The 60-page book (including an audio CD) is published by Naxos. The i-Pad app can be explored in a brief YouTube video.

National Association for Music Education (formerly known as MENC) Memberships include subscription to several publications. A combination NAME/NYSSMA membership is $108 annually. The NAME website hosts a lively General Music discussion on-line.

New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA)

NAME and NYSSMA are a combined membership: when you join one, you belong to both.

Music Educators Association of New York City (MEANYC) $30 annually, 1st-year teachers free.

MEANYC hosts various workshops throughout the year, as well as sponsoring the adjudication of NYSSMA festival competitions around the city. Their latest newsletter, Crescendo, is available here.

Texas Music Educators Association TMEA is included here as an exemplary professional organization: see especially what’s available under the heading Resources.

The Children’s Music Network is organization of  “teachers, performers, songwriters, radio hosts, and parents who care about the quality and content of children’s music.”

Office of Arts and Special Projects (NYC-DOE) sometimes plans day-long clinics during the school year, focusing on the Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts.

Music Educators Association of New York City (MEANYC) has short (2-hour) clinics on Saturdays at locations all over NYC.

UFT Music Teachers Committee was dormant for several years, but recently resumed offering a program of full-day Saturday clinics for music teachers, during the year.

Orff and Kodály chapters in NYC sponsor day-long Saturday events in Manhattan, with L.I. Orff workshops at Hofstra University.

Metropolitan Opera Guild

Westminster Choir College in Princeton, NJ, offers some one-day-only music education courses on Saturdays.

NYU’s Kodály Summer Institute is an excellent intensive program for Kodály certification held each year around first two weeks of July.

New Jersey City University has Orff certification classes in July.

National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has a certification for early and middle childhood music teachers. NBPTS certification is a rigorous process through which accomplished teachers earn a distinction after completing a course of assessments and portfolio submission. Information about the Music Educators certification and the NBPTS standards for early and middle childhood music can be downloaded as a PDF file.

The clinicians are two master choral conductors: Dianne Berkun (right) Artistic Director and Founder of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Jeannette LoVetri (left), BYCA’s Voice Specialist.

BYCA’s Cross-Choral Training™ method is functional voice training applied in a group setting, based on the latest information on voice science and knowledge of the young voice. Through the development of vocal registers and resonance adjustments, singers develop the capacity to perform music of diverse genres and styles authentically, and to respond to musical and expressive demands of the most challenging choral repertoire.

The workshop will be held at the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Academy, 179 Pacific Street, Brooklyn (near the F train stop at Bergen Street) from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM on Saturday, January 28.

The calendar is an initiative of the Council for Living Music in partnership with the American Federation of Musicians Local 802. It’s part of their effort to counter the trend among Broadway producers toward using canned music in place of pit orchestras for Broadway shows. The site uses GoogleCalendar and includes many Juilliard recitals and some drama as well as music.

• Carnegie Hall has a program for 3rd through 5th graders called LinkUp! and one called Music Explorers for grades K through 2. Each program combines learning soprano recorder and trips to attend (or even participate in!) concerts at Carnegie Hall. Their Online Resource Center is a rich collection off videos, lesson plans and other materials (free, but you have to register on-line for access).

• Metropolitan Opera offers a variety of opera programs for schools, as well as partnerships and professional development through the Metropolitan Opera Guild including the Urban Voices initiative.

• American Ballet Theatre is listed here because the music is such an integral part of the experience, and they offer free schooltime concerts, as well as free tickets for students to attend regular performances in the Spring.

• New York Philharmonic has a variety of programs listed. Their School Day Concerts get booked very quickly each year.

• Jazz at Lincoln Center has programs for schools and teachers, as well as a jazz curriculum website for children to explore on their own.

• Brooklyn Philharmonic offers excellent school time concerts in the BAM Opera House and at other locations.

• JazzReach usually schedules a few of its outstanding multimedia performances with the Metta Quintet in June at Manhattan’s John Jay College.

• Young People’s Chorus of New York City, the resident chorus of the 92nd Street Y and WNYC, successfully emphasizes choral work from multicultural sources. Every spring, YPC hosts a big choral directors workshop.

• Juilliard School of Music has several programs to support music learning in public schools. See their Morse Fellowship.

• Brooklyn Conservatory of Music has a Music Partners program which takes the place of a full-time music teacher in some public schools (P.S. 29 in District 15 is one). In some cases the partnership can be arranged to work along-side of a regular DOE music teacher. The BCM’s Music Partners director is Dorothy Savitch.

