Beyond Assessments: Making a Joyful Noise in Music

What Is Joy?

Joy is something that is difficult to define. We all have moments when we are happy, but joy is something different. When I was in elementary school, music class was fun. We learned a few songs from the traditional canon and then returned to the rest of our day. Perhaps once or twice a year, we put on a performance where everyone participated and was told that they did a great job.

Today, I live the “real life” of a general music teacher. Recently, I observed my students losing energy and focus in the weeks before an upcoming concert. None of us were having fun. The students were tired of rehearsing. They were ready for winter break. Honestly, I was tired and ready for a break, too. During one memorable rehearsal, the students were forgetting words, missing entrances, and losing focus. I told everyone that we were going to take a 5-min break and then get back to work. I sat down at my desk and tried to think of how I could get the rehearsal back on track. Then, the students started singing on their own. They poured all of the energy that had been missing from the rehearsal into their impromptu concert. I watched them and found myself smiling. The timer went off. Break time had ended. I knew that I should stop them and return to the rehearsal for the upcoming school performance. But I was torn. My students were having a good time making music. To be honest, I did not want to disperse the spontaneous, unrehearsed spirit of joy that filled my room.

Joy in the Journey

More than 30 states across the country are experiencing a shortage of music educators. As the number of music teachers entering the field diminishes each year, research has shown that many will leave the profession within the first 5 years of teaching (McJames et al., 2025; Miller, 2025). Low wages, lack of support, and safety are cited as reasons for the turnover. Are we also considering the negative effects of joyless work or the potential positive remedy of a joy-filled pedagogy?

It seems that students are also experiencing a shift in the way that they view music. In most districts across the country, elementary students are required to take music classes. Research indicates, however, that students are choosing not to continue in music when they are no longer required to take it in secondary school (Elpus and Abril, 2024). While public school music enrollment seems to decline in middle school, in many communities there has been a large increase in the number of private music schools where students can take individual or group music classes outside of school hours (Patel, 2026). What is prompting different levels of growth in music education programming in different educational environments?

The Aesthetics of Joy

My experience leads me to declare that Hip–Hop may be the most popular musical genre in the country. Even if students don’t seek out this musical genre, they encounter it daily in movies, videos, and commercials. This has led some teachers to use Hip–Hop as a vehicle for teaching core and musical content (Emdin, 2016). Traditional music genres favored by generations of music teachers follow a prescribed set of genre-specific aesthetic guidelines that often fail to accommodate the aesthetic sensibilities of our ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse students. Students define aesthetic experiences using different languages; aesthetically pleasing music, for example, brings them happiness or gives them joy.

According to Lee (2020), a lack of exposure to and understanding of other genres can lead to the dismissal of certain pieces in favor of traditional pieces. I personally enjoy a wide variety of genres. Still, I often feel that I don’t have the capacity or the right to teach them. Cultural appropriation versus appreciation is a very real concern. Ironically, I have never shied away from teaching the music of European men who died more than a century before I was born. The reality is that no matter what we like or do not like, we all have standards that we must adhere to. In the age of accountability, assessments are a part of the job. But perhaps we can adhere to the standards without eliminating our students’ joy.

Why Assessments?

Assessments are an important and necessary part of education. They can guide our teaching and track student learning. The problem is that, as teachers of music, we usually only use one type of test: a performance test. Our concert, our adjudication or rating at a festival. This test tells us not what a student has learned, but how well that student can perform the task assigned at a given moment in time.

Assessments can also produce stress and anxiety in both students and teachers (Alario, 2025). I once had an administrator tell me that rather than a formal observation, my evaluation score would be based on my concert. In essence, my job was tied to an arbitrary judgment that depended on whether someone liked what my students were singing or not. My principal, in essence, chose an improper assessment to evaluate the totality and complexity of my work. In the classroom, a combination of diagnostic, formative, and summative assessments is used to evaluate student growth. Each type of assessment has its own set of benefits.

Diagnostic Assessments

A diagnostic assessment can tell us what students already know. In music, we often either overestimate or underestimate what students know when they come to us. The number of culturally, linguistically, and neurologically diverse students in our classrooms is increasing (Kruse, 2020). Each of them brings a unique musical biography with them when they come into our classrooms. Diagnostic assessments are pre-assessments that are given at the beginning of a unit. Knowing and understanding how students have engaged with music culturally and socially outside of school is as important to their growth as a musician as what they learn inside the classroom walls. They tell me what background knowledge exists and what it does not.

