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The familiar urge from your math teacher every year in middle and high school…SHOW YOUR WORK! Every student I know fights against showing every step. “Why do I need to?! It’s obvious!” Perhaps the reason we don’t want to show our work is that we don’t understand just how valuable […]

The Michigan Choral Commission Consortium (MC3) is one of my pet projects, and it’s been taking off this spring. I’m excited to share this update. The multi-fold mission of MC3 is as follows: Commission more new choral music. Include organizations that can’t otherwise afford to commission. Create a community around […]

I’m not big on self-promotion. Inasmuch as I feel it’s my duty to let people know about the things I’m doing, I’ll promote myself, but it doesn’t come naturally or frequently. But if my promotion can have a potential benefit for my students? It’s a no-brainer. I’ll stand on my […]

Seth Godin has argued persuasively that we no long have a mass culture: there are no longer things everyone has in common. What we have, Godin says, are ever-more tribes of like-minded people. But in my choirs, I love to include some things we all know. Across years, there are […]

“We can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both.” – Debbie Millman That’s the tagline that designer Debbie Millman uses to end her outstanding “Design Matters” podcast, and it’s a good reminder for all of us: particularly educators. Leadership comes in many […]

Start a Quiet Time List. Even though teachers do 12 months of work between September and June, the summers aren’t “vacation.” They’re needed for building emotional, physical, and mental capacity they will use the next school year. They’re for planning, programming, and strategizing for new challenges in the school year […]

The student question, “Why is this important?” is valuable in almost every circumstance when we teach. It’s not impertinent, it’s not impossible to answer, and it’s not a time waster. Wanting to know why an exercise, rehearsal strategy, ensemble tradition, or assignment is important is not impertinent: in fact it […]

There are two ways to repave a road. Break up and remove the old road, and then repave it from scratch with fresh asphalt or cement. It takes time, commitment, and slows down traffic while there is no road there. Use a tool to fill the cracks in the road […]

Diane Wolk-Rogers is a stellar educator and speaker who has almost unwittingly influenced the trajectory of the American conversation in 2018. Her entire recent TED Talk is well worth watching, but I want to focus on this statement from early in the speech: “There’s a method to being an engaged […]

Ideas come unpredictably – in the shower, driving, in the middle of rehearsal. The most important tool I’ve found for getting better at capturing those ideas for future use is this phrase: I won’t remember this. The more often I remind myself this truth, the more often I write it […]