Music education has been my whole life. I love my career. And now EVERYTHING about what I’ve done for over three decades is completely different.
How on earth do we serve our students and sustain our programs in the middle of a pandemic?
I’ve seen so much change during my years as a teacher. Technology and society have caused our kids to grow up faster than they were physiologically programmed to do, and the impact from all the stimuli on their ability to function in this world is huge.
For the first thirty-one-and-three-quarters years of my career, there was a lot that changed, but nothing like what happened when the 2020 pandemic hit the planet and, at the speed of light, uprooting everything we ever learned about teaching. Suddenly, in what was going to be my final quarter of teaching, I found myself, along with every other teacher in the U.S. and beyond, completely reinventing how I taught as the world came to a standstill and schools were shut down across the globe. I had to learn to teach high school band online!
The first few weeks of the abrupt transition from face-to-face teaching to the isolation of being quarantined and figuring out how to meet the emotional and educational needs of my students was daunting.
As we started working through what it would look like for us to continue our band classes without being together, I came to realize that the daily practices and protocols I established with my students (who often come to class with challenges like anxiety, depression, and difficulty focusing) as a way to help them focus and be present for class were even more important now.
The daily practice we did in one another’s presence every day – taking four minutes to do breathing and relaxation together – up-leveled our in-class experiences because of the way it synchronized all the students each day, which caused our rehearsal time to be at least three to four times more productive than in the past. I knew that since our routine had such a positive impact on our ability to bring sixty-plus teenagers together and get them focused when we were in person, it was critical that we continued to practice that same routine when we were isolated and experiencing heightened anxiety and trauma. The ritual of getting our bodies and brains to relax each day before we started class was more important now than ever.
Kids are constantly told to “sit still and be quiet,” yet they’re never really taught how to harness their energy and social reflexes so they can actually sit quietly and focus their attention. Guess what happens when you actually teach students how to physiologically reset their bodies and brains so all of the restless energy (side conversations, excessive physical movements, difficulty focusing, inability to pay attention or remember) gets out of their way and they are able to start with a clean slate? It’s truly remarkable. It’s how we are biologically programmed to function at our best, so why not work with nature and teach our students how to tap into this? Once you do, you will be blown away at the changes: the ease of teaching, the attentiveness of the students, the retention of content, and a million other positive changes that take place as a result of taking the time to teach students this critical skill.
Teaching kids to get into this learning state is no different than teaching them technique on an instrument. It’s muscle memory – that is all. By practicing scales slowly, you train their muscles to respond in specific ways. The more you repeat patterns, the easier it is for them to execute those patterns and the quicker their responses become.
The same goes for teaching kids to settle down. Once your students practice a relaxation routine on a consistent basis, their bodies learn to be still because the muscles learn how to relax. Their brains are no longer in hyper mode; instead, they respond to this practice by learning to let go of the drama and other stuff floating around in their heads and become cleared out for whatever content or concept you want to introduce.
You have an incredible opportunity to help your students not just be successful musicians but to be exceptional human beings. Music teachers change the world. We are arguably the most influential adults on the planet. We have kids in our classes year after year after year. We watch them grow up. We are the only adults they see that frequently, sometimes even more than their parents, see them. So, we have important work to do – and we need the stamina to do it.
That’s where this book comes in. If I learned about the power of teaching this skill before diving into content with my students, I could have been a healthier and more effective teacher from the start. Instead, I spent the first three decades of my career teaching the way I was taught, actively handling classroom management and correcting behaviors instead of giving my students the skills to self-regulate so I could focus on teaching. It took a lot more energy (both physically and mentally) to teach when I didn’t have a daily routine to get everyone relaxed and focused.
For most of my life, I didn’t know how to relax, and teaching was a hyperactivity for me. I did it well, but managing all the components of a huge music program required active work, both mentally and physically. Even teaching classes took a lot of energy. Corralling the energy of sixty kids an hour, day after day, and motivating them to meet my goals was exhausting. Once I learned the power of teaching students to relax and settle that energy down before starting to teach class, everything became so much easier for all of us.
