MIENC Music Learning Leadership Institute
2008-2009 Team Certificate Program

A key strategy for Learning Laboratory School scale out dissemination is the creation of sustainable pre-professional Guided Intern programs for music majors and in-service training for teaching artists. The documentation of Guided Internship program through Cumulative Digital Portfolio Processes displayed here is the best way to understand how important this resource is for learning laboratory programs that depend on high quality documentation, assessment, and teaching skills of these interns who learn to see how action research based ‘music plus music integration practices” can transform the quality of music programs and serve as posit ive agents of change in the whole school culture.

Several of the Guided Interns stories are also embedded in articles published in NEC-MIENC Journals over the past eight years. In Journal III for example, over a hundred pages are dedicated to ‘portraits and portfolio” of guided internship projects and research.

Randy Wong: CMIE Layered Leadership

Jessica Reed: Agent of Change Vignettes

Charles Morgan: Leadership Vignette

MLL Seminar 4 Guided Internship: Atrium

MLL Seminar 4: Minneapolis

As training programs embrace music-in-education constructs, curriculum practices, and assessments, documentation will become more central to the study, analysis, and dissemination of music-in-education practices for reasons we’ve noticed over the past FIPSE grants including:

1. Music-in-education practices are still considered innovations and need to be recorded
2. Sharing is necessary so others needn’t reinvent similar practices
3. Critical analysis for self-growth (artist-teacher-scholar) requires a common platform where to store evidence and artifacts
4. Eventual design of a certificate program will demand high standards, practical only though a careful review of documented practices and artifacts

The MIENC Online Digital Portfolio System is an Internet-based technology designed for the creation, display, and storage of user-designed “mini websites” that function as school and student portfolios.

Overview

Jessica’s portfolio gives an extensive narrative of the journey that led her to take on the position of Music Specialist at the Atrium school, and the triumphs and challenges she met when she got there. It his heavily narrative-based, the information unfolding in the manner of a story. This narrative is supported by many lesson plans, observations, and written and pictorial reflections by the students. Together, the narrative and artifacts expose the rich and expansive curriculum established at the Atrium School that includes singing/solfege, rhythmic activities, instrumental music, opera outreach, composition, and creating opera.

Note that the first fifteen pages of the portfolio chronicle Jessica’s experiences before even arriving at the Atrium School. This provides valuable insight into the elements of the teacher’s persona that are carried into her curriculum and teaching methods. Note also, starting on page 40, the attention given to multiple entry points, and on 47, the extent to which the children embraced lessons taught from this standpoint and the types of musical problems they were able to solve.

Read about Jessica’s Guided Internship Portfolio

View the Atrium School LLSN Project Portfolio for 2007-2008