The NYCDOE’s Office of Pupil Transportation enables schools to reserve buses on-line. Each school is assigned a UserID and Password, for access.

According the Arts Achieve grant application, the project is meant to create “standardized ways of assessing student achievement in visual arts, music, theater, and dance in benchmark years: 5th, 8th, and 12th grades.”  Hopefully, the assessment results will translate into better classroom instruction and higher student achievement. Use of digital technology features broadly in the project and in its eventual wider application, in tools for communication, for assessment feedback, and for accessing arts curriculum.

During the grant period, the project will serve approximately 7,200 students through an experimental design involving the random assignment of 48 schools into 24 treatment and 24 control sites at the elementary, middle and high-school levels. In its outcomes, however, Arts Achieve could impact not just 1 million-plus children attending city public schools, but also serve as a national model.

The project’s stated goals include:
•     Improve student achievement in the arts through the development and implementation of balanced arts assessments that are aligned to high student content and academic achievement standards.
•    Translate the standards and information from assessments into classroom practices that support improved arts achievement for all students.
•    Promote innovations in student and teacher access to content and assessment feedback through the use of technology.

According to its grant application, Arts Achieve will result in the creation of on-line / open educational resources that have been validated and informed by the results of the assessments and made available nationwide. The grant could offer schools new ways to introduce technology into arts classroom practice — for example, to facilitate art-making, documentation, research, feedback, reflection, collaboration and file-sharing within and beyond the schools: student-to-student, student-to-teacher, student-to-parent, and student and teacher to partnering arts institution.

The pilot project will unfold over a five-year period, and its performance and content assessments will be aligned with the NYC DOE’s different Blueprints for Teaching and Learning in the Arts and with Common Core Capacities for Career and College Readiness. The formative and summative assessments will help some of the city’s youngest artists to reflect on and enhance their experience and performance in the arts and also to connect to resources that some high-need students might not otherwise access. The project also hopes to produce objective measures by which the partners can assess what they believe to be the significant correlation of arts achievement on improved English Language Arts performance.

According to a July 2011 article in the New York Daily News, the arts assessments could be extended to all schools by 2014. Unlike conventional multiple-choice exams, such assessments would examine how a student engages and responds to a work of art. As the director of the NYCDOE’s Office of Arts & Special Projects, Paul King, told the Daily News, “They look at not only the skills, but the understanding of what students gain from engaging in the artistic processes.”

Artful Learning Communities

With one of the partners, Arts Connection, the Office of Arts and Special Projects is extending this work in a project called Artful Learning Communities II: Assessing Learning, Transforming Practice, Promoting Achievement. According to the project proposal, the original Artful Learning Communities (described at the Arts Connection website) “successfully changed teacher practice through action research focused solely on formative assessment practices.” The new undertaking is intended to “measure student achievement in the arts with newly-developed psychometrically-validated and reliable summative performance assessments.”

Participating arts specialists “will learn how to take summative data, analyze it, determine what students know and don’t know and use this information to modify instruction practice, plan lessons and deliver on-going formative assessment to measure individual student progress.”

On Saturday, November 19, from 9AM-1PM, Jim Frankel, a presenter from the Soundtree company will host a workshop on ways to Integrate Technology into Your Music Classroom, exploring new software titles, hardware, websites, and curricular resources across grades K-12.

On Thursday, March 15, 2012 from 4:30 PM-7:30 PM, Marisol Ponte-Greenberg will lead a workshop on Traditional Music of Argentina: Music Styles, Instruments, Folk Songs and Choral Repertoire for Children. Packets with transcriptions of songs, translations and teaching techniques will be available, and Ms. Ponte-Greenberg who teaches chorus and general music at the Abigail Adams P.S. 131 School in Queens, will give a PowerPoint talk on her recent research as a Fulbright scholar in Latin America.

For all the UFT/MEANYC workshops, there is a $10.00 fee with advance registration/$15.00 at the door, and refreshments will be served.

Other workshops in 2012 include “Music & Dance,” Musical Theatre, a New York Pops brass and woodwind workshop, and a presentation on the Little Kids Rock guitar program. Details will follow here.

All of these workshops satisfy hours of Professional Development Credit and the necessary forms will be available at the workshops.

Click HERE for a registration form to print out and mail in. For more information, visit the MEANYC or the UFT Music Teachers Committee websites.

