Assessment

After determining what we want our students to learn, we needed a system for evaluating whether or not students had learned the Power Standards. As mentioned on the Power Standards page, grade-level teachers mapped out how and when the identified skills would be taught and assessed across grades 6-12.

Then, these teachers (operating in the role of instrument specialists) selected melodic etudes that met these criteria from the lesson materials at the different grade levels. That process generated the following document:

Students are evaluated summatively once every six weeks using rubrics we developed based off of solo and ensemble ballots and have refined each year:

They are also evaluated formatively using the same rubric each lesson. This way students are familiar with the language used in the rubric and have a good understanding of their level of performance before going in to a summative assessment. There is more information in the Grading section of the site on how we do this using Infinite Campus as well as in the Responding section of the site and how we use AwesomeTable.