Kansas Music Standard #6: The teacher of music has skills in evaluating music and music performances.

Knowledge

• The teacher understands criteria for evaluating the quality and effectiveness of performances, compositions, arrangements, improvisations, and teaching materials.

Performance

• The teacher facilitates student self-evaluation of music and musical performances.
• The teacher demonstrates techniques for evaluating music and musical performances.

    As an extremely active student, singer and accompanist, I see a very large variety of musicians and types of music. Through these performances, I have learned many stylistic traits, new tone and timbre colors, groupings of students and conducting styles. As a result, I use as many of these techniques and varieties of music in my classroom, both elementary and secondary. The first example is of an anticipated listening lesson for elementary students to hear different voice types, language, and instrumentation in Musical Theatre examples. To help with these open-ended concepts, I helped guide their listening through a graphic organizer we worked through together as a class. 

    As for the secondary music classroom, evaluation is a daily process and will happen 4-20 times during a class hour. As a prepared conductor, I will know exactly how I want a phrase (for example) to sound before it even comes out of their mouths. If it is not what I wanted, I will rephrase my instruction, give them a new constructive criticism as well as one thing they did well, give them a new technique to help them make it better, then repeat the phrase again. This cycle repeats itself over and over again until the class is finished and all vowel shapes, quality of tone, tuning, rhythm, and many more elements are as it sounded in my head or slightly modified if that perfect sound cannot necessarily be acquired at that time and place. A perfect example of this constant preparation-listen-assess pattern is found in a lesson plan I created for a piece called "Frohlocket ihr Volker auf Erden" for a high school mixed choir. I had a sound concept of what one phrase needed to sound like and I did not quit until I received the sound I had anticipated. In the end, our ears are the most pliable body part we have and as a music educator, they must always be supple in order for growth to happen.