Start Now and Progress – or SNaP to it – are strategies I’ve developed to help change or create behaviors in a hurry. I want to take a little bit of time to explore how it is we most effectively go about changing habits for ourselves and how we teach other people to change their habits. That way, when it comes to teaching students these new skills I’m introducing in the next chapter, you’ll have some ideas of ways you can teach them the skills that make it easy for them to learn and retain the content you are teaching them. I’m going to offer what may feel like silly suggestions that you might be tempted to skip over, but these little exercises are simple ways for you to understand how to teach yourself or others to break a bad habit, create a new habit, or up-level how you do something. Once you master the ability to effectively do that, everything becomes easier.
Almost everyone learns best when they do it in manageable chunks. That’s just a fact of life. When I was a kid (and a young teacher), I “practiced” and “rehearsed” by playing music over and over rather than stopping and working on the things that were hard. Often, what I was really doing was practicing the wrong notes and bad habits over and over, thereby reinforcing them instead of properly mastering a skill before trying to play an entire piece. My mother used to call this “plowing through the music” instead of practicing. It was hard to make any kind of predictable progress when I took this approach.
On the other hand, when I finally wised up and learned how to break things down into smaller components, I could effortlessly master the small skill sets, and the bigger pieces began to fall in place much more accurately and with greater ease. It takes time to figure out how to break the bigger goals down and it takes discipline to routinely practice the new habits, but as a music teacher, you already know the benefits of practicing in this way. The same technique holds up whenever you are trying to learn a new skill, build a new habit, or replace a bad habit, whether that’s for you as an individual or when you are teaching students.
Often, when we have a lofty goal, we try to jump directly to it without doing the work to get there rather than planning the steps we can take to reach that goal. I’m guilty of this, that’s for sure. There were many occasions I passed out a new tune to the jazz band that I was super stoked for them to play. Inevitably, the lead trumpet part would be a major third higher than Freddy, my lead trumpet player, could comfortably play. But, in my exuberance, I passed out the tune and we went for it. In the learning process, Freddy would miss the notes at first, but given time (and enough pressure on his lips), he’d squeak out those high Cs, and I’d pat myself on the back for being such a great teacher because the band was playing this awesome chart.
But then we’d get to the performances, and it became obvious that he really didn’t have the solid range or endurance he needed to consistently (and with good tone) play in that tessitura. He missed notes or stopped playing altogether because his chops got so tired or nerves would take over and he’d default to old habits. I was really causing him more long-term harm than good. He didn’t really learn how to extend his range and play well. Instead, he learned how to use bad habits (pressure and more pressure) to squeak out notes that could have come easily if I taught him how to properly and gradually build up his endurance.
I found it was much more effective to help students build their range one small step at a time if I wanted them to truly develop as musicians. Instead of trying to force something out of a horn using techniques that either caused bad habits to form or that weren’t dependable for long-term use before they were ready, I began teaching kids how to build their range a half-step at a time. In a matter of weeks, students built the muscles in their embouchures so they can reliably and consistently nail those pitches. By adding just one half-step at a time until it becomes an easy part of the student’s range, kids like Freddy can build a foundation that rapidly allows for growth. Before you know it, those high Cs are popping out with good tone, pitch, and consistency – all without putting pressure on his chops and causing damage to his facial muscles!
It doesn’t take as long to build a habit or skill as you might think. It does, however, take a clear intention (goal) and persistence (consistency) in order to see the results you want.
I remember losing seventy-five pounds and feeling really good about my body, except for one thing. Every time I was conducting and cut the band off, my upper arms would continue flapping. I hated that. But when you lose a lot of weight, that’s one of the “perks.” So, I decided to do something about it.
All my life, I’ve had physical challenges that kept me from being athletic or in shape. Due to arthritis and other issues in my skeletal system, from the time I was a kid, doctors advised me to “take it easy, don’t do athletics, and drop out of PE,” right before sentencing me to five years in a back brace all through middle school and high school. (I now realize that was horrible advice, but back in the 1970s, that’s how they “treated” the chronic pain I had.)
Anyway, until I was fifty-one years old, I avoided exercising, but as I began to take control of my health and become empowered to figure out how to be healthier, I realized I was capable of far more physical activity than I ever believed. So, rather than continue being passive about my movement, I became addicted to yoga. That got me in really good shape, but my upper arms still insisted on jiggling, so I decided to do something about it once and for all.
On April 1, 2019, I made the commitment to do a pushup. One pushup. It was the longest five minutes of my life! I was shaking as I tried to push myself away from the ground, beads of sweat forming above my eyebrows, imagining my arms giving out with me plummeting (twelve inches) face-first to the ground. It was hard. But I did it. Just one pushup.
