When reading the Orzolek article, it was a little bit easier to relate to it because of the Brophy text. However, I feel that the Brophy gives much more practical information, while the Orzolek gives more philosophical information. Because of this, I had something to relate to when Orzolek mentioned those people who give ambiguous solutions to assessment. "This works for some people, but you may have to adapt it for your classroom." I understand what Orzolek was saying about the ambiguity of assessment, because there is not much emphasis on it in music education. However, I never thought about the effects of that until reading this article. From my own experience, I know that assessment is not reported but I always saw that as a positive thing. I felt that music teachers were given the freedom of teaching value added lessons to their students because they don't have standards and benchmarks to meet and report about. However, after reading this article I understand that this contributes to the ease of elimination for music programs. If we're not forced to report our scores to anyone, then all parents and administrators see are the "awards" that the students achieve (concerts, trips, high numbers in ensembles). I feel that, while Brophy offers practical and straight forward ways of assessing student learning, he falls prey to this paradox of education.
I think that Orzolek supports much of what we learn at Westminster, except rather than bashing the system he provides positive comments that may help motivate teachers to change their own way of assessing. I like how he implies that even if we can't change the world we can change our own classrooms, including many different kinds of assessment. As good educators we understand the individual learning styles of students, and will do our best to accommodate for that.