Penelope Quesada: Music Education
Penelope Quesada is the Music Performance teacher at Semple Elementary. She immensely enjoys teaching elementary students using the Orff Schulwerk methodology. Ms. Quesada mentors new music teachers in her district and supervises and mentors music education student teachers from the University of Louisville. With a vast experience as a bilingual music teacher, Penelope has taught music in elementary schools in her native country Peru, the Louisville Catholic School System and JCPS.
Ms. Quesada’s training includes full Orff Certification on levels I, II and, III (University of Kentucky and Carnegie Mellon University), certification in World Music Pedagogy (Smithsonian Folkways Institute) and Robotics EV3 (Carnegie Mellon University). She has a B.A of Arts in Music, a Masters in Music Performance, and a Rank I in Education Technology (University of Louisville).
Ms. Quesada is also certified as a Music Teacher by the Kentucky Department of Education. Ms. Quesada created the first full Orff Ensemble in Kentucky and twice she has been invited to perform at the Kentucky Music Educators Conference with the LPAS Orff Ensemble. She was the recipient of the “Jefferson County Public Schools Music Teacher of the year” award in 2013 and the finalist for the Music Educator Grammy Award in the year 2016.
She has been invited to give music education professional development sessions in Orff methodology, technology in the music classroom and arts integration at the Kentucky Music Educators Conference, the Archdiocese of Louisville and Jefferson County Public Schools. She likes to research, find and create innovate ways to teach music to children to include creative thinking in her lessons, to integrate the arts and technology in the curricula and incorporate world music in her daily teaching.