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, I am going to really pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about the kind of realization that I had. And I'll be the first one to tell you this is not like I'm not like the first one to ever figure this out. But this is something that once I actually understood it, it really kind of opened my eyes a lot. So today we're going to be you know, if we've kind of been paying along or paying attention, we've been talking about choir stuff, a lot of singing, and a lot of kind of more choral centered stuff, we are training inside the math inside that our membership was all about, you know, in a choral setting, we were all the podcasts have been about music literacy, and my favorite things in a choral setting. And the reason being is if you haven't been figuring this out, I had a I started a sixth grade choir this year. And I've done a lot of learning over the year so far. And I came to a realization a couple of months ago, right around when things started to get a little weird coming back from winter break, I realized that what I was doing just wasn't working. And quite frankly, it hadn't been working for a while. And I was trying to kind of forcing to make it work. And what I mean by that is, you know, we were still making music, and the kids are still for the most part enjoying it. But I realized that I wasn't necessarily serving everybody in my class. And when I when I took a moment and stopped and zoomed out a little bit, I had realized that there was a misalignment between the why of why a crate why I decided to do a sixth grade choir, and the how of actually how I implement, I implemented that. And when I kind of realized why it makes a lot of sense. So first of all, I have never actually taught choir outside of student teaching until this year.
And it became really evident that when I was put back in a choral setting, I kind of went on to my, what I kind of seemed like my ensemble brain or you didn't like my secondary brain. And there's nothing wrong with that it was just it wasn't aligned with the students that were in front of me. And by that, I mean, I had kind of really defaulted to doing a lot of what I had seen my directors do in undergrad and in high school. And while a lot of that was really, really good, it didn't necessarily translate to a sixth grade setting. So what I found myself doing a lot was taking something that I had seen at a higher level and adapting it down or adapting it so that it was accessible for sixth graders. And when I kind of looked at the misalignment between the why and the how, like I mentioned earlier, I realized that I was doing it backwards. Instead of taking secondary stuff and adapting it to a sixth grade setting, I needed to take my understanding of general music and elementary pedagogy, and adapt that into the choral setting. And when once I started making those changes, I've really seen a lot of my students the engagement has gone up my awareness of what's going on in the classroom and what's going on in the you know, within the rehearsal is gone, it has really improved. I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm not saying that, you know, this is now a super ideal wonderful choir classroom where everything is done 100% properly. But what I have noticed is my students are enjoying it more and my students are most of the time more likely to give me a little bit more leeway when it comes to me getting them outside of their box.
And I've really been really been enjoying kind of taking these steps and, and trying new things. If you joined us for the master class this month inside that music teacher community with this our our membership that has ongoing PD and a PD library. I talked a lot about where I started to see these cracks and where I kind of ignored them and hope that they would get better and surprising. No one, they didn't go away. So that's really where I had to take a moment and I just kind of regrouped. And the first thing that I did was I noticed that my kids were kind of burning out or enquire and the first thing I did was essentially pause and I took a day where we weren't doing choir stuff. We were doing general music stuff, just to give them a little bit of a win a little bit of a pattern breaker and we played you tube around if you
are familiar with a game, it's amazing. But we played it with 50 kids, and it was absolutely wild and the kids loved it. And I'm not saying we have to necessarily do, you know, game days every day or you know, shift gears completely. But allowing them we kind of had gotten to into a rut. So I don't know how you feel about this. But I feel that sometimes both us as the teachers and our students, we get stuck in a rut, and we just kind of get stuck in this pattern of going along with the flow and kind of doing the same things over and over and over again. And when that happens, everything gets monotonous, we get bored, we were looking for something new, we're looking for things that our brain is going to latch on to. And typically, the way our brain will find all some, like all these negative things will will start acting out. We might have students that start talking or you know, just refusing to do things. And it just becomes a spiral of we don't know what to try to make it better. So we accidentally create the problem and make the problem worse. And that is one of those things were once I was able to have that pattern breaker of getting the the choir kids out of kind of break what they expected. We were able to bring it back. And I was able to flip into my elementary brain and adapt what what I knew was pedagogically sound in a general music classroom and apply that to acquire classroom. So what does that look like? If I'm going to really boil down what, what I, what I saw, and what I changed, is instead of focusing on the goal is to make music and have the kids learn this song, I made that my secondary goal. And my primary goal was engagement, I want the kids to be engaged in what we're doing. Because let's be honest, we could have really cool repertoire that if the kids knew it, they'd sound beautiful on it. But if the kids aren't engaged, it's going to take us so much longer to learn the repertoire if they even learn it at all. So I would rather my kids be engaged first. And that'd be my primary objective, but also still get stuff done. So before anyone starts, you know, given the pitchforks out, I'm not saying that music has to be fun all the time. Because let's be honest, we a lot of most of us went through music school, we know that music is not fun all the time. But the reality is, when music can be fun, that is when learning is easiest, when we feel like we are most engaged and connected with what's going on. And we just enjoy it more. That's the whole point. So this is kind of one of those weird episodes where I'm just kind of going in and kind of talking about some things that are on my mind. But I really have done a lot of reflecting and thinking about how we adapt what we know and how we apply what we know, into our classroom. So I want to leave you with the challenge. When you are given something new, whether it be a new class or a you know, maybe you have a particularly news to pick a new student that's particularly tricky that's coming in and you really don't know what to do, and you're trying new things. Are you going from what you think someone else would do? Well at or are you starting where your expertise is and applying that to the situation, you're gonna make mistakes, you're going to do things wrong. But I truly think that whenever we start with what our expertise is, and take that and apply that to the situation, it's going to at least bring us closer to the understanding of what we actually need, than if we were to take a successful thing that someone else does that really isn't in our zone of genius and try to apply it to that situation. So I want you to kind of think of that when you're given a new situation or maybe a tricky situation. And remember that you are an expert. It might not feel like it all the time. But you are the pedagogical content expert in the music classroom. So drawl from that area of focus, draw from that area of expertise and apply that to whatever situation you're given. If you enjoyed this week's episode, it would mean the world to us. If you were to leave us a review, wherever you're listening to on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you are, leaving us a review or some comments really helps us understand what episodes are resonating with you most. And also it just helps me understand and kind of remember that I'm not just here in my basement recording and nobody's listening. You can also send us an email Hello at that music teacher.com. And if you want to learn more about my training that I gave this month in that music teacher community, you can head over to the link in the show notes wherever you're listening. That growing PD library will always be there. So any of our past master classes you're able to go in and check, take get some content specific professional development and get a certificate so you can get some CDs. With that being said, thank you so much for joining me for this week's episode. And in case nobody's told you lately, thank you so much for making a difference in the lives of the students that you teach.
