Habits of Effective Music Teachers

What makes for an effective music teacher? Every music teacher has up and down days, and even some school years that are better than others. However consistent excellence is what we all can and should strive for. To accomplish this, consistent habits that lead to excellence need to be practiced.

I wanted to suggest some habits that I think are important for effective music teaching.

Effective Music Teachers make habits of:

• Being cheerful and positive (even when they do not feel like it)
• Being organized in class/rehearsal
• Making sure their students know they care about them (even the difficult students)
• Giving honest, genuine, and positive feedback to their students
• Doing things outside of the school setting to make sure their personal energy is charged (don't underestimate the importance of "you" time)
• Studying and advancing themselves musically
• Analyzing their own teaching and strengthening areas that need growth
• Practicing good people skills with colleagues and administration (even the difficult colleagues)

There are many more good habits of course, but missing any of these could cause significant difficulty is some area of one's music teaching experience.

We all should desire to improve and grow as music teachers, and by dedicated effort and learning, we can. But, good habits do not form randomly, but by definition must be repeated over and over. Let us be intentional about practicing good habits in the classroom/rehearsal room.

A saying I am fond of sharing with my singers is, "If you want to be a good choir, you do the things that good choirs do, because doing those things are why they are good." (my saying) In other words, good choirs aren't good, and then have excellent habits in rehearsal, but rather good choirs are good because they have excellent habits in rehearsal. This is true of music teachers and conductors as well. One is not a "good" teacher/conductor and then has excellent habits, one is good because one has and practices excellent habits.

God gives the talent, it is up to us to cultivate and use it for His glory!

Three Ways To Increase Efficiency In School Choral Rehearsals

In a choral rehearsal, better organization means better efficiency. Better efficiency means higher achievement in rehearsal. Higher achievement in rehearsal means higher quality performances. So, organization and efficient habits can really be helpful.

Before sharing three ways to be better organized/efficient in rehearsals I want to make a disclaimer. Choir directors work with people, not machines, which means things don't always happen according to plan. Even with great organization, flexibility and a willingness to improvise and adapt to a music need immediately in rehearsal is often necessary.

Way number 1: Have an efficient check-in system for singers.

When they enter the rehearsal room and check-in, have a quality system that allows you to spend the least possible time. If you have a reliable student, have them take attendance, or have a self check in system. If you must do it yourself, have it be something that you can do in a minute or less (as in a system that assumes everyone is present and you only mark those absent and adjust for those who come late after rehearsal). If you can save a minute or two per rehearsal (as opposed to a traditional system that requires personal check-in every time for every person) you can easily gain between a half hour to an hour and a half of practice over a nine-week span.

Way number 2: Write the piece rehearsal order on a white board for all to see.

This can especially be valuable if you have a large amount of repertoire. If singers have their music in the correct order when rehearsing, it vastly cuts down transition time when switching between pieces. You could save 10 to 15 seconds every switch which could add up to a minute or two per rehearsal. Again we're talking about a half hour to an hour and a half of additional practice per quarter.

Way number 3: Use wait time when giving instructions.

This is a bit of a paradox. I tend to move fast in rehearsal, so this is something I work on constantly. When you stop the choir, wait for a couple of seconds before giving instructions. After giving instructions, wait for a couple or few seconds before starting up again. I can testify firsthand that when you don't do this, some singers will get lost with where you are in your instructions or even with a starting point in the music. This will force a repeat and create lost time. With younger singers that may have attention issues, not having the wait time is exceptionally challenging for them. By using the wait time at starts and stops, though it seems like an eternity at times to the director, you will move much more efficiently through the practice and actually save time.

What Works In Music Education?

This is a broad question. Too broad to be answered comprehensively. However, I want to share a few things that I've seen work well in establishing excellence with choirs, inspiring students to love music, and for teaching music effectively.

Good preparation works. I'm not referring to spending hours on lesson plans, but rather holistic preparation that begins with keeping oneself learning and growing musically. It follows with a broad plan and goals for a musical season (school year), and then targets specifics. Lesson plans for music teachers just fall in line under the broad plan.

