Professional Development for music education

            Professional development seems farfetched for music teachers. For my school district, professional development days are usually for the core classes. Myself, along with my arts colleagues, are required to attend these meetings. I do see the point of them because they benefit my students and, in the case of classroom management, they improve my own teaching methods. Meetings about special education is helpful for my classroom. It would be nice if there were more professional development meetings about music and the arts. One thing that frustrates me about these meetings are when we are working on the Ohio Improvement Process (OIP) and an arts representative comes in and tries to help. The keyword being tries. Most of the time, this instructor is a core teacher and helps us with lessons we can use in our own classrooms about the core subjects. Most music teachers are performance based and cannot provide a language arts or a math lesson. It would be nice if they knew our standards and give us ideas on how to help keep our students interested in music and art. “Professional development needs to be relevant to a teacher’s personal interests and needs” (Bauer, 2014). Since we do not have that kind of option, I really enjoyed reading the book this week about other ways to do professional development. Having a personal learning network (PLN) has shown me to use other resources for the classroom. Before this class, I never was a fan of Twitter. My fear of it was how easy it can be for anyone to join; especially my students. I make it a priority to make my personal life private and I am able to do that in the privacy of my own home. From being in this class, Twitter has given me the chance to meet other professionals who have shared resources that have worked in their classrooms. Another idea that the book mentioned was the use of blogs and Google+. I was very skeptical of writing in a blog every week for this class because I am not an open person. From it, I have met wonderful teachers that gave me some great ideas to use in my classroom and I have also learned to improve my teaching from them. When this class is over, I plan on continuing with my blog and adding others in my circle through Google+. As long as everyone has the same goal, a blog would be a great way to meet other professionals.

This class has shown me many resources that I plan to use in my classroom. It has also shown ways to be organized. I learned about bookmarking in college and found it very easy when saving materials. This method is something I still use today because it keeps me prepared when I teach and helps me keep lessons in mind when I want to use them later. I mentioned this in one of my blogs before about Facebook. I knew two fourth grade teachers who made a page for their classroom. They and their students, and their parents, were the only ones allowed to be members. If anyone missed a day in class, the students were able to get their materials from this page. On the first page, you see the words “this is a safe environment”. They also wrote their intentions which were to keep the students on track; in case they missed anything from the day. Although Facebook is very public, it can be another resource that is able to keep the teachers organized if used in the correct way.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music.