The Office of the Arts and Special Projects is set up to support and enhance instructional programs in art, music, dance and theater, in grades preK-12. Each school receives a budget line for arts education based on pupil enrollment. How these funds are spent is determined by the school’s principal, in accordance with established guidelines. During the reorganization of the Department of Education, budgeting is a far more transparent process than it was in the past, and a great deal of information about how schools spend money is available publicly, on-line.

The OASP site is an on-line source for several critically-important documents:

the curriculum guide Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts (it’s a PDF file, heavy in color and graphics: not practical for downloading and printing). Note: The Blueprint “strands” on Music Education are also available in a more practical poster format (both are available for purchase; see below).

Getting the Blueprint:
Your school’s principal can order it through FAMIS: E-Catalog, search under the category “Internal Services” with the following item numbers:
TLAR10032- Music Blueprint Book- $7
TLAR10033- Music Blueprint Poster- $3
Include specific contact information on the purchase order for the delivery of materials. The necessary funds should be scheduled in Object Code 0998. For a free download of the Blueprint in a PDF file, click here.

The DOE’s brief Benchmarks for Music Learning can be examined online — a series of general statements that summarize expectations for children’s learning and abilities in grades 2, 5, 8 and 12.

In addition, the OASP page offers much valuable information on ArtsCount. This is the Department of Education’s program to ensure that arts education is not overlooked in the drive toward accountability in city schools (see post below). Components of this program include the Annual Arts in Schools Report, the Learning Environment Surveys, and Annual Compliance Review. Some of this information can be accessed on each school’s DOE-hosted website, if you click on the link to “Statistics” on the left column.

The OASP site offers links to many other valuable resources including grant sources and activities for students, including the Mr. Hollands’ Opus Foundation, and VH1′s Save the Music Foundation.

Learning Support Organizations

Each school is associated with one of the School Support Organizations (SSO). Music teachers should seek to contact the arts coordinator for their school’s SSO, and to be aware of any workshops or other SSO initiatives to promote arts education.

 MUSIC AS TEXT: ANALYZING MUSIC FOR PERFORMANCE AND APPRECIATION

As in the past, the 2011-12 school year offers a series of professional development events for music teachers in New York City public schools. There’s a cost for the series that must be paid for by the school at the pleasure of the principal, and participants must register on-at a dedicated website (CVENT). The cost of the series is $100 per elementary school participant for the full workshop series (3 days).

All workshops will be held at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School, 35-12 35^th Avenue in Queens, on Tuesday, November 8, 2011, and then on Monday, January 30, and Thursday, June 7, 2012, from 8:30 AM — 3:00 PM.

This year’s series will provide “will provide practical, performance based strategies for articulating and demonstrating the ways in which music empowers students to ‘decode’ complex text.”

“These three sessions will focus upon one, specific aspect of the music specialist’s mission: to encourage students’ appreciation and participation in music thus developing their ability to read music-related text. In doing so, the goals and outcomes for our students contained within the Music Blueprint and Common Core standards are supported.”

Participants are expected to attend all three workshop days. The registration deadline for this workshop series is Tuesday, October 31, 2011.

The Fine Print:

1. Obtain permission from your principal to attend all workshop days.

2. Ask your school to purchase this course through the FAMIS e-catalog.

3. Obtain the document number for your school’s payment from your Principal or school purchasing personnel. You’ll need to provide this number for the on-line registration form.

4. Complete the online registration at the CVENT site. Confirmation will be sent once registration is completed and payment is approved by the Office of Arts & Special Projects.

 Payment Instructions for Schools

The school must make payment before the teacher can register for this workshop series. Please purchase this course directly through the FAMIS e-catalog using the FAMIS item number TLAR10089. This course is an Internal Service and can only be purchased using funds in Object Code 0998. Please list the teacher’s name on the document. When payment has been completed, the teacher gets the FAMIS document number (IS) which is required to complete the online registration form. For assistance with the payment process, schools can contact their network operations specialist. Payment(s) will be refunded if, for any reason, teacher registration cannot be accepted.

(In past years, participants were permitted to attend even when payment had not been completed, as long as they could provide a signed note from the principal indicating an intention to pay.) Principals will need to purchase the workshop on your behalf as a FAMIS item, so it’s important to discuss the date and your plans, in advance of the registration deadline.

For further information, contact the Office of Arts and Special Projects at artsandspecialprojects@schools.nyc.gov or call 212-374-0300