Personal Reflection

     Teachers' jobs are incredibly busy and overwhelming and as a college student, I want to be able to help educators, parents, and anyone who is interested, by creating a resource that is convenient and that they can use to better understand how music could be used to fulfill such foundational needs in the classroom. My goal as a future educator is to find a way to incorporate what I love, music, into my classroom to help my students develop, work through challenges, and learn. I want to be a teacher because I know what a large impact teachers have on their students and how their help can inspire students for the rest of their lives. However, I want to allow as many children as possible to have the wonderful classroom experience that my teachers provided for me. In order to do that, I need to create a resource which can be widely accessed by people everywhere so that teachers can look at my research and resources and be able to easily integrate music into their classroom. This is the motivation behind my Honors Research Project, culminating in a website with musical academic materials for teachers and students.

 

     After I graduate from Nazareth University in the Spring of ‘26, I will be certified to teach ages birth through sixth grade in both generalized and special education. I plan to use what I learned in researching and writing my Literature Review to ensure that I am incorporating music into the classroom in the most beneficial ways for my students. Additionally, I will use the resources that I have created and/or those I have shared on my platform for additional lessons and learning opportunities to cover a wider range of topics and grade levels. 

   

     Creating this project brought me many surprises. One misconception I had was that most music materials are intended for younger grades and that there are fewer materials out there for upper elementary. However, during my search for music materials for the classroom, I found a surplus of upper elementary lessons with music incorporated into them that were very well done. Another surprise that I came across while creating this project was how overwhelmingly the empirical research demonstrates positive impacts of music on children. With every topic comes mixed research, and because music is more of an abstract concept than something like administering a pill or placebo pill, I expected to find more studies with a lack of statistically significant results demonstrating music’s benefits in the classroom. However, the vast majority of articles that I found during my search contain statistically significant results which demonstrate music's positive impacts on individuals. 

   

     Creating this project has taught me so many valuable lessons about myself, my academic journey, the research out there on music, and how I want to run my own classroom. After creating my own lesson plans and corresponding rubrics, worksheets, steps, and music videos along with them, I felt an even stronger passion for music in the classroom and including it in my future classroom for the benefit of my students. I hope that you all have found this website to be helpful, eye-opening, inspiring, and user-friendly. I encourage you to leave suggestions, comments, reactions, etc. in the forum for myself and other users of the website to read about. Thank you for supporting your students in the best way possible and continuing your professional development throughout your career.