Formative Assessments

A formative assessment should take place during instruction (NIU, 2012). It allows the teacher to see if students are on track or if the teacher needs to slow down and reteach a concept. When teaching the recorder, I often do a quick assessment while I am taking attendance. I might ask students to play a particular note when I call their name, but I am also looking at hand position and their ability to self-correct. I don’t even let them know that they are being assessed. I don’t criticize or critique. I just put a check or a minus in my book to indicate if they are on track or not. If I notice more minuses than checks, then I know that I should reteach the concept. If there are only a few students having problems, I might give them extra attention during group work or pair them with a partner who has mastered the skill. I am constantly surprised at what students do not know. I have learned I cannot assume students come to me with knowledge of the traditional canon of children’s songs, for example. I have found that before I can successfully teach a concept with a song, I may first have to slow down my lesson and teach the students the song.

Summative Assessments

Summative assessments are the type of assessments that we most often jump in the classroom. For musicians, this is also known as the performance task. The concert. The adjudication. The festival. This is when we quantify our students’ ability. Not their knowledge, or their growth, but whether they are good or not. I remember having a student who, during the diagnostic assessment, could not match pitches when singing. After a year of instruction, however, they were able to identify whether or not their singing was on pitch. As part of my summative assessment procedure at the end of the year, each student self-reported what they had learned and how close they approached end-of-the-year standards. As I recall, my non-singing student reported—very honestly—that they did not like music class at the beginning of the year because they knew they were a poor singer and did not want to stand out during group singing.

But the student also noted that learning new songs and studying new artists over time increased their enjoyment as the year went on. The student found joy in discovering new ways to engage with music, and, as a result of the summative assessment process, both of us experienced pride in the student’s demonstrable musical growth.

The Joy of Rubrics and Exit Tickets

As a student, I believed that grades were a judgment of my performance. I looked to my teacher to tell me whether each performance was “good” or “bad.” Now that I am on the other side of the equation, I believe that rubrics and exit tickets are elements of my educational GPS, or a Guided Performance System. I depend on rubrics to establish end goals and paths to learning. I depend on exit tickets, such as my students’ self-evaluations, to let me know when students have reached their destinations.

A rubric communicates to students, parents, and administrators what success will look or sound like (DeLuca & Bolden, 2014). Rubrics clearly and objectively establish student expectations for each unit of study, and they also clarify what I am looking for as an outcome. Well-written standards should point toward musical excellence yet be objective and obtainable for all students.

Exit tickets communicate progress in-the-moment. For example, I sometimes require students to name a member of a particular instrument family to earn a line-up ticket at the end of class, ensuring I begin with a student who has volunteered. Similarly, in a written version of this activity, I may ask students to point to or circle a picture of a member of a specific instrument family using visual aids. The most useful exit tickets support standards-based teaching and learning and offer an informal assessment opportunity. They also offer another opportunity for shared joy in the journey.

A Joyful Repertoire

I acknowledge that there are many aspects of our work that are beyond our control, such as site-specific teaching assessments or district-level repertoire requirements. However, within our classroom walls, we can choose to bring a world of music to our students in our individual programs. The world’s music and music from marginalized composers should be incorporated into the full year’s offerings rather than programmed to honor certain times of the year. The world’s lullabies, children’s play songs and dance songs bring joy to our students any time of the year, though we may have to conduct research to transform them into effective teaching tools.

Recently, I recall introducing a simple triple meter to my students using a children’s song from Afghanistan. As I studied the song, I struggled to pronounce the lyrics (it was about bouncing a ball) but observed the song supported the goal of learning how to keep a steady beat. I recalled that many of my students were English Language Learners (ELL) who exhibited hesitancy in participating in music class. To my delight, when I introduced the song in class, my ELL students smiled and eagerly participated in the activity as intended. The musical elements of the song plus the bouncing-ball activity helped students experience new music through a standards-based lesson. I observed that students felt and acted as if they were members of the class, or a new, unified whole. Joy multiplied!

A Joyful Teacher

Research indicates that the teacher is one of the most important factors in the classroom for student success (Hattie, 2009, Muhammad, 2023). By extension, this implies that if the teacher is not happy or joyful, then the classroom cannot be joyful. The pressure to be perfect at all times can often replace the simple joy that is brought by creating and experiencing music (McNeil et al., 2022). Decision fatigue and stressors are real, so we must all remember to set aside time for self-care, even if it means setting aside scheduled time for a break. During the day, we can take a few minutes to read, take a walk, or play a song for fun. Then, when the day is over, we must leave work at work. Nighttime rest, relaxation, and restoration invite joy to return to our teaching at the start of each new day.