Contemporary Ways to Streamline Your Teaching

Throughout this course participants will see how you can start beginning ensemble classes for instrumentalists immediately. Throughout the country, beginning programs are approached so differently. In some places, students start in just small group lessons, and directors are resistant to starting students in a large ensemble setting from day one – but this is MISSED time and opportunity. In other places, contact time is very limited in beginning ensemble settings, and yet other places students start in small ensemble classes. No matter what your set-up this course will help you to look at how you approach your beginning ensembles by utilizing the flipped classroom method, which I began using before 2015 (yes, BEFORE COVID). These ideas, techniques and resources can be adapted for ANY program, big, small, rural, urban, whether you meet with your students daily, or once every 6 cycle days. 

Flipped Learning, pre-teaching, Danielson Rubric – do any of these education buzz words sound familiar? Whether they do or not, this course will help you to understand how to incorporate pre-learning as well as reinforced learning to bring your ensemble (or even general music classes) to a whole new level. Are you tired of students coming back and saying “I don’t remember that” or “how do I?” or “what is the fingering for that?” – all of these can be solved utilizing a different approach beginning ensembles. With a little creativity, while this course have resources for beginning ensemble classes, it CAN and should be utilized in General Music and Choral settings as well. This ‘new approach’ to teaching ensembles, allows you to pre-teach concepts and ideas in a way that will differentiate between all the different instruments in your ensemble room in a way that will expedite the learning that takes place. Don’t feel like you can assing “homework” for music, there are ways to incorporate differentiation with or without technology. We will do a deep dive into HOW you can better your program utilizing creative ways you might have never thought of for ensembles. Afraid to let the students ‘turn-talk-share’ in beginning ensemble classes or to break free of the structure rehearsal techniques that you grew up sitting in during an ensemble? This course is for you! Let’s utilize creative methods to approach your ensembles in a different way to help excel your program.