On April 2, I did two pushups. They were both really hard and I was pretty sure I had reached my maximum potential for the number of reps I’d ever be able to do.
But on April 3, I set out to do three pushups. On this particular morning, the first pushup wasn’t quite as hard as my first pushup was on April 1, but the next two more than made up for it.
As each day progressed, I added one more pushup. Predictably, the more pushups I did, the easier it was to do more and more of them. By the time Tax Day rolled around on April 15, I was up to fifteen pushups! That was huge. I went from barely being able to do one pushup just two weeks before to suddenly being able to do fifteen. Sure, the last four or five were difficult, but the first ten were consistently doable without too much effort because my body was being trained to do this new movement and it was becoming a habit.
I was seeing results in my arms, so I was highly motivated to continue. On April 16, I could have done sixteen pushups, but I decided to stick with fifteen … but about an hour later, I did a second set of fifteen pushups, so by April 16, I did thirty pushups in one day! Now I was seeing exponential growth. So, when April 20 rolled around, I added another set of fifteen pushups and was up to forty-five pushups a day. On April 30, I added a fourth set, bringing my daily pushup total to sixty pushups. By April 1 of 2020, just one year after starting this push-up extravaganza, I established a daily routine of completing 100 push-ups each morning. No more jiggly arms for this girl!
By taking small, incremental steps that built upon what I did each day before, I was able to take a skill that was very difficult for me on April 1 and do it sixty times just thirty days later. Can you imagine what happens when you build your students’ skills like that, or when you do your own learning in bite-sized increments? It’s almost impossible to fail.
In my first book, I refer to this process as SNaP Strategies. SNaP stands for Start Now and Progress, meaning that you start with one small but manageable task or skill and take small but easy-to-accomplish steps you need to take to reach your goal.
What I love about SNaP Strategies is that they allow you to practice the art of changing, learning, or replacing a habit in ways that focus more on the concept than content so you can later apply the concept in a variety of situations. It’s a lot like teaching our students to play scales and etudes. They don’t perform those in concerts, but it’s through the deliberate attention to the details in those exercises that they learn to hone their muscle memory and skills without all the distractions they’d find if you gave them a piece of literature that required them to implement too many skills they weren’t taught yet.
In my exuberance of wanting to share great music with my students, I often gave them literature that was not well-matched to their cognitive or physical abilities or skills. It’s frustrating for everyone. That would have been the same as me trying to do sixty push-ups on April 1, 2019 with no incremental steps in going from zero to sixty in thirty days. There’s no way I could have safely done that, but I could do it in thirty days when I planned it out and consistently practiced that skill in small increments.
Whether you are trying to change a habit, learn a new skill, or master new techniques, there are ways of making this happen much faster for yourself and your students. The quickest way to do that is to build the “how-to-learn” muscle, and that is done by intentionally directing attention at a goal and the incremental steps you are going to take to get there… and then taking those steps consistently.
As you think about your classes and what you want your students to know and be able to do as a result of your on-fire teaching abilities, you’ll want to become a master at making this warp-speed growth happen. You can practice it by implementing some simple SNaP strategies now so you are making it a daily habit to retrain your brain and your kids’ brains. Then, when it comes time to getting your students on board with your new and improved classroom atmosphere, you’ll have more strategies for helping them adopt new habits quickly.
Homework Alert
On the following pages are some SNaP Strategies you might want to consider as ways to practice learning how to change behaviors or create a new habit quicker and more effectively than in the past. Make a commitment to doing a strategy for at least a week, then be curious and ask yourself a few questions about what you observed. Write your observations in a journal so you can see what changes over time.
- What did I notice when I did this strategy?
When you do this activity, just be aware of how you feel when you are doing it. Does it make you happy, anxious, peaceful, or bloated? Just notice.
- What was hard about it?
Were you tempted to not do it sometimes? What brought resistance?
- What was rewarding?
Did it feel particularly good to do the activity, or was the result of doing it something you’d like to experience again?
- Do the results align with my personal/professional goals or do they distract me?
Remember, you prioritized those goals in the previous chapter, so hold yourself accountable to doing actions that support you in achieving your goals.
- Do I want to keep this behavior, modify it, or replace it?
When I was struggling with my health and realized many of my conditions were due to food sensitivities, I had to figure out what foods were exacerbating my symptoms, so I began noticing how I felt after eating certain foods. It wasn’t long before I noticed a direct correlation between consuming gluten and my joint pain – when I ate gluten, I was in constant pain. When I didn’t eat gluten, my joints didn’t hurt, and I lost a lot of weight without changing anything else, and my ADHD symptoms improved drastically. I liked how I felt when my body didn’t hurt and my brain worked better, so as hard as it is to avoid gluten, it’s a behavior I will continue because I am motivated to feel good.
