My inquiry group read An East Oakland Odyssey, by Elena Aguilar, describing her interactions with select students in her specialized middle school English classroom.

We really keyed into the idea of papers, exams, quizzes, etc not resonating with all students, not being a way for students to demonstrate their understanding.  Whatever the reason may be — EAL status, disinterest, short attention span, simply not engaging with writing and/or reading — we wanted to find a way to show this to our colleagues.

We came up with an idea to create theory tests based on a small variety of challenges.  Whether it’s a a new language or not understanding the music-specific words yet, being more advanced or still struggling with the content, we devised a baseline theory test upon which to build our challenges.  And gave them to our peers.

Baseline 1 Baseline 2
Challenging 1 Challenging 2
Gifted 1 Gifted 2
Attention 1 Attention 2
Language 1 Language 2

The reactions we got we mixed, based on the test someone received.  Being keen teachers, those who received our challenging quiz were eager to dig through their brain to figure out the answers, even after class.  Others drew very lovely pictures

or gave up entirely (particularly on the test written in Wingdings).

It was interesting to then try to brainstorm how else we could get this kind of information.  Ms. Aguilar has great success with Eddie by encouraging him to present, perform, discuss, lead whenever he can.  So how can we provide similar opportunities for our students?

We had some trouble coming up with methods that wouldn’t demand hours of a teacher’s time.  Do we really think this is the best way to instil the importance of music theory and sight reading?  Is this because we’re still stuck on how we were taught? Is it really that important?  Who decides?  All are questions we will face in our teaching careers — and which I’ve had to contend with twice in my short practicum, alone.  I am still looking for a satisfactory answer — my reasoning may not resonate with the struggling student.  So here’s where we get to experiment, try to figure out how we can inspire that student.