This week’s resource is by Kelly Parkes and Frederick Burrack; Developing and Applying Assessments in Music Classroom. I focused on Chapter 9, “Using Assessment for Program Improvement”. My notes weren’t extensive on this one, but there were a few ideas that I took away from reading the chapter.

Firstly, the idea of an annual program review in itself is one that isn’t new but is nice to have it be solidified as important. Obviously we’re always going to be improving upon what we’re doing, and I really like how they’ve discussed the importance of assessment being used to inform decisions within the review. Obviously assessment data can relay a great deal of information about a program to a teacher and anyone else who may be looking at it, and Parkes and Burrack emphasized the importance of having outcomes based assessment, which demonstrates a students’ ability to meet a standard, in helping inform decisions about a program.

Something that I thought was interesting was their idea of a curriculum map. I’d never heard of this before, but they described it as an educational tool that sequences student learning across course offerings (similar to how we considered consistency in our year plans). A curriculum map is also supposed to embed assessments. This is probably something that I will do more research into because it sounds like a useful tool.