If you like the changes you are seeing, then you may want to continue the new habit or behavior. If you don’t like the changes or they aren’t worth the effort, then you can at least use the questions above to enlighten you about what you learned from the experiment. When you practice this kind of intentional attention to the little things, the big things become much easier to accomplish.
Here are some ideas of SNaP Strategies for busy band directors. These are just a few suggestions – you can be as creative as you want to be with what you want to do. The point is to deliberately set a goal and break it down into small steps you can take every day to help you get there sooner.
SNaP Strategy #1: Gratitude for the Attitude: You find what you look for, 100 percent of the time. So, if you want students who are polite, respectful, engaged, helpful, attentive, and enthusiastic, then look for those qualities in the kids who are right there in front of you every day. They may be difficult to see amongst the distractions that draw your attention away, such as the disruptive students and other responsibilities that get in the way of you noticing the kiddos who always come to class and try to do what you want them to do, but they are there.
When you identify and acknowledge the behaviors you want to see continue, you get more of those – just like when you identify and acknowledge the behaviors you don’t want, those become the prevalent behaviors.
Here’s what I mean by that statement. Did you ever have a student who was disruptive, so you talked to him, contacted parents, sent an email to the counselor, and finally went to the principal because you were at the end of your rope? Every day, you could make a list a mile long about all the things Max was doing to be disruptive. It’s so obvious to you – you notice him as he comes in the room loudly, takes too long to get set up, and never seems to be ready to play when you want him to be, but when you don’t want him to play, he’s playing. No matter where you move him, he talks to the people next to him, distracting them from being engaged in your riveting rehearsal. He seems to suck up all your attention and energy, diverting it from the other twenty-nine (or sixty) kids in the classroom.
As hard as it seems, what if you could shift your attention (even for a moment) to look for the kinds of behaviors you wanted to see more of, such as Myah going out of her way to put away extra music stands at the end of rehearsal, Ryan helping a new student find music, or Emily asking if she can come in at lunch so she can show you how she finally mastered playing pedal tones on her trombone? Could you find something positive that is going right in just about every class? Or, could you find something Max does that doesn’t drive you crazy? Anything? Look for it. You’ll find something if you look hard enough.
Every day before you leave school, make it a point to acknowledge one student for doing something you want to see continue. I suggest doing it in the form of an email so it can be saved. This is an exercise that has several purposes. It forces you to look for something positive amongst the chaos. When you know you are going to be looking for something positive, you’ll have a different mindset. At first it will be hard to do, especially when it feels like you’re drowning in overdrive; but when you practice looking for the positive, it becomes easier.
Sending an email to the student’s parents, principal, counselor, or any adult who the student and parent would be proud to hear good news from is a way for that student to know that the people who are there to support him are also sharing in his accomplishments. Sending notes like this has a fabulous ripple effect. Even if you only got a glimpse of a positive behavior from a student, if it was there and you acknowledge it and that child gets positive feedback from you, his parents, and another adult or two who saw the email, then he’s going to want more of that, so he’ll begin to show you more behaviors like that.
This process is something I look forward to. It’s my reward at the end of each workday. It makes me leave work with a smile on my face.
Here’s your homework – it should be joyful and take no more than five minutes each day.
- Each day, be on the lookout for one behavior from a student that you can send a positive email about
- Before leaving school for the day, send a quick email that’s something like this:
To the Parents of Lili
CC: Principal, Counselor, Softball Coach
Hello Ms. Smith:
I wanted to send a quick note to you and let you know how much I appreciate having Lili in our band program. Every day in class, I notice how Lili comes in with enthusiasm, takes responsibility for setting up her own equipment, and is ready to play when class starts. Her active participation makes her such a positive role model for her peers.
I sincerely appreciate having Lili in our music program. Thank you for supporting her so she can be a part of our band family.
Mrs. Moffat
I’ve been doing this for years because it feels good and I see the benefits as students respond with more of the positive behaviors. It feels good to be the one writing the letter, because I often hear back from a parent about how much it meant to hear from me. I love the “this email will go on the fridge” responses I get from proud parents, but what I didn’t really understand was how good it felt to be on the receiving end of a letter like that.
We got a new superintendent in the 2019–2020 school year. On the sixth day of school, he and my principal popped into my classroom and stayed for almost thirty minutes. They watched as my students and I went through our daily routine and then rehearsed New World Symphony. It was the third day we played that year. This class has sixty kids in grades nine through twelve who got to see important adults take an interest in what they were doing. The superintendent and principal got a chance to see what our students do every day and I thought it was cool to have administrators who cared enough to spend that kind of time in our classroom. I was impressed.