An audition process followed by periodic checkups with singers or players works. In other words, knowing where each participant is individually greatly increases the effectiveness of your teaching and the focus of one's rehearsal/lesson plans. I like to give my students surveys at end of terms to see how they are relating to what they have been taught.

Finding and using performing locations with quality acoustics for your ensemble works. Sometimes this isn't possible, and no group can always perform in an ideal acoustic environment, but making sure quality performance venues are made available to your groups can greatly enhance the experience of one's students. This can get them more excited about learning and progressing, which of course builds up the groups. Generating honest positive experiences of success is important in motivating your students.

Prayer works. Perhaps most music teachers are in an environment where public prayer is not legally possible. However, all can engage in personal prayer to God for wisdom, for our students, for challenges, etc.... I can personally see where so often issues with students are figured out by personal prayer, or hearts are softened to be willing to learn again, or in prayer, the solution to a difficult situation comes to mind.

Signs You Are Making A Positive Difference With Your Students

I have yet to meet a teacher that says they do not want to make a positive difference in the lives of their students. I would assume that nearly every teacher (not withstanding a few creepers) indeed genuinely wants to have positive impact . This is surely true of the music teachers I've come in contact with. Here are some signs that your having a positive impact with your students, both musically and personally.

* Having students that continue with music after they are finished being in your classes.

You know that you at least didn't squelch their desire to make music. Often they will let you know how much they enjoyed the music experience, but sometimes you just have to observe. Having students of mine continue with music in college has been particularly rewarding to see and affirming in this way.

* Seeing definite growth in musical ability from your students.

This can be obvious growth in technique. However, growth in musical taste can be just as affirming. When a student discovers and learns to love the music of a great composer for example, it is thrilling.

* Students that are passing "it" on.

Keeping your ears and eyes open to what students are saying in passing can be very informative, both in what you can do to try and help them grow personally and musically, and as affirmation your work for them is making a difference. If I overhear a student encouraging another student with something I helped them with, I'm very pleased. When they are passing "it" on, you know you helped reach them.

Sometimes the affirmation comes years later from a parent or student. We should be patient and point our students toward good things, good character, and live well ourselves. The results do and will come!

Finding Inspiration For Great Choral Teaching

As choral music educators, it is important to find fresh inspiration for quality teaching. I would like to share three ways that help me find fresh inspiration.

1. Attend Professional Conferences

Being part of organizations such as the ACDA (American Choral Directors Association) and attending conferences, reading sessions, and workshops put on them, one can find much inspiration. Rubbing shoulders with fantastic music educators, musicians, and conductors alone is valuable, but throw in a masterclass, a reading session, and some fantastic concerts and one can be tremendously inspired. Positive interaction with high quality music gives a fresh reminder of why I chose this profession.

2. Study Repertoire

I am admittedly a repertoire geek. I enjoy pouring over scores of sheet music and looking for gems to teach to my choirs. When I find these gems, I become excited and motivated to share the music with my singers. I look for parts of the music that will be problematic, that will teach a concept, that will hopefully get the singers excited. Learning new music myself transfers into a desire to share it.

3. Get Out In Nature

Getting out in nature, seeing beautiful things, seeing interesting things, and just enjoying God's creation is refilling and inspiring. When I experience beauty in nature, besides recharging, I desire to share beauty in the rehearsal room. Perhaps the inspiration here is as much about recharging my energy for teaching, but I think both elements exist.

I wish you all great inspiration.

Building Trust With Parents About A Child's Voice

When working with young singers, it is important to build trust and a positive relationship with the parents. You want them to be excited about the their child's singing and trust you to help them. I wanted to share a few ways to build trust, and by extension, enthusiasm with parents.

