Most-Read #MusicEd Blogs of 2016
As 2016 comes to a close, NAfME wishes its members a safe and happy holiday season. To help you reflect on the past year, we’re providing the readers of NAfME’s “Music in a Minuet” blog a look at the most-accessed articles from the year, followed by two popular music education advocacy articles.
9. What Students Have to Gain From the Arts
By NAfME Member Matthew Stensrud
Beyond a single classroom such as mine, advocates, families, educators, and policymakers committed to education equity must also remain committed to having the arts in our schools.
Why?
Because low-income students often have the most to gain from an arts-rich curriculum. Read more.
8. Effective Lesson Planning for the Secondary Choral Director
By NAfME member Roland Wilson
One perk of music education is that we have the opportunity, as well as the responsibility to steer our students toward needed learning that is framed by curriculum, but not constricted by compulsory yearly testing. We can literally choose where to take our students chorally and what methods we will employ to get there. The Understanding by Design (UbD) framework provides scholarly language and practice to the ‘begin with the end in mind’ tradition that we employ. Read more.
7. Music Teacher Resumes Revisited: Planning, Creating, and Maintaining
By NAfME member Paul K. Fox
Inasmuch as it serves as an extended version of your business card, a “quick look” of your personal brand, an easy-access to contact information, and a showcase of your accomplishments and experiences, it is essential you invest a lot of time on the planning, careful review, creation, and constant updating of your resume. Read more.
6. Ten Tips to Transform a Flutist into a Piccoloist
By Rachel Lynn Decker
Music teachers and instrumental directors often take one of two approaches with the piccolo. They either avoid it encouraging students to stick with the flute because the piccolo is seen as a challenging instrument, or they hand the flutist a piccolo and just assume that he or she will be able to play it. Neither of these approaches sets the student up for success with the piccolo. Read more.
5. Teaching Concert Etiquette
By NAfME member Tom Sabatino
My opinion is that good concert behavior CAN and SHOULD be taught to both students and audience alike. As educators, we should not sit by and simply be observers in this passive-aggressive assault on what was once regarded as “common courtesy.” Just like its cousin “common sense,” we can clearly see that both sense and courtesy are not so common anymore. Read more.
4. How to Teach Your Students the Attention They Need to Succeed
By NAfME Member Walter Bitner
Music teachers in school settings often feel a sense of isolation from the activities happening in other classrooms, and a lack of understanding on the part of other teachers and administrators about what it is, exactly, that music teachers teach. There are striking differences in the way teaching and learning happens in the music classroom when compared to the activities happening in other classes. In the current standards-obsessed education climate, appropriate musical activity in the classroom faces real obstacles in being appreciated, understood, and ultimately funded, because it resists being reduced to a checklist of objectives. Read more.
3. 4 Steps to Use Google Classroom in Your Music Class
By Jacqueline Woudenberg
Recently the district in which I teach started to incorporate more technology into our daily work lives, from laptops to wireless keyboards. For a teacher like me, in my second year, this was greeted with much enthusiasm, as a lot of what I do in and out of school deals with technology. One aspect of this tech-oriented approach to teaching that I adopted is Google Classroom. Read more.
2. Six Music Classroom Management Strategies
By NAfME Members Rachel Maxwell and Jessica Corry
Explain and show students how you expect them to do EVERYTHING. Include even the easiest behaviors: entering the room, where to build instruments, where to store cases, how to set up the music stand as a workstation for the class period (pencil, tuner, warm-ups, music). Insist that routines are done correctly every time and it will become habit for you and the students. Read more.
1. Some Things Every Music Teacher Shouldn’t Live Without
By NAfME member Audrey Carballo
Some folks say you can’t live without love. Others say friends is what makes life worthwhile. Many believe that faith shows its mighty powers throughout our everyday lives. But, I’m here to tell you without these essentials, a music teacher’s life is DOOMED! DOOMED, I SAY! Read More.
Popular Music Education Advocacy Articles
Improving Music Education for Hispanic Students
Hispanic communities face educational issues similar to other minority groups, including the need for adequate funding for schools serving minority and disadvantaged students, as well as other issues with a special impact on the community. The gap with access to music and arts education is also wide. Only 26 percent of Hispanics ages 18-24 surveyed in 2008 received a music and arts education compared to 59 percent of whites. Read more.
The Era of ESSA begins… sort of
Monday, Aug. 1, marked the end of No Child Left Behind as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) became the major K-12 federal education law of the land. NCLB isn’t ending its reign that easily, however, as the 2016-2017 school year is a year of transition for schools across our nation. That means that NCLB is still being enacted as the standing education law to allow schools, districts and states to build their school, district and state plans to meet the goals of ESSA for the 2017-2018 school year. Read more.
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The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) provides a number of forums for the sharing of information and opinion, including blogs and postings on our website, articles and columns in our magazines and journals, and postings to our Amplify member portal. Unless specifically noted, the views expressed in these media do not necessarily represent the policy or views of the Association, its officers, or its employees.
Brendan McAloon, Marketing and Events Coordinator, December 22, 2016. © National Association for Music Education (NAfME.org)