What really surprised me, though, was receiving an envelope in the mail a few days later. You remember old-school letters, right? Anyway, inside that envelope was a letter from the superintendent. It was just a few sentences long, but because of the fact that he took the time to articulate and write a note letting me know he appreciated what I was doing in my classroom, those few sentences meant a lot. And guess what – he CC’d my principal, and when I was walking down the hall the next day, Mr. Peters said, “Did you see the letter from the superintendent?” Yup – it felt good to have the people I respect recognize what I’m doing in the classroom.
That’s how our kids and their parents feel when we share good news. Try it. See how it makes you feel. See how it makes your kids feel. And if you like it, then you’ve just established a habit that will have an incredible ripple effect on your kiddos and your program for a very long time.
SNaP Strategy #2: Time Stealers: How much time do you spend every day looking for stuff, like the paperwork you just filled out for the upcoming field trip, or your score for Danzon No. 2, or the cup of coffee you made three hours ago? If you’re like most band directors, your office is a bit disheveled (and maybe even your car, too). I noticed that the state of my desk often reflects the state of my mind, so it becomes a visual reminder for me to slow down when I see my desk becoming overly disorganized.
For a few days, notice how much time you spend looking for things that should be easy to locate. Don’t judge yourself; just notice. Are you constantly looking for your keys? Do you walk into a room, wonder why you are there, and waste time standing there, trying to clear your head so you can remember? Do you frantically search for that ASB PO you need in order to get a deposit made for an upcoming festival? Do you find yourself filling out paperwork over and over because you start it and then get distracted and never get it completed? Do you have thirty-six kids standing in your personal bubble asking you to help them find music, fix their broken sax, or get a new reed? Is your physical space cluttered? Estimate how much time you spend in this state of mind (for me, I easily used to spend an hour a day spinning my wheels – feeling like I was working because I was doing things, but mostly I was re-doing things or trying to organize myself to get stuff done.)
SNaP: Pick one place (desk, office, car, filing cabinet, etc.) where you find yourself being sucked into wasting time and energy because it’s getting in your way. Set aside five minutes a day to actively transform the place. Hint: Steps 1 through 3 could be done on three different days for five minutes each as you visualize each of these scenarios. After you’ve imagined the space being ultra-functional and how that will help you serve your students and maintain your sanity, then Step 4 can be done in five minute increments for as long as needed, until your space is set the way you need it so it and you function at your peak.
- Imagine what you need that space to look like in order for you to function at your best. What kinds of things will you do there? Where will things be stored? What will be in your line of sight? What will be out-of-sight but nearby?
- Imagine what it will feel like in that reorganized space. What will it be like to walk into your office, sit down at a desk that’s clutter-free, and work on one item at a time? What will it feel like to actually accomplish the task you sat down to do? How will it feel to do it effortlessly, without the frustration of having to go through piles of papers and other stuff to find the information you need to complete your task?
- Imagine what is possible when you no longer have the visual clutter to distract you and hinder your creativity. It’s like closing down all the apps on your phone that are draining your battery. Visual clutter impedes our learning and adds stress to our days. Visualize “deleting” the visual clutter in your space to free up your energy for other things.
- Set aside five minutes a day to do something to make the space a closer version of your vision. Five minutes. It might take five days or thirty days to complete the task, but either way, the time will pass. Why not have something improve during that time? What space decluttering would give you the most bang for your buck? Start there. Once you’ve completed decluttering this space, notice what’s changed. If you find that the more organized space allows you to save time, function better, and be less flustered, then you’ve just had a big win! If it doesn’t impact your ability to function, then you’ll realize this isn’t an important contributor to your stress.
SNaP Strategy #3: Reset Yourself: Whether you’re going from home to school or between lunch duty and percussion ensemble, it’s difficult to bounce from one situation to another and shift gears. I have a few rituals I do that help me transition quickly and effectively so I can head into a new situation and quickly adjust.
Each morning, when I’d pull into the parking lot, I used to get really annoyed with the world’s biggest speed bumps. They irritated me because if I didn’t slow down enough, the bottom of my car would sound like fingernails on a chalkboard as the speedbumps scraped the undercarriage of my red Volvo. In an effort to protect my car, even though I was in a hurry to get into my classroom, I’d begrudgingly slow down enough to get my mom-car over the bumps without taking out an axle.
