The National Association for Music Education (NAfME) has worked to come up with national standards for music education. This list is intended to help music educators develop curriculum for their students and they include the following 9 standards:

1. Singing, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.
2. Performing on instruments, alone and with others, a varied repertoire of music.
3. Improvising melodies, variations, and accompaniments.
4. Composing and arranging music within specified guidelines.
5. Reading and notating music.
6. Listening to, analyzing, and describing music.
7. Evaluating music and music performances.
8. Understanding relationships between music, the other arts, and disciplines outside the arts.
9. Understanding music in relation to history and culture.

For those of us involved in music education or studying to become music teachers these standards may already reflect what we teach and our teaching goals. However, depending on the school and circumstances some of these standards are obviously easier to work into the curriculum than others. For example, if you’re not already familiar with improvisation or composition meeting standard 3 may be quite a challenge. Rehearsing for concerts and contests may not leave much time for music teachers to work on standards 8 and 9. That said, these are attainable goals for most situations I’m familiar with and while not a perfect list, do help music teachers think about what we’re already doing and how we can improve the quality of our teaching.

“MuzikMadders” has written music to the National Standards for Music Education and posted it on YouTube. Thanks to Dr. Michael Shallock at Western Carolina University for finding this clever video.

Using music to memorize information is a great mnemonic trick. Making up lyrics to music you need to identify on drop the needle exams that music students often get is a similar way of helping you learn the titles of pieces and their composers.

Happy new academic year! In honor of the fall semester starting up for me today, here is David Zerkel’s list of 10 things for being a more effective music student.

1. Take your classes seriously.
2. Listen to as much music as you can.
3.  Learn and know your scales and arpeggios.
4. Schedule your practice time as though it were a class.
5. Go to concerts.
6. Embrace what technology has to offer us in developing as musicians.
7. Be curious.
8. Play with your peers.
9. Be serious about your pursuit of excellence.
10.  Know that every great musician in the world still considers himself or herself a student of music.

Read up on what Zerkel says about each item on the Horngasmic blog’s repost of his list. Then go check out what James Boldin adds to this list on his Horn World blog.