You don’t need to be in teaching for very long before you get one: the angry parent email. Resist the reaction to send an anger-fuelled message back. Parents come and go, but your reputation will follow you forever. Here’s how to respond.
Easy Classroom Hack for Recording
With this brilliant hack, the students aren’t self-conscious, and their individual voices are captured on the computer, louder than the other voices in the room.
Surviving your first year of teaching: 15 tips
Teaching is hard. Teaching music is both exhausting and exhilarating. Your first year in a school is bound to be challenging, maybe even make you question what on Earth you are doing there. Just breathe: It’s totally normal. You have
Nine Tips for Learning All Those Names
I am not good with names. Really not good. At one session a week, among hundreds of students, I consider myself successful if I know all the students’ names by the November conferences. (As I’ve calculated it, by that time,
The Professional “No”
Planning, parent communication, classroom setup, tutoring, report cards, IEPs, faculty meetings, department meetings, district arts meetings, parent night, concerts, fundraisers, extracurricular activities, professional development, recertification, grading, differentiation, testing, curriculum development, documentation, copies, class blogs, parent-teacher conferences, impromptu parent-teacher conferences, filing
Almost summer: end-of-year reflection questions
I’m seeing all the “last day of school” posts coming through my feed now, and I’m thinking about how to wrap up the year with my team. As teachers, we naturally want to improve our craft all the time, so
Fostering a Growth Mindset
There is a lot of talk about growth mindset in educational circles these days. You have probably read about the experiment where a teacher was told she was getting all the brightest students in one class, and when she treated
15 questions to ask the teacher before you
It’s the time of year when you might be preparing to move on to a new job. You’re probably looking forward to some changes, and wondering about some of the behind-the-scenes workings of your new school. If you are lucky
Playdough music center for early childhood classes
Fifteen years of teaching has taught me to be prepared. There will be days when you have no voice, or no energy, but you don’t want to waste that precious contact time. Alternatively, you will have days when you need
10 Tips for Using Learning Centers in Specialist Classes
I’ve been experimenting with learning stations, or centers, in my music classroom. I’m always intrigued when I walk into classrooms that are set up with exciting experiments, games, and other provocations for learning. But a long time passed between admiring