Personal Narrative: A Career In Music Education

As I sum up my thoughts on how my first foray into the music education profession affected my teacher leadership ability, I must restate that I was bless to not have received an easier placement for my first job. Granted, it would have made the transition from college to career a little easier as I may have been able to use more of the standard, book-based methodologies and content that many of my veteran teachers or fellow colleague in music education were able to use for their own respective programs. Thus, the direct influence on my teacher self-efficacy as well as my skill sets and confidence in my roles as a teacher leader may have been drastically different. However, I had the opportunity to constantly have my feet in the fire so I could

To begin, I wonder how more school administrators will allow the music educators in their schools to take leadership positions and not limit them to their subject exclusively because it is not a core subject? Although there has been a major push to standardize assessment for fine arts courses in public education, the arts are still not seen as important to moving a school academically or on paper via test scores. Even with the push to incorporate more interdisciplinary methods into core subject classrooms and curricula, it can go without saying that fine arts teachers, especially music teachers, have a stronger advantage of teaching academic concepts through the arts without downplaying their content area. Yet I have seen situations were a very competent music teacher, well respected by the students and fellow faculty at their school and having a command of school measurements and evaluations, denied the ability to advance to a higher level of the school’s leadership formal hierarchy simply for the fact that some facets of the present administration could only see the music teacher as such. I fear that many school situations miss out on the chance of having some aspects of relevant teacher leadership due to teachers being pigeon-holed into what they are only supposed to