From an Assignment to a Company
Nearly 30 years ago, I turned in my Masters Project at Teachers College, Columbia University to Dr. Lee Pogonowski - my advisor - as part of the requirements for graduating with a Masters Degree. I spent over a year on the project, which focused on how to implement and assess the National Standards in Music Education with technology. What I did was write a lesson plan and an assessment for every National Standard and its sub-standards, for elementary, middle and high school - over 60 lesson plans and assessments. Little did I know then that almost 30 years later that project would become the seed idea for the company that I founded, MusicFirst. Even though I was in the digital dark ages when I worked on the project (you couldn’t record more than 30 seconds of audio into a computer without extremely expensive equipment), I knew that when used as an enhancement to teaching and learning and an archive of assessment data, technology in music education was a very important part of its future.
While many of the lessons plans and assessments that I wrote back then now obsolete, it was fun to review the document and see just how much of it is still applicable today. This work from project ultimately led to my doctoral dissertation, which is titled An Evaluation of a Web-based Model of Assessment for the New Jersey State Core Curriculum Content Standards in Music, which was published back in 2002. I thought it would be fun to share a couple of the lesson plans and assessments from my work back in 1996. Unfortunately, I no longer have the original Word file or PDF, so I can only share images of each page. Enjoy!
The ideas from this project, later expanded upon in my dissertation, were an attempt to illustrate how technology could be used in the music classroom in a wide variety of ways: from a curriculum delivery standpoint, to technology integrated projects and assignments that made students use higher order and critical thinking skills - specifically focusing on using their own creativity to demonstrate their understanding of the lesson objectives. The lessons and assessments that I wrote were a direct inspiration for the Content Library in the MusicFirst Classroom, and believe it or not, a few of those lesson plans live on today inside of that library. What wasn’t available 30 years ago was software that lived completely online. In fact, that wasn’t even in the realm of possibilities back then. When I wrote my dissertation in 2002, that idea was definitely a possibility, but still a few more years off in the future. I actually turned in all of the lesson plans from this project to MENC (now NAfME) for publication consideration. Many of those lessons actually made it into an important document at the time, Strategies for Teaching Technology, that focused on the standards and music technology. That, in turn, kickstarted my career outside of the classroom, and ultimately led to what I am doing today.
I wanted to share this story about my Masters Project because I often hear from undergraduate and graduate students about the disconnect between the assignments that they are doing as a part of a course and the “real world”. I hope this serves as an example of the fact that you never really know what the potential is for the work you do for an assignment. For me, I worked on this because it was a personal interest of mine - it always has been - the intersection of pedagogy, assessment, standards and technology in music education. That, in a nutshell, is what MusicFirst is all about.
