This course is a practical, reflective, and community-building educational experience based on the classroom practices and professional development presentations from GRAMMY Music Educator and 7-time Teacher of the Year, Mickey Smith, Jr.

KEEP ON GOING: Enjoy Teaching No Matter What is a study of sound Mindset, Management, & Motivation that centers around what Mickey Smith calls the Teaching-Triad. This Teaching-Triad helps educators develop the ability to identify, research, and explain the motives behind the strategies that teachers employ in their classrooms. In this course, educators will have the opportunity to discuss and study meaningful topics that can help them engage, educate, and elevate every learner to excellence while at the same time create a sound quality of life, as well as a renewed professional fulfillment that creates a sound one hundred and eighty days (SOUND180) of classroom instruction and harmony. Divided into three parts—The Sound, The Stage, and The Spectator—KEEP ON GOING is a course that will take you on a journey from internal self-reflection to outward expressions (Sonority) of what it means to be a sound adult for the children we teach in today’s classrooms, and to operate with the significance, resilience, and brilliance necessary for the challenges of this unprecedented era of teaching. 

This course will address topics such as:

• I Am Who? (Authenticity & Transparency in Teaching)
• Pivotal Moments & Teachable Moments
• It’s Only a Crisis
• Teachers Are NOT Heroes 
• Why NOT Teach?
• What Teaching Really Is (Trust in Teaching)
• Don’t Start Standard
• Win By Ten
• First Days Lasting Ways
• Creating a Teacher M.A.P. (Management Action Plan)
• What My Wife Taught Me About Teaching 
• Healthy Habits, Boundaries & Balance for a SOUND180
• What’s Your “Sound-Quality?”
• Compose Your Legacy “Song” 
• The “Sound” of Teaching

The course will consist of reading, discussions, visioneering, virtual chat sessions, supplemental material, and practical projects to work for both your personal and professional development. Developing vision, intentionality, and consistency to keep on going starts with having a plan, applying the strategies in this course into your classroom, and reflecting on the journal questions in this course to ensure that KEEP ON GOING: Enjoy Teaching No Matter What goes beyond simply being a course you take to becoming an experience for positively transforming and balancing how you live and work.

Important Information:

Non-music educators are also invited and welcome to register for this course. This course is open to everyone, and it applies to all teachers no matter what they teach. There are no pre-requisites.

Participants must attend a minimum of 4 out of 7 online Zoom Class sessions. Dates for Zoom classes are the following Mondays, 6:00-7:00 pm Central Time: February 13, February 20, March 6, March 20, April 3, April 24, May 1.