How can one measure a successful music program? What about a successful music teacher? How can one assess student growth in their musical understanding? All of these questions I ask myself as I reflect on fifteen years of teaching large, performance-based ensembles. I have had the pleasure of working with dozens of pre- service music education majors and have brought in a handful of student teachers into my classroom. Working with these energetic and eager young educators has deepened my questioning in regard to what we are truly trying to accomplish with our students and our careers.

When I look back and reflect on the decisions I have made with my teaching, many possible themes have emerged that I would like to share with the profession. These realizations have come from mindfully stepping back and watching my students engage with music on their own terms, developing their own understanding, and becoming empowered to be active learners in our ensembles. My teaching has been identified by many of my peers, in a good way, as "non-traditional". Since my students perform music at a high level, I am comfortable with knowing that I'm providing a strong music program for them. I believe I can provide opportunities for my students to experience success and enjoy making music.

I have talked with many other music educators who are also looking, experiencing, and desiring ways to make the experiences they provide for their students to be more meaningful. I am only midway through my public school teaching career; you may call this a mid-career crisis, if you wish. But, these are some themes that I believe all music educators should mindfully reflect on as we strive to give the best experiences to our students.

1) Performance-Based Ensemble Directors Should Not Base their Ensembles on Performances

Ensembles must perform. It is the reason why most students elect to learn an instrument or to develop their vocal abilities. It's fun, it can be educational, and it is ultimately what we are all about. Our community loves it, our administrators expect it, and truthfully, besides just the kids enjoying to perform at a concert or festival, conducting a well-prepared concert can bring a lot of joy to a teacher as well. However, if we are limiting all the experiences in the classroom between concerts to simply just rehearsing for a concert then we are also limiting the very nature of how students learn. Students experience music in many ways, and our state and national standards provide many expectations on how students should be learning about music. While all activities and experiences we design for our ensembles should improve performance and foster deeper understanding, there are many ways to do that without simply developing instrumental and vocal techniques. The doing of music (performance) is important, but should never overshadow the knowing of music.

While there may be no way to remove the fact that your ensembles will be evaluated (formally and informally) by their concerts, it is important for music teachers to be able to assess the overall experiences their students have with music day to day. If you allow yourself to continue to feel evaluated strictly by your ensembles performances, then the pressure will ensure you only work on performance (sounds like teaching to the test, right?). Take pride in various experiences you provide for your students each day and be sure to include your community (parents, administrators, teaching colleagues). Have them come to class. Offer informal presentations of students working together in your ensembles and showcase what we do besides the end result.

2) Composition May Be The True Missing Link

I have grown in my teaching to realize that students develop a greater understanding of music through composing it than by performing it. Performance is limited to ability. It takes a long time to develop as an instrumentalist or vocalist and performance can often be demonstrated by rote, memorization, or responding to the director's directions rather than through true understanding. I engage my students in composition regularly throughout the year. We learn a new topic then the students compose. We learn a new style or genre then the students compose. Instead of practice logs or recorded minutes, students are often assigned a small composition to ensure me that they are thinking with music at home. Some compositions are simple etudes to demonstrate or assess for understanding. Some compositions are revised and edited within groups or with the entire ensemble's input to develop a thought, idea, or curiosity. Some compositions are rehearsed and performed in class or at concerts. Some compositions are beyond the student's ability and left on the computer or notational program and are simply shared. Composition, again, is not limited by how strong one can perform. Therefore students are able to experience and demonstrate musical concepts at a much deeper understanding with composition than through performance.

Not enough music teachers embrace composition in their ensembles. My guess is because they never did it themselves in secondary school or even as undergraduates. I don't teach composition. I just give room in my ensembles for composition to be used as a tool to enhance learning and allow students to take more ownership in their musical experiences. Technology can make the compositional process easier and everyone can now be a composer and easily share their musical ideas with the entire world. The teacher can be the facilitator to foster students' own curiosity and musical understanding into meaningful musical experiences. Students understanding music better can result in better performing students (and better performing ensembles). I have found with my own students that they use composition as a tool to improve on their weaknesses. I have used this phenomenon in my curriculum now and often insist students compose their own playing quizzes, focusing on their own determined struggles. Further, when students have the opportunity to share and perform their own compositions, they feel empowered. It becomes their music and their learning. Elementary and general music teachers have known and practiced this for years. Perhaps instrumental and choral teachers should have more conversations with them.

3) You Were Probably Not Taught Correctly

We teach the way we were taught. Nothing wrong with that necessarily, but we must be open to the fact the way we learned music or how we participated in music may not have been the best, or at least may have been limited. Music education has come a long way the past 20 years. What we know about how students learn and experience music has definitely changed. What has not changed much is how music is offered to students in secondary schools. We still have primarily bands, choirs, and orchestras with very little other class offerings. It is therefore important for ensemble teachers to design their classrooms in a way that allows for student exploration, student-inquiry, and multiple perspectives, all within a student-centered environment. It may be hard to think that your favorite high school teacher or some of the greats you've experienced at various conducting symposiums may have goofed a bit, but being open and willing to look at how students interact with music in your classroom and on their own may provide the tools necessary to foster enriching experiences for all students.

4) Make TIME No Longer a Four-Letter Word

If you had all the time in the world with your students, what would you do differently? My guess is that all listed items in this article would be easier if there was just more time. So what is most important to you and your students? If you focus the little time we have (which is often interrupted with various school events) on what we believe is important for our students to gain, then we won't be pressured to fall into the regular routine of "rehearse-perform-repeat". We know that Johnny may very well not play saxophone in 5 years, or that Timmy really does not like the violin but is sticking with it until graduation. How can we ensure that the limited time we spend with our students in our classroom can provide the tools and assurance they need in order to use the plentiful time they have outside of our classroom? By allowing TIME to get to us, we are potentially damaging all the TIME students have away from us.

