Masters Portfolio

Master of Music in Music Education (Orff Schulwerk Emphasis) — George Mason University

Music teachers have one of the most joyful jobs in the world, but professionally, we are often alone. There is traditionally only one elementary general music teacher in a school, or even shared among several schools. We are one of a kind. Some of us find ways to remedy this—professional organizations, cross-district collaborations, supportive specialist teams—but in our classrooms, the simple reality is that the majority of us are on our own. We are responsible for our own habits, our own innovation, and our own growth.

Throughout the process of earning my Master’s of Music in Music Education from George Mason University, I have come to trust in myself as a competent and creative music educator. I entered my first year of teaching with no education training whatsoever; it was my sheer love of music and of children that got me through. My Orff Schulwerk Level I training, taken the following summer, gave my lessons shape and my curriculum direction. The next summer I embarked on my master’s journey, and it was through this program that I have found my footing. My coursework at Mason has nourished my work as a musician and artist, helped me expand the subject matter I teach, and encouraged me to reflect on the inner workings of my classroom. After two years in the program, I can confidently say that I am a better teacher because of it.

Not all of my coursework focused specifically on music education. Some assignments, and even some entire classes, addressed me simply as a musician, and rightfully so: I cannot expect to effectively teach my students a skill that I myself do not have. In my Teaching Improvisation course, I was often asked to improvise on an instrument, sometimes including my own voice. These improvisations (Artifact 2) exposed me to a type of music-making that I have not traditionally been comfortable with, but to which I adjusted over the course of the semester. In Analytical Techniques, I completed my final paper, “Lyrical and Harmonic Emotion in Moxy Früvous’s ‘Fly’” (Artifact 4), on one of my all-time favorite songs, one that I cannot imagine ever using in my classroom. In Orff Level II, my movement study on a spinning top (Artifact 8a)  was especially meaningful because my peers asked me to perform it in our Level sharing. The process of developing that movement study was so powerful for me that I am strongly considering training to be an Orff Levels movement instructor. In the meantime, my students benefit from my artistry through my modeling and careful teaching.

Some of my master’s coursework taught me about musical concepts with which I was previously unfamiliar, pressing me to explore how I might approach these topics and skills in my teaching. Indeed, this was the entire premise of my Multicultural Perspectives elective, which reviewed the traditional and contemporary musical practices of many cultures other than my own. In my worldbeat lesson plan (Artifact 6a), I imagined using “Kye Kye Kule,” the Ghanaian gathering song that opens all of my classes, as the basis for a group worldbeat composition. My final paper in that course, a resource document on Nordic folk music (Artifact 6b), was more exploratory, discussing a variety of Nordic musical traditions and the context in which they developed. While my academic courses typically provided me with information and enhanced critical thinking skills, my Orff training helped me develop some concrete skills, such as playing the alto recorder. For my Level III recorder pedagogy assignment, I chose to write a lesson plan for introducing the alto recorder (Artifact 8b), since neither my students nor I had played it in the classroom before. Seven months after I wrote the plan, I taught the lesson to my students. It was a great success; many of my students are now adept at alto recorder, and we are performing the piece in our showcase next month.

Perhaps most importantly, my master’s work has given me the time and resources to reflect critically on my own teaching and the systems I teach in. In fact, the very first assignment of my degree (Artifact 1) asked me to explicitly name and describe issues relevant to my work, framing them as problems to solve through research. My personal philosophy of music education (Artifact 3) was the first time I had consciously positioned myself—as both teacher and musician—within the context of established music philosophers and educational theorists, giving my work a sense of significance that I had not felt in it before. For my paper “The Effect of Motioned Pitch Contour on Tunefulness in Rote Singing” (Artifact 5), I collaborated with my Elementary II class for an action research project regarding the efficacy of one of my teaching habits; when I discovered that the data supported my habit’s usefulness, my students were just as excited as I was. I partnered directly with a student for the second time for a short piece on performance anxiety (Artifact 7), in which second grader Kammy and I reflect on her experiences on the stage. Finally, my final for-credit assignment for Orff Level III (Artifact 8c) asked me to condense three Levels courses and two years of Schulwerk-based teaching into one single-spaced page. That assignment forced me to sharpen and solidify my own image of what music education can and should be.

I am the only music teacher at my school, and earning a master’s degree has not changed that. What this experience has done, though, is prepared me for a career full of learning, questioning, experimenting, listening, and thoughtful teaching. It has empowered me to take creative risks in my classroom, and to explain to others why those risks are vital to my students’ educations. It has given me the confidence to formalize my hybrid Montessori–Orff teaching approach and to share it with other educators, marking the beginning of my journey as a presenter and teacher educator. The two years I have spent in this program, as well as the two years of teaching that came before it, represent a training period, a stage in which I was finding my footing through study and practice. Now, as I embark on the rest of my career, I do so with the knowledge that every choice I make is informed and intentional. I might be the only music teacher at my school, but I know that I am more than enough.