I’m a much more effective teacher now. Instead of force-feeding kids everything I believe they should know and feel, I facilitate their abilities to tap into the music and hear the message it has for them. I learned how to help them go from states of stress – where learning is difficult, if not impossible – to a place where their brains and bodies are receptive and ready to learn, remember, and recall what they’re discovering. It sounds like a whole new way of teaching, but really, it’s not. It’s the way we were programmed to learn.
When we teach students how to get into a learning state, teaching and learning become so much easier, leading to less stress for you and your students.
This process can be used by children of all ages and across all socio-economic statuses, cultures, orientations, and marginalization, including over-achievers and AP/Honors kids. In fact, it’s often most effective for the kids you’d least expect.
Just like a carpenter needs the proper tools and high-quality wood and a plan if he is going to create a craftsman-style piece of furniture, teachers need tools to do their jobs well, too. One of the most powerful tools a teacher has is being able to guide their students into a readiness-to-learn state before delivering content. This one simple step has more impact on every aspect of student growth than any other pedagogical tool I encountered in the more than 30,000 classes I taught over the course of my career.
This book is my way of sharing what I learned so other band directors can do the important work of teaching in a way that is easier and more effective for them and their students. I want to support them in their efforts to be positive role models and mentors for their students. I want to work with teachers who realize that our roles include shaping kids into responsible and respectful human beings through the magic of music education. It takes a lot of stamina to do this year after year, and I am here to share strategies that support dedicated music teachers who are called to change kids’ lives for the better.
Under the best of circumstances, teaching is stressful and exhausting.
After our 2020 health crisis, it’s going to be even more so, and unless you have a plan in place for how you’ll help students cope with the strange new world in which we live, it’ll be overwhelming and daunting for you and your students.
If you have a routine that already works, then now is the time to reevaluate it and see what you might need to tweak in order to meet the new needs of your students. Most of them will be affected by everything that happened as a result of the pandemic, so teaching-as-usual will be anything but usual. You know your students and community best, so you can use this book as a guide to help you assess and possibly redesign what you do in light of our new normal.
If you don’t have a routine you use to help your students overcome the distractions of life so they can focus in your class, then I’m especially glad you picked up this book! Now’s your chance to practice some new skills that will help you and your students get the most out of your classes in spite of the added stress, anxiety, depression, and more they’ll be dealing with.
This book outlines the process I designed and implemented in my classroom and is set up to help you create a plan to successfully teach music to students who will be forever changed after this worldwide shift in education and life as we once knew it.
My work with my students always comes from a place of love. As I came to what was going to be the end of a long and fulfilling career in music education in June of 2020, I found myself being called to stay in my classroom and community a little while longer. I see the writing on the wall and know there will be massive shifts in everything we do as educators now, so I made the commitment to remain with my students and walk beside them on this journey. Providing them with the stability of our routines together during a time of upheaval and uncertainty is essential not just for them but for me, too. Now more than ever, they need to continue to practice what we were doing every day in class – relaxing amidst the chaos.
Because my students and I learned to make our classroom a place where we decompress together every day, I know I will have the stamina to be present with them as we adapt to our new ways of doing things. Even though we will all have more reasons to be distracted with each passing day and the rapid changes taking place to education and we will undoubtedly experience plenty of stressful situations, we will forge ahead with our daily routine that allows us to settle into an hour of magical music-making together, where we can put our worries and distractions on the back burner and use music as a tool to help us cope, heal, and express ourselves.
This book is the culmination of my life’s work and shares the most powerful wisdom I gained from my decades of experience as a busy band-directing mom who managed to build a successful band program in spite of a million obstacles. My wish for you is that you will find it to be instrumental in helping you be that badass band director you were born to be so you can be there for your students for a long time to come.
Check out a FREE SNEAK PEEK of Love the Job, Lose the Stress: Successful Social and Emotional Learning in the Modern Music Classroom now!