5) Ask, Don't Tell

I'm sure many of us have heard at least some of the phrases "student-centered", "constructivist", "student-inquiry", etc. If not, they are basically explaining the overall experience students should have in any learning environment where instruction is focused on student's interacting directly with the subject and developing their own understanding and meaning. The days of long lectures, word searches, and answering the questions at the end of the book after reading the chapter are quickly fading away. What does this look like in music performance classrooms? How can music programs become more student-centered in a setting that has always been so director-dominated? How can a music teacher, knowing that an administrator who knows very little about music or rehearsal techniques may evaluate them, demonstrate to their evaluator that students can create their own meaning in their classrooms?

I believe the easiest, quickest way to change your classroom environment to a more student-centered, inquiry driven environment is to ask good questions, and not just tell your classes what to do. By simply posing thought-provoking questions to your ensembles throughout the day, you can ensure that they are part of the learning experience. A simple test that any teacher can do is record and compare the amount of time the they are talking about the music versus how much time the students are talking about the music. The results may tell you quite a lot about who has the power and knowledge in your classroom. Rather then stopping a rehearsal to tell the ensemble what to do, ask meaningful questions that encourage students to interpret the music. Honoring multiple perspectives in the classroom can promote deep musical conversations, empowering the class as decision makers, and making the ultimate decisions more meaningful to the ensemble. They take ownership in the music, the rehearsal, and the performance. You will regularly be impressed (and so will your administrators) about the depth of conversations and the growth of shared understanding among your ensemble members.

We all love quiet, productive rehearsals but I worry when I see teachers insist on silence during the rehearsal. Yes the social aspect of teenagers can quickly come out when given too much slack, but all musicians need time to discuss and reflect on their understandings of the music in front of them. Often students "translate" for each other when they don't quite understand the director's instructions or the composer's intent. Student leadership should be encouraged and the classroom environment should foster a community of practice where all members feel able to contribute in their own ways and learn from each other.

6) Embrace The Changes of Music Teaching Standards and Teacher Evaluation

I feel the biggest fear among music teachers currently is involving teacher evaluation. Evaluating music teachers with the same guidelines as other subject areas can be concerning. For the music teacher, it may bring out the fact that our traditional, director-led approach is outdated and doesn't align with how good instruction (in any subject area) looks like. Holding music teachers accountable for the national, state, and local content standards in music and what students learn in all music classes (including performance-based) may stir up many heated debates. We cannot feel that the world is closing in on us and we have to give up all we have done with our ensembles. No one is expecting us to drop everything. These progressions in teacher evaluation and content standards are a perfect time to reflect together to see how our profession and the experiences we give our students can also progress. There are many fabulous teachers already successfully implementing truly holistic, student- centered, performance ensembles. Search them out and talk with them.

7) Empower Your Music Learners and Integrate Technology



The biggest connection I have made recently with my students is the integration of technology in my band ensembles. By using various technologies I have been able to reduce wasted time (see #4 above), help students make more connections with the music beyond performance (see #2 above) and empower students to become more involved with their learning. With each new program or website, there is always a bit of a learning curve but I found the time spent has been more valuable to my students and their success than the time I'd use on score study.

The use of the iPad has been especially valuable to my instruction and to my students' learning. I have one iPad right next to my music stand and besides the time saved with attendance, inventory, emails, tuning, tempo checking, music vocabulary searching, YouTube videos, trill fingerings, lesson plans, and composition sharing, I have also been able to keep in touch with how my students experience the world. The way our students experience information and music now is far different than how we did at their age. Technology in band when I was in high school was a VHS player (see # 3). My band as a whole enjoys exploring some of the musical concepts we discuss in literature using the GarageBand app on the iPad. My Percussion Ensemble especially enjoys creating their own pieces, or doing a cover tune using the iPad. They negotiate and discuss the various sounds and performance techniques possible with the iPad in order to create, with little guidance from me, their own musical performances. The discussions we have with the iPads in our hands directly relate to the same discussions we had with our band and percussion instruments. Students are able to make the connections quite easily and by relating the musical concepts with tools that they are familiar with and enjoy, creates a lasting impression on the students. The music—what we create on the iPads as well as what we rehearse and perform in our traditional ensembles—becomes the students'. The students make many decisions and take ownership of their learning while composing and refining their music using the iPads (or other technologies). Students like to make music. They don't always like the process it takes to make music, especially in large ensemble groups, working towards a concert. Integrating technology, like the iPad, allows students to show their understanding immediately, allows for many connections between music and the world around them, and connects us with how students experience music in their own settings.

8) Advocacy Is More About Relevancy

Summarizing #1-7 above, the word that comes to mind is relevancy. It is very unfortunate that we often are put in the position to have to defend what we do and why what we do is important. We have to constantly advocate what we do in order to save our programs, to keep kids in our seats, and to ensure that the Arts are part of the core curriculum for every child in every grade in every school. What I would like to encourage all teachers to do is also ensure that your programs, your curriculum, your daily interactions with your students, are always relevant to the students' needs. Budgets, scheduling, and graduation requirements are always blamed when programs are not able to fully thrive but what about if the kids just don't like what we have to offer them? Are we ok with only 20% of a school participating in music? How long can we last if our department serves the least amount of kids, but requires the highest amount to fund? A lot has been written and discussed about the dichotomy between how students experience music in school versus how they experience music outside of school. In order to ensure our continued success, we must keep an open mind and heart and provide opportunities for our students to connect with music in ways that meet their needs as well as to reach out to the many students that our ensembles failed to interest.

I am excited to see what the next fifteen years has in store for me and for our profession.