Thomas J. West Music

It's the end of the first marking period, and things are so backlogged administratively at my school right now that I have had little time to assess student performance. We had four classes remaining, so what did I do? Playing test? Instead, how about a performance clinic?

First I described to the students what a clinic is. It's basically "American Idol" or any other reality performance competition where a panel of judges gives live performers immediate feedback on a performance. I noted the difference between the unskilled and unprofessional commentary delivered by a critic like Cowell on American Idol to the scholarly and skilled professional constructive comments of Ben Folds on The Sing-Off. Also, it's a clinic, not a competition, so no one will be "voted off the island".

The students must be prepared to play anything we have covered so far this year. That includes warm-ups, scales, ensemble excerpts, and excerpts from their solo pieces (every student is working on solo repertoire). They do not know what their excerpt(s) will be ahead of time. They perform, and I give them immediate feedback and invite their classmates to do the same.

This works well in my teaching setting for several reasons:

1. My ensembles are small (my largest class has 12 students)

2. The students are attending a school with a strong, vibrant community based on positive reinforcement and pre-professional training in all aspects of their demeanor and skill development. It is a safe environment for them to play in small groups or as a soloist.

3. All of my student to varying degrees have a desire to improve their playing skills and musical knowledge.

4. My students are expecteed to an in general are practcing on their own time.

Once I assign their excerpt(s), they perofrm, and they receive feedback, they then focus on the excerpt(s) as their practice material for the next two classes. Their assessment grade is based on how much improvement they demonstrate from their first clinic session to their last. This is a more effective way of getting thm to produce for several reasons:

1. It takes as much pressure off of having to play in small groups or as a soloist as possible.

2. None of their excerpts have to be a finished product

3. It gets the students to focus on an excerpt and strategize a way to make as much improvement as possible in as short a time as possible.

At a time in the school year when they are crammed to get their cyber classwork done before the end of the marking period, they have a major music theory test in guitar class (there's college freshmen who couldn't pass this thing), a playing test in piano, performance tests in dance classes, and the middle school play opening this weekend, providing a performance assessment such as this takes a lot of the pressure off and additionally gets them to listen critically to their classmates and devise intelligent musical commentary.

This article (c) 2011 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.

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