music.
6. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music.
7. Evaluating music and music performances.
8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, & disciplines outside the arts.
9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture.
. . . That first item brings to mind a wonderful image: a young person who is “singing, alone and with others.” The existing National Standards for the Arts, New York State standards for the arts, and the NYC Department of Education’s “Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts” are all based on a single very important notion: that every child has the right to a rich, complete education, regardless of his or her race, or social class, or sex, or ability. They are written in an effort to guarantee this right, so it won’t be overlooked as city and state school systems organize their budgets and educational programs.
They’re directly useful for almost everyone involved: even with their tortured academic language, our national and state standards and the NYC Blueprint provide teachers with valuable reference points and opportunities for thinking about what we do each day. Yet two questions keep nagging if you actually sit and read (or skim through) these documents: who wrote this stuff? and then, in what school did they envision all of this activity taking place?
“Accountability” is a favorite word in a lot of current writing on education. Balanced literacy calls for kids to engage in accountable talk, and schools, supervisors, and teachers are meant to be accountable for what children learn — or what they don’t. (The current mania for high-stakes testing is a symptom of this: education policy is being shaped by people trained in law and business administration, so the numerical data can take on a nearly mystical importance.) The standards help establish exactly what is expected of everyone.
Standards emphasize two basic curriculum categories: content (meaning what will be presented to the learners) and achievement (meaning what the learner will know and be able to do as a result). The NYC Blueprint calls these “subject-based curricula” and “outcome-based curricula.” Performance standards (or benchmarks) specify the abilities a child can be expected to achieve at the end of a predetermined course of study.
Below are links to some of the documents that make up our national and NY State arts standards as they affect the teaching of music in pre-kindergarten through 4th or 5th grades. In some cases, detailed descriptions of the standards can be downloaded as PDF files and printed out.
National Standards for Music Education
NYC Blueprint for Teaching & Learning in Music
New York State Department of Education’s “Standards for Arts Education” as they apply to music are linked below:
