The following is an adaptation from the Randy Wong’s article “Portfolio Documentation in Context,” to be published in the upcoming issue of The Journal for Music-in-Education. Reprinted by permission.

Through the creation of a specialized MIE Guided Internship, students with research interests in assessment methods can undertake positions in the MIE Research Center as MIE Portfolio Archivist-Analysts. Guided interns who choose this persona undertake the responsibility of acquainting themselves with our MIE Portfolio Library (which includes individual student, class, and cumulative Concentration portfolios from the inception of the MIE program in the late 1990s) and the portfolio process.

Portfolio Archivist-Analysts are also familiarized with similar portfolio work done in other Research Center and National Consortium projects; for example, that of the LLSN School Portfolio System. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts work hand-in-hand with Documentation Specialists to ensure that the appropriate types of documentation are being collected, and both roles help to inform their class peers, guided internship mentors, and teaching faculty of particular issues, concerns, or successes that the portfolio program may need to address.

At the end of the semester, MIE Documentation Specialists and Portfolio Archivist-Analysts meet to assemble class portfolios that will serve as an additional record of a particular course. Portfolio Archivist-Analysts collect incoming student class and internship portfolios and digitize them in accordance with the MIE Digital Portfolio System. Once students’ portfolios are digitized, MIE faculty members electronically annotate them with reflections, questions, feedback, and scores. And when students receive their hard-copy portfolios back, they also receive a copy of the digital, annotated version. At the same time, students can opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase Program, which serves as the repository for student work that we can use for publication on our website or in this Journal. Likewise, those portfolios are made available for other Conservatory students who are interested in learning from their peers’ work. Thus, all students who participate in the MIE Concentration program (and by default, the MIE portfolio process) become active members of the “wider gamut of individuals” that educational philosopher Howard Gardner suggests is necessary for a system like this to function. Additionally, Gardner’s own views on the regularity of reflection can help us to better understand how and why the MIE portfolio process is important to those that are active in it:

By asking students to keep and review process-folios regularly, we hope to involve them in constant reflection on their activities and to allow them the opportunity to monitor and to learn from their own growth and even their own setbacks. Ultimately, we hope that these process-folios can become rewards in themselves as well as a tangible record of an artistic apprenticeship.

With the creation of an ecosystem (affectionately referred to as the “M-i-Ecosystem”) the centerpiece of which is the student/guided intern and his/her portfolio, we are hoping that students may start to recognize that the partnership of teaching and learning is a lifelong endeavor, and that the skills that they hone while creating their portfolios are applicable whether or not they eventually choose to become teaching artists, researchers, or professional musicians.

Please note: We respect our students’ privacy and will not publish links to their portfolios on our website unless the student has chosen to opt-in to our MIE Portfolio Showcase program.

The MIE Portfolio Showcase program posts excerpts of your portfolio (chosen at our discretion) on the MIE@NEC Website, and helps to make visible the terrific work that our students do. Participants in the MIE Portfolio Showcase receive no compensation for their participation, and we will conceal the identity of all portfolio authors before publishing portfolio excerpts. Participants may also opt-out of the MIE Portfolio Showcase at any future time. To opt-in to the Portfolio Showcase, please contact MIE Program Coordinator Randy Wong (617-585-1299) or email randy@mieatnec.org.

–Randy Wong

Randy Wong is Program Coordinator for the Center for Music-in-Education and Information Architect for the Music-in-Education National Consortium

Lyle Davidson has done something really remarkable this semester in structuring his “Music, Learning and the Brain” class (informally referred to around here as “the brain class”). For the first part of our class, we’ve been studying John Ratey’s lucid book “A User’s Guide to the Brain” (2001).

We took the first five class meetings to engage with this text in an in-depth way. Our class discussions focused on outlining and clairifying our understanding of this material, everything from flow charts about brain functions to creating clay models of the brain to build fluency with its contituant parts. The text is a terrific and engaging book which communicates the new picture we’re developing about the brain and how it works in non-jargon terms and with very approachable stories and metaphors. The most profound thing that I can state simply from our study is that viewing the brain in the old way, like a machine that simply works correctly or doesn’t, is very outdated and we would be more effective to look at the brain like a colony of organisms (neurons) that is growing, evolving, and reshaping itself in response to stimulus every single day of our lives, from conception to death. Therefore, in a very physical way, education is “changing our brains” and there are much fewer limits on what we can do with our brain than we usually imagine.

However, unlike most science-based course which I’ve participated in, we’re not going to continue in this detailed text-based course of study, and the semester’s learning will not be assessed by either in-line or end-of-semester examinations on the material. Instead, both the remainder of the class and the methods by which we are assessed will be something very different. We spent yesterday’s class brainstorming how we could create a new direction or new modality for the class. In this new mode we break off as individuals and small groups to do our own research, readings, projects, documentation, and learning in “applied topics” which connect what we have been studying to areas that we are excited about. These applied topics — which range from how the brain reacts to our diet to how to use a new understanding of our brains to re-think pedagogical topics to how we can understand the brain’s role in the social aspects of music — are chosen based on the direct personal interest and connection that each classmember has with them.

In structuring the course in this way — 1) An initial burst of intensive study and more traditional academic study with a common text and fast assimilation of new material, 2) a pivot node where the established learning strands come together in a brainstorming session, 3) and explosion of new, individualized veins of application and discussion which are based on our common reference of the text we’ve studied, and 4) a final culmination of our explorations in which our research, work, and portfolios are presented — Mr. Davidson has created at way to present a science-based topic in an engaging manner through it’s direct personal application.

I am thoroughly enjoying the course and I find the topic to be of immense interest. I’m excited to see how our brainstorming session results in a multi-threaded discussion in which topics that we are passionate about related to the material are explored and discussed.

This experience begs a natural inquiry question: We are familiar with some of the most standard academic classroom study/assessment arcs from having experienced them over and over. If this is an innovative model for structuring a class, what other innovative structures are there out there?

–Fred

Fred Sienkiewicz
(fred at sienkiewicz.org)