Collaborative professional development (PD) efforts are increasingly popular and successful across the United States. In this article, we highlight the voice of the teacher in brief descriptions of PD efforts that support collaboration as a key component of meaningful music teacher PD. To draw a vivid picture of the potential and possibilities in models of music teacher collaborative PD, we connect eight practicing teachers’ positive PD experiences to recommendations from recent research findings. We also make suggestions for music teacher educators about the implications of these findings about the establishment of a disposition in preservice teachers toward valuing collaborative development.

This article provides an overview of research on assessment of improvisation in music and offers suggestions for increasing its centrality in music teaching and learning. With listening, improvising, reading, and composing as context for music teaching and learning, it covers historical and philosophical foundations for, and research on, creativity and improvisation. The article’s synthesis of the literature focuses on assessment of ability to interact, group, compare, and anticipate and predict music while improvising. Six elements (repertoire, vocabulary, intuition, reason, reflection, and exemplars) contribute to a holistic and comprehensive creative process that inspires spontaneous and meaningful music making. The article concludes with recommendations for replication and extension of research to provide insight for improvisation assessment.

Preparing, inducting, mentoring, and retaining new music teachers remain concerns in our profession. This article began as a study of first-year music teachers who made regular entries in secure electronic journals and participated in mid-and end-of-year interviews. We initially sought to understand these new teachers' experiences related to mentoring, professional development, collaboration, and standards-based instruction. Findings related to these topics were eclipsed, however, by challenging experiences that Elise, a first-year instrumental music teacher who participated in our study, reported. We used a narrative inquiry methodology to present Elise's experiences in context of literature related to workplace incivility, gender, hierarchical structures, and emphasis on performance in instrumental music education. Based on findings, we offer recommendations for future research related to four stakeholder groups: pre-service teachers, early career in-service teachers, experienced in-service teachers, and administrators.

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Researchers have demonstrated the importance of professional development experiences for in-service music educators that are content-specific and that cultivate meaningful partnerships with higher education faculty and preservice music teachers. The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to explore cooperating teachers’ perceptions related to hosting and mentoring student teachers. We interviewed 13 cooperating teachers to document their views. Based on interview results, we created and distributed an online questionnaire, with 102 cooperating teachers from five U.S. regions responding. Cooperating teachers’ motives for hosting student teachers were largely altruistic, and they identified various student teacher skills and university supervisor supports as being important. We suggest that the immersive experience of serving as a cooperating teacher may be a form of professional development.