Music Education

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Announcing the 2020 Summer Session

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Announcing the 2020 Summer Session

Last week marked the end of the school year (and 12 weeks of online teaching) and the start of something new. A simpler schedule, a slower pace, a season to plan and prepare for what’s next.

What is next?

For many of us, there’s still a lot of uncertainty about what the next few months will hold. Will we return to in-person teaching? Will schools and churches reopen? Will it be safe to sing together, play together, be together?

We don’t have the answers just yet. But what we do have is an opportunity to plan and prepare.

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How to Teach a Virtual Studio Class

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How to Teach a Virtual Studio Class

A few years ago, I started teaching monthly group classes in my studio.

The idea was to include more opportunities for informal performance, observation, musical discussion, and developing musicianship skills in a supportive group environment. All students are invited and encouraged to play something each time, even just part of a piece.

This gives us an opportunity to:

  • show works in progress

  • talk about practicing, learning processes, challenges, and rewards

  • give feedback (positive + constructive)

I also plan a few musical games and activities related to listening, movement, creative musicianship, and composition — things we can’t really do in our one-on-one lessons.

This year, I planned to teach five studio classes specifically for 3rd-6th graders, two studio classes for 7th-12th graders, and monthly buddy lessons for my K-2nd grade students.

But what to do when the world shuts down and everything moves online?

Host a Zoom studio class, of course.

Last week, I taught two studio classes (3rd-6th grade and 7th-12th grade) and two buddy lessons (K-2nd grade). Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how I set these up, how I structured our time together, and what activities I created to play virtually.

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22 Creative Ideas for Teaching Music Online (for All Ages)

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22 Creative Ideas for Teaching Music Online (for All Ages)

Like many of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to teach music creatively online these past few weeks.

  • What tools work best to facilitate connection, dialogue, and musical experience?

  • What strategies lend themselves best to online teaching?

  • What assignments will foster music-learning during this time?

As many of us are navigating this new territory of learning how to teach online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I thought I’d put together a master list of ideas for teaching in a variety of settings: church music, community teaching, and K-12 music.

I’m also including a list of tech tools that I’m using personally, have used in the past, or have heard recommended from other music teachers in the field.

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How to Use Color to Teach Music Literacy

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How to Use Color to Teach Music Literacy

If you walk into an elementary classroom, you might notice that everything is color-coded: signs and charts on the wall to labels on bins to pieces of tape marking certain spots on the floor.

This is because colors are easy for most young children to recognize and differentiate between.

But in music, our baseline is black and white, the colors of standard notation. When first introducing music-reading, it can be challenging for young students to recognize patterns and organize the content visually when everything is black and white.

For this reason, color can be a helpful tool when teaching music literacy and developing music-reading skills. “When we use color in a systematic way it can help students retain information better than just using black and white.” (source)

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How to Transition to Teaching Lessons Online (Due to COVID-19)

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How to Transition to Teaching Lessons Online (Due to COVID-19)

We’re living in unprecedented times.

With the recent worldwide outbreak of COVID-19, more and more schools and studios are choosing to close and transition to remote learning.

Maybe you’re like me in thinking that some subjects lend themselves well to being taught online: history, language, math. But music? How do you teaching piano to a 1st grader online? How do you teach choir or band? How do you teach group lessons?

This week, numerous music educators have put together resources, kits, and teaching guides to help others transition to online learning, learn about tools that are available, and get ideas. There are Facebook groups and webinars, blog posts and Google Docs summarizing all the music-related tech tools that are offering special discounts right now.

Here in Rochester, NY, schools are closed and moving online until further notice.

As such, I’m transitioning my studio to online learning. Today, I want to share what that looks like, including:

  • The notes I’m sending home to parents

  • Three models for online education I’m offering to all my students (K-10th grade)

  • Steps I’m taking to plan and prepare for this change

  • Resources and printables I’m pulling together for the next few weeks

  • Tools I’m using on the tech side of things

  • My best recommendations for studio teachers in this situation

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Work-Life Balance — Is There Such a Thing?

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Work-Life Balance — Is There Such a Thing?

We’ve heard it all before: the lore of work-life balance. Of doing it all, and doing it all well. And so we set out in search of the magical formula that will keep us in perfect balance, the solution to all our problems. 

But secretly, we kind of wonder: is it real? Can it be achieved?

There’s been some debate recently as to whether or not this idea of balance between work and life is actually attainable. The thing is, the word balance makes it feel precarious: the feeling we have when learning to ride a bicycle, that we might lose our balance and fall over at any moment.

Not a great visual for life, just saying.

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Five Teaching & Learning Myths to Debunk This Year

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Five Teaching & Learning Myths to Debunk This Year

You know those things you’ve heard that seem true? I mean, they sound plausible. Plus, if enough people say it, it must be true, right?

Before long, we find ourselves buying into the hype, retelling the story, believing something we’ve heard without stopping to ask questions.

This is how myths begin.

Sometimes, there’s simply a lack of information—nothing to disprove this theory or that idea. Other times, they sound good on paper but are only surface-level with no substance to back them up.

Whatever the case may be, we’ve all encountered myths (big and small) in various parts of our lives.

But have you ever stopped to think about myths related to teaching and learning? What stories are being told out there that affect our work and how we approach things? What’s being shared as fact when there isn’t research to back it up?

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Do We Really Teach How We Were Taught? Three Things You Should Know

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Do We Really Teach How We Were Taught? Three Things You Should Know

Do you ever think back to the teachers you had growing up?

Maybe a private music teacher or a choir director or your high school English teacher or a professor you had in college.

What do you remember about them? What was your learning experience like? What approaches did you observe? What do you find yourself incorporating into your own teaching?

There’s an age-old adage that says we teach how we were taught.

This isn’t the full story, of course: we all have unique backgrounds and a variety of experiences that inform the people we are today and the teachers we are becoming.

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17 Cumulative Songs for Children's Choir

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17 Cumulative Songs for Children's Choir

Do you remember those songs we used to sing as kids that went on and on and on? That had what felt like a hundred verses, each one longer and sillier than the one before it?

This is the joy of a cumulative song.

From music class to road trips, playgrounds to choir rehearsal, cumulative songs are fun to sing, engaging for children of all ages, and an effective teaching tool.

For those of you who may not know what I’m talking about, a cumulative song is a song that adds a new phrase of text with each repetition.

Usually, the lyrics are a list of some kind, getting progressively longer as the song goes on.

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4 Strategies to Help Your Adult Choir Improve Their Sight-Reading Skills

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4 Strategies to Help Your Adult Choir Improve Their Sight-Reading Skills

It's one the greatest musical skills you can help your choir develop: singing and reading music for themselves with musical understanding.

Just like learning to read language, music-reading comes after listening and interacting with music aurally and developing a musical vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns (these are like words in language).

Think of how you learned to read: You probably spent a lot of time following along in a book as you listened to someone else read to you.

Eventually, you started finishing the sentences and pointing to the words as you went along.

You learned simple words like, go and dog and started being able to identify them in the context of other books.

Learning to read music is no different. We learn to recognize tonal and rhythm patterns like familiar words in books.

Follow along with my creative work and daily adventures: @ashleydanyew

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