Context: Music Teacher Assessment and Program Evaluation

Informal assessment and evaluation practices are part of our everyday lives, as we make decisions about what to wear or discuss our favorite sports team’s performance with colleagues. Similarly, stakeholders routinely make informal judgments about music teachers and school music programs based on a variety of inputs: a parent’s email interaction with a teacher, an assistant principal’s unannounced observation, or state choral festival ratings.

These informal evaluations are often for private purposes, use information assembled in one’s head, and combine observations with existing knowledge (Owen, 2020). Many stakeholders’ informal assessments of music teachers are informed by their own prior experiences with school music. In this chapter, I will address how concepts underlying informal observations might be extrapolated to more formal frameworks and procedures.

Music Teacher Assessment. Teacher assessment provides structure to set instructional and professional goals that align with state policy and district curriculum, articulates a common framework for dialogue among stakeholders, incorporates mechanisms for professional accountability and growth, and offers some degree of objectivity to guide what are often high-stakes conversations about teachers’ careers and students’ education. Yet, music teacher evaluation is not without challenges. Often, it is politically contentious but mandatory, continually changing, not music specific, and conducted by evaluators without a music teacher background—creating a potentially adversarial context for music teacher evaluation (Bernard & Abramo, 2019).

Further, music educators hold varied conceptions of teaching effectiveness that may include core teaching practices, pedagogical content knowledge, and/or skills and knowledge important to successful music teaching (e.g., Haston & Leon-Guerrero, 2008; Miksza, Roeder, & Biggs, 2010; Millican & Forester, 2019). These conversations often do not include a teacher’s skill and knowledge related to composition, pedagogical content knowledge related to composition, or a teacher’s dispositions with respect to including composition within their curricula.

Bernard and Abramo (2019) offer a pragmatic and hopeful outlook on music teacher assessment. Although it may be used punitively, “it ultimately can be—and should be— used to help teachers to dialogue with other educators and improve their teaching” (p. 6). Ideally, music teachers proactively leverage their expertise to advocate for their decisions, engage with evaluators and evaluation systems, and grow professionally.

Program Evaluation. Stakeholders may combine existing knowledge and observations in different ways (e.g., an administrator who is an enthusiastic avocational vocalist and community theater performer, a parent who has never taken a music class, a student who listens to and produces hip-hop music and is choosing a string instrument to play in a required “exploratory” class). To navigate informally and personally constructed perspectives, a formal process of program evaluation may be useful, considering:

What is the underlying basis for selecting evaluation criteria? What evidence will be used and on what standards will it be judged? How will conclusions be made and presented (Owen, 2020)?

As with teacher assessment, program evaluation can have both positive and negative effects, including increasing awareness of student engagement, justifying increased funding, and deepening understanding among stakeholders (Moreno, 2014). While these efforts “can introduce unforeseen tensions and animosities within the personnel, curriculum, and context in the classroom, program evaluations have the ability to uncover and disclose unintended factors that constitute the success of a program” (p. 33).

Music teachers often “lack a working knowledge of program evaluation methods that can help them further refine music programs at the local level” (Ferguson, 2007, p. 4). Program evaluation may include varied data (e.g., student performance assessments, budget expenditures, stakeholder perspectives). Findings may be used summatively, as a “report card” (Ferguson, 2007, p. 4), or formatively to guide decision-making. Further, what constitutes a “program” might vary, from a unit plan to a sequence of all offerings in a school district (Ferguson, 2007). While a music administrator may wish to facilitate a more holistic curricular program evaluation, I will primarily focus this chapter toward teachers evaluating courses and students they teach.