Producing a great product is critical to develop trust. If you develop great sounding groups for the level the singers are at; if you have happy, excited children singing for you, the parents will generally become more trusting and enthusiastic. To produce a great product, one must know how to develop the voices in a healthy way, how to motivate and enthuse children, and how to help them enjoy the experience. In other words, competence and attitude is critical. This transfers to a good product.

Clear and concise communication is very important. Parents need to know you will be reliable in communication. If you have a concern about vocal technique in a child, communicate with the parents about it, present what you are trying to do to help fix it. You will gain respect, and often an ally in helping the child.

Be friendly. It is amazing what smiling and shaking a parents hand can do when you see them. Be genuinely interested in how they are doing, and it will help build relationship and trust.

Admit mistakes! If you make a mistake with a child, parent, or class, admit it, apologize for it, and fix the situation as best you can. Most people don't expect others to be perfect, so a bit of humility with mistakes goes a long way.

Three Ways to Challenge Yourself As A Music Teacher To Promote Growth

As a music teacher, I want to continually grow my skills and abilities. I want to be a better conductor, musician, teacher, and motivator to name a few. No matter what the area I want to focus on may be, to achieve growth, I must step outside of my comfort zone and deliberately push myself. Here are three recommendations to push yourself for growth as a music teacher.

1. Be deliberate about targeting an area (or areas) of growth. 

Chances are, with the business of teaching/conducting life, that if you do not take time specifically to target areas or an area of growth, little will occur outside of the naturally occurring osmosis. I recommend taking time at the beginning of the school year to select your area(s). Then make a plan. So much of growth is based on personal discipline and organization.

Challenge yourself by choosing areas for growth!

2. Select at least one piece of music that is a challenge for you.

Granted, this may not always be possible musically depending on the level of your students. However, the challenge for you could be introducing a quality piece that you know will take quite some time for your students to appreciate (but which most eventually will if taught well). I heard a High School choir at a national ACDA conference a few years ago present a whole set of Hindemith pieces as part of their program. Teaching a group of teenage singers to appreciate the Hindemith music and perform it well would likely be a greater challenge than the musical aspects of the piece.

Challenge yourself with repertoire!

3. Set aside regular time for professional/personal growth.

Like the first one, this seems very obvious, but so easy to neglect when teaching life gets busy. I would recommend that this should be outside of school/district requirements. This extra focus will help you become an exceptional teacher. Think what would happen if you set aside just 30 minutes per week for the whole school year to research something, practice something a bit extra, etc.... Most school calendars in the USA run four nine week quarters. 30 minutes per week could amount to 18 hours of focused improvement time in the course of a school year.

Challenge yourself by carving out time for growth!

Photocopying Choral Sheet Music: What should I do?

A recent forum thread on choralnet.org has generated much discussion and interest on the issue of the legality of photocopying choral music (click here for the thread). As this is a pertinent issue for music teachers, church musicians, and really anyone that is dealing with sheet music at anytime, I have decided to weigh in on the issue with some of my thoughts. However, the legal issues have been largely discussed, written about, and clarified many times over (in many places), and so I will be approaching the issue from a more practical standpoint. I hope it can be some help for those who may not be so sure how to approach the issue and enlightening for those who may not thought about it. (I will also be putting this post on my personal website blog at www.michaelsandvik.com).There are other legal music issues that can also be discussed, such as performance royalties, mechanical licenses, etc..., but this post will focus exclusively on sheet music.

Copyright law can appear daunting and intimidating at times, especially to young music teachers. There are lawyers that make careers specifically working with copyright law for a reason. However, if one follows the guidelines I lay out here, I believe one would be in compliance nearly all of the time (I don't write 100%, because it is always possible to make an ignorant mistake, which of course should be rectified if learned about).

In this post I will refer to any printed score (whether from a composer, publisher, or photocopied yourself) as a copy.

Disclaimer

I am not a lawyer. What I write should not be considered legal advice, nor as a final say in any way. 

