Molly Overson
Hello, and welcome to my ePortfolio. I am a prospective graduate of the Virginia Tech Department of Education. I received my undergraduate B.A. degrees in Music Education and Music Performance from Virginia Tech in May 2012. I am originally from Fairfax Station, Virginia, where I went to Lake Braddock Secondary School for high school. The strong, thriving band program at my high school and the amazing man who led the program were my primary inspirations for going into music education.
I believe in equal education: who it is who learns, how they learn, and what they learn. The more advanced students must be given the same level of challenge as the less advanced students, which may or may not be the same activity. I expected and asked for careful listening skills during the warm-up activities I did with each class, though the 8th graders certainly had more advanced material to work with than the 6th graders. The more motivated or talented students must receive the same amount of attention as the less motivated students. I taught the percussionist who isn’t taking Band next year how to read treble clef so he can play his assigned parts for the last few weeks of the semester. The two different sixth-grade classes I taught this semester learned the same pieces of music in the same amount of time, but had different foci and objectives for their lessons. A class should be universally designed, so that special needs students can access the material in whichever way is most comfortable to them, and so that all students may experience the material in a variety of different ways. The girl with a vision disability plays the same music and has all the same musical objectives as the others in her section, but has her music enlarged 125%. All students should have the opportunity to learn as much as they can in all the ways that they can, and it is up to the teacher to provide those opportunities.