Tennessee Musician - Vol. 67 No. 1

TM
President’s message
Jeff Phillips
Greetings! I’m
sure that many of
you are busy working
on your holiday
programs, working
on portfolios,
maybe finishing
marching season,
and busy getting
ready to wrap up
this semester and
plan for another
simultaneously. As
with every year,
especially in education,
change is upon
us! That’s going to be one thing we can always count
on. While we can’t control many of the directives
and initiatives that are required of us, what we CAN
control is our reaction to them and how we CHOOSE
to deal with them. Many of these items shouldn’t be
thought of as things that impede our classroom day to
day teaching, but as ways that we can become better
at our own teaching, organization, and advocacy.
For this issue we will look at the new standards. Before
you begin rolling your eyes and telling me how
you just got familiar with the old standards (and how
you never did figure out how to do the singing/playing
of instruments or that improvisation thing), take a
breath!
To be successful in the classroom, we all have
to have definable goals and a focus of direction for
our instruction. The key component of making these
goals is to have a set of standards for what you expect
to accomplish and how you want to get your students
to the desired level. Whether you take your standards
for curriculum from an older curriculum guide, state
or national standards, or a tried and true set of goals,
you use standards in your classroom (if you don’t,
perhaps we need to talk…)! Our National (and Tennessee)
Standards have been in place for some time
now and I think we have all had issues with how to
incorporate so many things into our curriculum. How
do instrumental directors incorporate singing? How
do choral directors incorporate playing of
instruments? What about that improvisation section,
and are we all doing composing and arranging? These
have been the subject of discussion for several years
prior to tying the standards to our classroom teacher
evaluations. Now that we have them posted in our
classrooms and are expected to reference these when
we teach, here “they” go and start changing them!
This is where the “new” standards come in. Partly as
an answer to these frustrations we’ve experienced and
as a means to tie what we do in music education to
21 st century skills and college readiness, other teachers
have developed these revisions. This has been a long
process and the “rollout” of the new standards began
last year with opportunities for review from music
teachers at all levels all across the country.
What you’ll find are fewer small standards
and some purposefully broad areas that allow YOU
as a teacher to fit your style of teaching to incorporate
these areas into your lessons and rehearsals. As
we begin to look at these, think of how what you’re
already doing (or have done for years) is already in
line with these areas! Then, how can you utilize these
to better teach your students and assess their performance?
I think you may be pleasantly surprised at
how the areas of “perform, create, and respond” translate
into everyday music education! This is the stuff
WE have been doing all along and now our colleagues
in the school are going to be expected to fit their subjects
into this model. WE have an opportunity to help
them and incorporate MUSIC into all of our subjects
IF we take this challenge and use it to our advantage;
we have a built in advocacy moment just waiting for
us!
Take advantage of the articles and columns in
this issue to spark creativity (or argument!) and let’s
use this as an opportunity to make us better teachers
and our students better musicians. The endless paperwork
and forms, the classroom observations, new
requirements, and everything else we have thrown on
us each year: through all of it, let’s not forget the real
reason that we started doing this “music” stuff in the
first place! In all of those mounds of clerical “stuff”
we teach an incredible art form to our students! YOU
are the most important part of the day for so many
children and YOU are TMEA! - Jeff Phillips
12 www.tnmea.org
TM | Volume 67 number 1