The Fundamental Principle When Dealing With Sheet Music
*Purchase or acquire usage rights to EVERY copy of music you possess.*
In my opinion, this is the simple idea that drives sheet music copyright law. If you bought one copy of a piece of music, you only use/have one copy. If you bought fifteen copies, you only use/have fifteen copies. In other words, you pay for your product or license. If it is free, you acquire permission for use. I would dare to guess that 90% of sheet music copyright issues can be taken care of by applying this one principle. I'll share later what to do with the other 10% of the issues.

A person may think, what does it matter if I purchase six copies of a score and then make 20 more copies of my own? The company or composer still gets paid some money, and the music gets learned and performed? That is good right? And besides it only represents a few dollars.

The truth is that this is not right.

Consider this. Lets say you own an apple orchard that specializes in selling a few apples at a time primarily to tourists who want a tasty and healthy snack. We'll say the average sale is ten apples. Part of the experience allows for visitors to walk through your orchard and see how meticulously it is cared for. However, most visitors are regularly picking an apple or two themselves when they go on the orchard tour. The extra apples seem insignificant to them, they are buying ten apples after all, and everyone seems to be doing it. Yet when you do your accounting, you discover that you had 20,000 visitors who besides buying apples, also took one or two each during the tour, meaning that around 30,000 apples were taken from your orchard for which no one paid. This becomes a significant financial hit for you. This would not have happened if the visitors applied the principle that says, "if I have it, I bought it."

Though not a perfect analogy, this is regularly happening with sheet music. One composer on the above mentioned choralnet forum thread (see link) wrote this: "I estimate that I lose about $10,000 per year due to the illegal stealing of my intellectual property, either via photocopying, avoidance of performance fees and avoidance of paying mechanical licenses for recordings. $10,000 EVERY YEAR  is a lot of money to me and my family and I become very frustrated and angry when I think about it. Every living composer I know is suffering from this and every one of those composers is a real person, with monthly bills, many with families to support just like everyone else. Publishers are, of course, also affected and are struggling to stay in business."

Sometimes photocopying is legal. Many websites, like www.musicspoke.com, www.sheetmusicplus.com, other companies, and many composers, including myself, regularly retail digital scores. Purchasers there buy a pdf file and a license which gives them rights to print/copy the purchased number of the file. If you bought rights to 40 copies, you can legally print/photocopy and use 40 copies. If you print/photocopy a 41st copy however, you are now taking an extra "apple."

I hope readers are seeing how easy copyright law is to comply with. It is thoroughly based on common sense.

A Note
I have found that most people that have been acting out of ignorance in taking extra "apples" of music. When I've explained the situation to them, most are happy to reform and do things the right way.

What About Complicated Situations?
For the 10% of the time (or less) that it may not be clear what to do in a copyright situation, the best thing is to contact the publisher, distributor, or composer you bought the music from and let them tell you exactly what you can do in a situation. If you are dealing with a special case that you can not contact the original retailer or copyright owner, you can contact a lawyer, or even a music retailer for advice (who would be likely willing to advise someone trying to do the right thing). There is no reason not to know what to do in a situation.

Here is an example of a somewhat complicated situation (that in reality was not that complex). When I was in graduate school, I had an assistantship in the choral department. We had ordered a particular piece of music from a publisher which was on back order, meaning the piece would not be arriving for several weeks. However it was needed for use more quickly than that by one of the choirs. We had one score in our possession that had been used for perusal purposes. By calling the publisher, we obtained permission to make 100 copies (or some similar number) of the piece, which was the number we had purchased, with the agreement that we would destroy the photocopies as soon as the order arrived. They gave us a long numbers and letters code to print on the copies along with the words "copied by permission..." for reference purposes. The actual copies did eventually arrive and we destroyed the photocopies as directed.

Another situation happened when I wanted to use and perform an out-of-print piece for a Christmas program with a choir. I had one score in my possession. I contacted the publisher, who gave permission to photocopy the piece of music for a price and again the inclusion of the words "copied by permission..." and a reference number. Like the previous situation, the key was to contact the proper person (a publisher in both of these cases) for information about how to proceed.

