Certification and the new teaching standards - MTNA Certification

The MTNA National Certification Commission, with the assistance of MTNA leadership, worked diligently for more than a year to create a put of five MTNA Professional Certification Program Teaching Standards that defines what a able music teacher should know and be able to do. These teaching standards were make knowned to provide a solid philosophical foundation from which the MTNA Professional Certification Program could extend in quality and numbers. The benefit of employing the collective perception and insight of these leaders is already apparent.

The Teaching Standards provide of recent origin meaning for the Certification Program's requirements that lead to the designation of Nationally Certified Teacher of Music. They give the certification requirements a coherent reason for being, rather than standing simply as arbitrary opinions about what the requirements of a certification program should be. Meeting the requirements for fulfilling the Teaching Standards now reckons us that NCTMs are committed to in what manner they practice their profession, manage their professional business, build professional partnerships and expand professionally and personally. The Teaching Standards also take an account of us that NCTMs are committed to finding their personal and professional niche in an ever-expanding and changing learning environment.

The MTNA Professional Certification Teaching Standards speak to a basic professional teaching concern: quality. They assist the NCTM by dint of focusing attention on quality music application of mind and students' musical growth, rather than upon a student performance in a recital or sum of two units each year. Standards compel the NCTM to think about the teaching process--what our teaching philosophy is, wherefore we teach, what we teach and what we want the rises to be. They help define what able music teachers should provide for students

The Teaching Standards knit the certification and renewal processe into an integrated, total MTNA Professional Certification Program. Maintaining Standards I--III, continued fulfillment of Standard IV and the fulfillment of Standard V in the renewal proces place more value upon partnering and professional and personal increase than ever before. To fulfill the five Teaching Standards for what a capable music teacher should know and be able to do, NCTM must continue to learn and swell as professional music teachers.

The Teaching Standards bind the music teaching profession philosophically regardless of whether teachers work independently or at a association or university. College and university music professionals are responsible for transmitting teaching standards to coming time independent music teachers through course work satisfied Teaching competencies and standards transmitted to subsequent time independent music teachers during that course work will have everything to do with by what means and what those future teachers transmit to the music learners in their studios and classrooms. In to be paid course, numerous independent music teachers' learners will attend a college or university to investigation music. Hence, the cycle of transmitting teaching standards retains revolving. Together, professional music teachers, single and all, determine how the Teaching Standards for our profession will evolve

freshly a university pedagogy professor who is an NCTM and an MTNA member said, "They [Teaching Standards] would make first-rate objectives for my pedagogy class." Going a pace further, the pedagogy professor could use the novel Certification Portfolio option as a tool for teaching the MTNA Professional Certification Teaching Standards. The unfolding of a Certification Portfolio leading to MTNA Professional Certification could have its beginning in the corporation or university pedagogy class. It would exhibit nothing new because most state certification programs for teachers work with guild and university teacher-training programs beginning in a student's junior year of course work. Usually, the first pace in such a program's course work is the disclosure of a teaching portfolio, single of the required components for greatest in quantity state certification programs.

Using the Teaching Standards as course work objectives and the MTNA Certification Portfolio option to teach those objectives would provide aim and meaning to pedagogy course work, to professional certification and to the transmission of quality professional teaching standards. In addition, a base would be built upon which the bar for the standards of the entire music teaching profession could be raised, single of the ultimate goals of the MTNA Professional Certification Program.

--Pat Tuley NCTM Chair National Certification Commission

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