You're listening to that music podcast with Bryson Tarbet, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind that music teacher at the elementary music summit each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher, and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve. Show Notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found at that music teacher.com.
Hello, and welcome back to that music Podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about sorting through all the clutter. Because I know if you're anything like me, you love PD, you love going to conferences, you love finding new ideas on Instagram, Tik Tok all the places. But if you're also like me, you're not so great at implementing it without actually making a conscious effort. So when I first started teaching, I gathered everything. And I had what I called my folder of shame, which was essentially all of my, my PD packets, anything from Oh, mea screenshots of things that I found on Instagram, so many Pinterest prints that pronounce, but I never really did anything with it once I printed it out and put it in this form. So today, we're going to be talking about ways that we can actually make sure that you are doing that. Because when you're just doing you know, when you're just printing it out and are just doing it, that's not really, that's not really helpful. And a lot of this comes down to when you have so many different resources, you just feel like you're drowning in resources. So instead of me kind of rehashing something that I've talked about before, what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do this little introduction, and then I'm going to pass it over to pastor Bryson, who is from the repertoire detective challenge we actually hosted about a year ago today. And this is the third day of the repertoire, Detective challenges, which is all about how we're making sure once we have found all this repertoire, once we found all these areas, if you think you have too many resources, how you can narrow that down, and make sure that they're authentic, make sure that they're high quality, and make sure that they're with something that you want to hear all the time. So before I pass it over to pass Bryson, if this, like I said, this is from day three of the repertoire detective challenge. If you want to learn more about the repertoire detective challenge, you can check out the link that's in the description below, or wherever you're listening. And it's also probably going to be better to watch. So if you didn't know, we also post the podcasts on YouTube. So if you head over to YouTube, again, we'll put that link in the description wherever your show notes, wherever you're listening, you'll be able to see my slides and things like that as well. But if you want to do the Europe Georgia Tech Challenge in its entirety, you can check out the link in the show notes. But it's also part of the that music teacher community. So if you're part of the community, it's in the approach isn't No, it's in the curriculum planning section, the repertoire detective challenge in its entirety. But without any more chatter on my part here is day three of the repertoire detective challenge, take it away past Bryson, how do we know if a piece of repertoire is worth including in our classroom. And that's really what today's entire training is going to be about. Let's go back to the repertoire based curriculum framework. So here, we're right in the middle smack dab in the middle about making sure that the pieces we have are authentic. So we're talking about all talking about ensuring authenticity. So how do we know if a piece of music is authentic? And there are a few questions that you can ask yourself, once you find a piece that you really want to double check and make sure that it truly is something that's worth including, first of all, does the piece accurately represent its origins? So if it's a piece that's saying it's a folk song from Canada, does it actually come from Canada? Or is it something composed in a way that is, you know, often miss attributed to that, that origin? But I also want you to ask this question, does it bring you joy? Does it bring your students joy? Does it bring you as the teacher joy? When I talk about the joy, I really want us to think about it. Because let's be honest, we as teachers are going to have songs stuck in our head all day. And we're going to use these pieces of repertoire for many, many years. So if it doesn't bring us joy, if it doesn't bring our students joy, there likely isn't a place to include it. There's so much other stuff that's out there, that we could find something that is joyful when we're finding when we're putting things into our curriculum. Another question I want you to ask yourself is when you find a new piece, does it have a questionable past? And when I say questionable past I can mean a lot of different things. But basically, it comes down to ensuring that the history of the song is one that you are fine and you are you think is worth perpetuating. So when we're thinking about the history, I want you to think does it have questionable origins, meaning or authenticity, it Does it have potentially hidden adult themes. And it doesn't have a history of racist, derogatory or hateful themes. These are things that we want to really be careful of when we're including something in our repertoire, to make sure that we are accurately representing something and bringing something into our classroom that is worth representing to our children. Lauren McDougal created this wonderful document that has grown so much over the past few years called songs with a questionable past. In this document, it has a lot of folk songs, particularly that we basically that Lauren, and you know, crowdsourcing research has been able to track down the research so that we can find where it comes from. And there's a lot of actually repertoire in here that is commonly used, that has been traced back to a past that I don't think is worth including, you know, racist past a lot of adult themes or maybe misogynistic, misogynistic themes. So I'm going to put a link for this document in the training as well. There's so much good information in here. So when you find a piece of repertoire, double check, make sure it's not on this list and make sure that you're able to really trace it back in a way that improves that it is something worth including in your curriculum. I also want you to ask yourself, will your students be able to see themselves in this repertoire? Are we going to be able to allow the students to have a connect a personal connection to the repertoire that we're including. But on the flip side of that, will our repertoire allow students to see others in the curriculum, we need to make sure that we're not just showing the students more of themselves, but also letting them understand that there's so much more out there and allow them to see that there is there's there's value in doing things in hearing things and performing things that aren't necessarily in their own musical vernacular. So in today's challenge, I want you to take the the repertoire that you found so far, I want you to narrow your list down to about 10 songs to do a deep dive into, I want you to check each of these songs. And I want you to go through and verify its authenticity, track it back as far as you can, can you I want you to double check that questionable past document to make sure that it doesn't have a questionable past. And if it does, think about you know, depending on what the history is, what is your next step? Are you going to not include it? Are you going to find something different? Or are you going to share with others like, Hey, I've been using this piece forever. And apparently it has this this history that I wasn't aware of figuring out what your next step is. But tomorrow, we're going to take it one step deeper, as we figure out how to organize it in a way that we can actually use it in our classroom. I hope that's given you some ideas on how to take all of the things that are out there, because there are so much wonderful stuff out there. And I hope that that's given you at least a starting way to get started. So you can start to get down to the things that because let's be honest, when we have so many resources, there's no way we're going to include them. Because we just we just we can't include everything right? We literally have to make decisions on what to include and what to exclude in our classrooms. And that's where I think taking it through the steps that I mentioned in that the previous training, which is really helpful because it really helps you narrow down what is worth perpetuating what is worth getting stuck in your head, what is worth having the students talk about and enjoy and experience and what's just not, and that'll be very situational, it depending on the student population you serve, depending on you as a teacher, depending on, you know, whatever it'll be, it'll be very specific to you, what I might read out of my curriculum, or maybe are your favorite things, and that are the best, you know, things that your students really latch on to most and that's okay, that's really where it comes down to the fact that we are all different, we serve different populations. And we really need to just kind of embrace that and embrace how we can really take ownership of what it looks like to be in my classroom. And really own everything about that. So again, I if you want to learn a little bit more about the repertory Tech Challenge, you can check out the show notes below. But I would be remiss if I did not invite you to join the elementary music mini Summit, which will be on January 20 2020. For a brand new event, we is free, you can grab your free ticket by heading over to that music teacher.com/summit. It's going to be amazing. I am already blown away with the amount of tickets that we've we've had claimed and I'm super excited to be able to offer winter PD. We've been we've been hearing your request for years and we're finally able to make it happen. And again, I do want to take a moment and thank you because it sometimes we don't hear that a lot of times you don't hear that. So I wanted to end this episode. Like in a similar way like I've been in New Episodes lately, which is in case nobody has told you. I want to thank you for making a difference in the lives of the students that you teach.
