What Have I Done?

With this post, I am wrapping up my fourth class in the DLL program. One-third of the way to my master's degree in education. My master's degree in education. That phrase has always intrigued me. I don't know if this is true for other languages, but I love the way that, in English, we tend to say "I'm working on my PhD," or "I'm getting my HVAC license" as opposed to, say, "I'm working on a master's degree." It's a very optimistic way of phrasing it--it expresses an assumption that there's a high school diploma, a bachelor's degree, a tech certification, a doctorate, whatever, just waiting out there for each and every one of us, and meant just for us. We don't have to create it out of thin air. We just have to take the steps to go get it.

We'll Start At The End....

In my last post, I outlined goals (both Big Hairy Audacious ones and...Little Bald Reticent ones?) for my innovation plan, which can be found here. In that post, I used a modified version of Fink's 3-column table to map out goals, activities, and assessments for the Technology-Assisted Music Course that is the keystone of that plan.

In this post, I've taken a different approach to do a deeper dive into one part of that class. Using the "backward design" principles put forth in McTighe and Wiggins' Understanding By Design (2005), I designed one of the culminating projects of the TAM course: an "audio self-portrait," in which students attempt to express part of their personalities through self-produced audio recordings of their own compositions.