Haslett HS Select Women's Choir - Observation #3

This has been a very hectic week for Ms. Valla. She has her pre-festival choral festival concert tonight and it is also hell week for the middle school musical, which she is responsible for running. Festival is next week on Thursday and Friday, the same week the musical opens. The middle school preview day, where the middle schoolers visit the high school ensembles, is also next week on Wednesday. Needless to say, she is quite short on time at the moment!

I met with Ms. Valla before choir to discuss her grading and practice requirements. Most of her grading comes from class and concert participation. She assigns participation points in class by week. Failure to bring materials (music, pencil, etc.), a lack of participation in warm-ups or rehearsal, or disruptive behavior results in a loss of points. She also assigns participation points for concerts. Occasionally, she assigns theory worksheets or questions on recording listening in class, which also have point values.

In terms of practice requirements, she has none for her choirs. Ms. Valla told me that over 3/4ths of her students do not take voice lessons outside of school, nor do they have access to resources that they would need to practice outside of class, like a piano. In addition, most of her students have only participated in school choirs and have no additional experience or ways to get it. Therefore, she feels it is unfair to assign outside practicing as a requirement, since most students do not have the experience or knowledge to be able to do that on their own. The most she will ask students to do outside of class is memorize words. Other than that, she prefers to work in class to ensure that things are learned correctly. This is different from what I have observed in Okemos, which does use practice logs for the strings program, but I feel like Ms. Valla's approach is probably more common across area schools. Okemos is in many ways an exception as the music program is incredibly strong and the community it very invested in continuing that tradition - especially in strings.

As far as evaluating students goes, she does this constantly in every rehearsal. Ms. Valla told me that every student in every grade level auditions for their spot in choir every year. This applies to choirs that meet during the day and after school as well. This way, she hears every student from 7th - 12th grade once a year. Sight reading is a part of this audition in addition to solo singing. She also works on sight reading throughout the year (especially when it gets closer to festival!) and has evaluations on this as well. In addition, she implements the new state requirements for pre and post evaluation to show student growth. Sight reading is a component of this, as is music history and theory. She has also included some pedagogy things, whatever the department chooses to focus on and highlight in their teaching. This is still a relatively new thing and the pre/post assessment, which includes a written component, is changing still as the department figures out what they want to do.

The rehearsal itself was more singing intensive than past rehearsals I have seen. Ms. Valla was focusing on tone and sound quality on the two pieces in preparation for their concert, so she was running sections and pieces and listening for blend and vowel shape. The girls are also continuing to work on feeling confident on memory, so sections were being run multiple times to help solidify text and entrances without music in hand. One thing was clear though - when this choir listens and blends and focuses, they sound amazingly good!