Remember, copyright law for sheet music, though very nuanced and complex at times, in practice can nearly always be followed by applying the simple principle of "purchase or acquire usage rights for every copy of music you possess. For the rare times the situation is not clear, there are many places to obtain advice specific to your situation.

I hope this has been informative and helpful for music teachers, directors, performers, and anyone else who may be interested.

Excellence in the Choral Rehearsal Room: Characteristics of a Highly Effective Learning Environment

In the choral rehearsal room (classroom) there are many characteristics that demonstrate effective learning. This post will consider three characteristics of singers in the choral rehearsal room that demonstrate highly effectively learning: mental focus; listening, and reading.


1. Singers are mentally focused

For highly effective choral rehearsing to occur, singers must be mentally focused. They are motivated, pay attention to instructions, and are eager to learn. This is seen in their reaction time to instructions, singers interpretation of conducting gesture, timely questions, and improved vocal technique based on receiving instructions. Conductors must get good focus from their singers in order to expect great musical growth. If mental focus is consistently low day after day, then conductors must put their top priority into teaching singers to have mental focus and motivation (which is often the underlying fault for lack of focus). Conductors should also be willing to examine their own rehearsal technique is focus is lacking. With young, inexperienced singers, a lack of focus can occur when a conductor spends to much time "explaining" rather than keeping the singers singing.

2. Singers are listening

In a highly effective rehearsal environment, singers are listening while they sing. They are taught to listen for intonation, choral balance, vowel formation, musical line, etc.... They are applying these concepts and improving in these areas. The evidence of singers listening becomes evident to the conductor if he/she is listening for the choral results. An effective learning environment will see an improvement in these areas of musicality over time.

3. Singers are reading music

This is one of the most tangible areas of highly effective learning because knowledge of note reading and musical vocabulary is easy to evaluate. When improvements in this area are taking place, singers are becoming complete musicians, reading and understanding scores of music. If they do have reading skills, they should be improving with practice. This takes commitment from the conductor to improve these theoretical skills (this is the key). While teaching note and music reading may slow music learning early on in a school year/musical season, it will improve the overall learning by great amounts in the long term.

Avoiding Music Teacher Burn-out

Avoiding teacher burnout is agreeably important, but is often easier said than done. For me, as a music teacher, I find a certain teaching energy drain - reward cycle in place. Rehearsals can be so rewarding, but are often emotionally draining (even when satisfying). As a major concert approaches, the drain continues and even escalates, which seems to be somewhat cumulative day by day. A successful concert or performance tour is amazingly refilling in energy, as are those moments in rehearsal when the singers just seem to get it, or conquer a difficult passage.

I would describe burnout as being drained of teaching/emotional energy, which happens over time. This occurs when the drain amount is greater than the refilling. Day to day refilling of ones emotional energy tank becomes so important. Luckily, I find that one can do a lot of refilling away from the classroom. In fact, on a day to day basis, I find much of the best refilling is done by taking a break and doing other activities (generally in the evening). I would like to recommend three activities that have helped me refill my teaching energy tank.

1. Running/Walking: Few things restore me like this activity. Stress just sort of melts away. Classroom/rehearsal challenges become easier to deal with. I can just mentally relax while pushing myself physically, or just think about whatever, or even pray while running. I don't run with headphones, and I have doubts that the same activity would be so restorative (at least for me) if I wasn't so free to think.

2. Gardening: Tending plants can be quite restorative also, although not to the degree that running or walking is. For me, this is probably because, even though gardening is so fun and rewarding, it is at times a chore which in a busy time can feel demanding. Overall, however, it is relaxing, and very exciting to see seeds become sprouts, then little plants, then grand plants producing flowers, fruit, etc....

3. Personal devotion time: Spending time with God by reading the Bible and praying is perhaps the best restoration there is. As I claim His promises for wisdom, peace, and guidance, I receive strength for a new day's tasks. There is nothing that can surpass spending time with God.