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.

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)

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

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.

Every day, we make thousands of tiny choices.

We choose what to wear, what to eat, what to say, how to respond to the changing world around us. We make decisions in music and teaching, what to write, what to play, what to focus on.

We are inundated with options and possibilities, a dizzying array of information and ideas.

We feel an obligation to make the "right" choices, a responsibility to make choices quickly and efficiently, to be decisive and smart.

Lent begins two weeks from today—Wednesday, February 26.

For most denominations, this is a season marked by quiet confession, sacrifice, and reflection.

Maybe you’ll give something up this season (like caffeine or cookies or social media) or maybe you’ll take something on (exercise, prayer, or solitude).

Maybe you’ll walk a labyrinth or participate in a Taizé service or do some fasting.

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?

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.

If you’ve been following along for a while, you know that I like to start each year with a book list—a collection of books that I’d like to read (knowing that I usually discover other books throughout the year that I’ll add in).

I used to be a strict one-book-at-a-time reader, but last year, I found that I enjoyed reading two at a time—a nonfiction/business/health book for mornings or pockets of free time during the day and a novel/memoir for reading at night.

I always try to choose books from a few different categories:

Business
Health & Lifestyle
Spiritual
Relationships
Fiction
Personal/Intellectual
Nonfiction/Memoir

This helps me be intentional about the books I choose to read and ensure some diversity (so I don’t end up reading only one type of book!).

Without further ado, here is my book list for 2020:

Happy New Year's Eve, friends!

This year-in-review post is one of my favorites to write each year. Sometimes it feels like the year passes by so quickly, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to look back to this time last year and celebrate all that’s happened and how much we’ve learned along the way. Here's a look back on our year: