Break Chronicles: Day One of Winter Break and Some Deep Thinking About Music Therapy Students, Interns, and New Professionals
The first day of winter break is always a time where I make lots of plans for future me to accomplish. I rarely complete any of those plans. I have things that I need to get done, including cleaning the kitchen. I also need to do laundry, pack a bag, and prepare for the rest of my winter break. I am starting my task list and am getting ready to start things off after I post this essay.
Lately, my thoughts have been taken over by thoughts about how people learn. I have really been focused on current music therapy students and interns because that is who I work with in my music therapy job. This is probably going to sound a bit preachy or critical, and I am not going to apologize for that tone - mainly because I feel like there is a generation of music therapy professionals who have not been able to access the types of critical thinking and problem solving practices that are really needed to be a successful music therapist in the professional world. I see the lack of access as part of the educational practices of the past two decades, and I wish it was different. It isn't, but the effect of the educational policies of the 2000's and 2010's is very real - in my opinion. In addition, the pandemic did not help with the acquisition of these crucial (again, in my opinion) skills for our current students moving into the role of new professionals.
What do I mean?
In 2002, the president at the time, George W. Bush, signed a bipartisan educational policy into law. The policy, entitled "No Child Left Behind," was meant to measure learning gains through the use of standardized tests and to link that performance to educational funding. In my area, school districts were rewarded for high test scores and punished for low test scores. The punishments trickled down to the teachers but the rewards did not. (There are some links to different analyses of NCLB at the bottom of this post. I have not read through them completely, but I am going to be doing just that...)
So, you may be thinking, "So what??"
That is a valid thought, I can tell you. I have been trying to figure out some trends in my recent interns that have really made me wonder about education and how students are being taught to access information and to think. If I calculate the birth dates of my recent interns, I realize that most of their early educational processes were part of the NCLB era, and that starts to identify some of the situational struggles that I have with how they learn and how they demonstrate task mastery.
Okay - time to reveal my biases.
I did not like NCLB. I felt that using standardized test scores to compare student achievement from year to year was not a valid way of measuring performance. My sister, a second grade teacher, had to test her students each year on the tests provided to her by the various governments that oversee education. If her 2003 students performed well on the tests but her 2004 students did not, she was held responsible for all of the declines. There was NO provision for the way classrooms often come about. There are years where classrooms include lots of high achieving learners and years where the kids just aren't at the same level or interest. All of the evaluation, though, was based from year to year.
My solution? Individual education plans for everyone! You could easily use the tests that most teachers use to evaluate whether students are learning in the place of standardized tests. If a student enters my sister's second grade classroom at a reading level of Kindergarten, month 2 and leaves that classroom at a reading level of second grade, month 9, then that child has gained a significant level of reading under the tutelage of my sister, her teacher. By evaluating each child based on their starting point, you can easily see if the teacher is doing the job.
Unfortunately, no one asked me what I thought about federal policy (other than a professor in my Law in Special Education course in grad school), so we continued the pattern of standardized tests with punishments meted out on teachers if students were not performing. In my opinion, the focus on test scores significantly harmed students and educational gains during this era in United States educational policy.
I seriously do not think that my interns can problem solve at the levels of my earlier interns. When I give them a chance to be creative, they are unable to do so. They do not compose music. They want someone else to do that.
Now, please know that I am generalizing here, but enough of my interns have had these difficulties recently that I am trying to figure out how to teach these adults the skills that I learned in elementary school. I really feel like we have failed these students. I am going to work on ways to encourage my interns to gain the skills that I want them to develop before they end up out in the professional world and can't find a song about client-specific needs and have to figure it out on their own.
Are you an educator or an intern supervisor? Are you seeing these trends happening or is it just me? I welcome all comments, concerns, questions, debates - all that because I am not sure if I am just imagining these things or not.
In other news - it is my break, so I am thinking deeply about many different things. This tends to be the time of year where I get very deep into thoughts about interns and music therapy and personal reflection and resisting the urge to create goals that I will never accomplish...
But...
Happy day after the solstice!
The White House. (n.d.) Fact Sheet: No Child Left Behind has raised expectations and improved results. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/education/
Shapiro, A. &Thompson, A.S. (n.d.) Why band-aids don't work: Analyzing and evaluating No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in light of constructivist philosophy, theory, and practice. Forum on Public Policy. Retrieved from: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1099438.pdf
Dee, T. S., & Jacob. B. A. (2010). The impact of No Child Left Behind on students, teachers, and schools. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Fall. Retrived from: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/2010b_bpea_dee.pdf
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