A couple of years ago, I thought about the purpose of the speed bumps (other than to annoy me). They were put there to force people to slow down and check their surroundings so they can make sure it’s safe before they continue. It’s a simple concept. But we all know that without the speedbumps there to provide “incentive” (in the form of not ruining our cars), most people won’t slow down. That’s how accidents, mistakes, and time-wasting happen. When we don’t take the time to check our surroundings, double-check our work, or make sure we are setting ourselves up for success, we run the risk of things going wrong.
I finally came to the realization that speedbumps are actually a good thing. Those oversized and irritating concrete nuisances serve a very important purpose. They’d undoubtedly saved hundreds of lives as careless kids with their heads in their phones cross the parking lot without looking for cars and countless moms behind the wheel with curlers in their hair as they drop off their kids at school “glanced” at their phones as they drove through the parking lot toward those wayward teenagers. Those speed bumps reminded distracted drivers to slow down and be on the lookout and have prevented many tragedies.
How many times a day do you do or say something you wish you could undo? Did you ever do something in a hurry and then realized that if you had taken a moment to think about it, you could have saved yourself a lot of time and frustration? You need to come up with your own “speed bumps.” Find something you encounter or do a few times a day – it could be driving over speed bumps or unlocking your classroom door or anything else. Just pick something, and then make a commitment that every time you are in that situation, you reset yourself.
For me, resetting means closing my eyes (or softening my gaze) and taking three deep breaths that extend into every fiber of my body and make me feel like I’m expanding 360-degrees. That act alone slows my heart rate, lowers my blood pressure, and reduces or stops the production of cortisol. I am able, in about sixty seconds, to change my body to go from shooting out toxic hormones that interfere with my health to producing feel-good hormones like dopamine that relax me on the spot. This didn’t just happen the first time I took three deep breaths. I had to practice training my brain and body to respond like that, but it didn’t take long, and now I can do it on-demand!
I also found that my day starts a whole lot better when I go through my morning routine. Once I pull into my parking space, I get my keys and badge out of the cupholder of my car. While I clip the badge on the waistline of my pants, I simply set an intention of serving my students to the best of my abilities. I know my content is important, but I know my students are more important, and I remind myself to keep that at the core of every action I take and decision I make. As I put my key into my classroom door, I intentionally take a deep inhale and put a smile on my face before turning the key to the right and opening the door.
That might seem silly to mention, but the thirty seconds I spend paying attention to my intention does wonders in helping me remember why I’m doing this important work. When I put a smile on my face, it automatically makes me feel good because the act of smiling signals our brains we are happy, which, in turns, causes our bodies to produce hormones that make us actually feel happy. Since I no longer teach the zero-period jazz band, I walk in my room while they are rehearsing. Because I intentionally put a smile on my face before walking in, the kids who notice me coming in the room automatically respond with a smile as a reflex, and that’s a pretty awesome way to start every day!
What are your strategies for resetting yourself? Why is it important to have this ability? How can you see your next meeting or parent conference going differently if you were able to decompress yourself before going into those types of stressful situations?
Think of something you do several times a day, such as unlocking your classroom door. Make a commitment that every time you do that action, you will intentionally take another action. For example, every time you unlock your classroom door, you will intentionally take a deep breath and put a smile on your face. If you intentionally do that for 21 days, you will find that it becomes habit to smile when you unlock your classroom door. That means your body and mind will automatically be put in a positive state as your happy hormones get released and override your cortisol. It takes practice, but once you master this ability, you physically feel your heart rate decrease, depth of breath increase, and a sensation of relaxation will take place. That simple act of resetting sets you up to move forward in a different frame of mind, one that is a little less stressed and a lot more likely to help you be a calm teacher.
Identify your “speedbump” of choice, that action that will signal you to slow down and regroup, and then make it an intentional habit to take a few seconds to reset each time you are in that situation. Be sure you use your journal to reflect on what you observed and how you felt when you adopted the new habit.
Like my exercise with pushups, you can invest just a few concentrated minutes a day to support yourself in being more productive or learning a new skill or creating a positive habit, and then you’ve got a whole new capacity for functioning at a higher level. But more important than the clean office or organized filing cabinet is the process you just went through of identifying a goal and achieving it in incremental but consistent steps. This is how the most effective learning happens in kids and adults. It’s biological, so don’t fight it. Embrace it. Learn how to teach yourself to effortlessly change habits by using SNaP strategies. Then, you can apply the same principles to yourself and your students on a bigger scale. Always remember, it’s the consistent practice of the new skill where habits are born.
Excerpt of Chapter 7 from Love the Job, Lose the Stress: Successful Social and Emotional Learning in the Modern Music Classroom by Lesley Moffat
