How to boost your class productivity by 40%...

"Creating Exceptional Art and Entertainment" - High School Music Department

"Making Awesome Music While Having Fun" - Middle School Music Department

You need to facilitate a discussion with the student leadership in your music program to come up with a short, memorable purpose statement.

Why the students? Why not just come up with it yourself? Because you need buy in!! You would rather have a good purpose statement that everyone bought in because they helped craft it than a great purpose statement that you created, but no one followed. If you asked students why they are in your music program, "To learn" is not the first thing to come out of their mouths. Students don't do school music to be taught or to learn or to be participants while you check off the state standards. Students want to stand out and be apart of something great! Students are in your class to create, explore, express, and become.

So when you ask your kids why the choir or band exists, everyone needs to know and buy in to the purpose statement created by the leaders. At my past high school, they chose "Creating Exceptional Art and Entertainment." 1. It addressed why they were there - To Create.

2. It addressed what they were doing - Creating Art (Concerts) and Entertainment (Concerts and Pep Band).

3. It gave a standard - Exceptional. There is a difference in just being good and in being exceptional.

Any activity I had us doing had to meet this purpose statement. Was it helping us "Create Exceptional Art and Entertainment?" Is it art? Is it entertainment? The answer would change the way in which I taught something and even the music I selected. Was I picking exceptional art or entertainment? For the students, as well as myself, we could ask "Is the performance of this piece exceptional?" or after a concert, rather than a circle pow-wow, without direction, blindly discussing a concert, we could define the win. And even though music is not a sport, you can define the win with these purpose statements. "At last nights concert, did we create exceptional art and entertainment?" "According to this, did we win?" I will say that identifying how you won is just as important as figuring out why you lost. Then, right that moment, as a part of that discussion, we would rehearse our music and fix the mistakes - even if we were not performing those pieces again. This showed that 1.) Your goal is always perfection (I will explain this at a future date. Obviously you never get there and the journey, itself, can never be understated.) 2.) You will be amazed at how receptive they are and how much the students learn in these moments. It actually sinks in what you've been teaching them all semester and those mistakes don't show up at future performances. 3.) You make it clear that, next time, you want all of that to happen BEFORE the concert.

I put 40% as the difference maker but it's hard to put a number on this. It has the potential to turn your program into a model organization. It will help students learn how to follow a groups common purpose and maybe even find their own. It makes you figure out what you are going to focus on doing, and what you are going to focus on not doing. Some ideas are just another way of doing things. This is NOT one of them. Every music department should do this. Not a different purpose statement for each ensemble, unless a particular ensemble has a dramatically different purpose, but they all should fall under the music departments group purpose. Then you put it on the wall in big letters where everyone can see it. You put it on every program, on your website, on every ensemble t-shirt, talk about it at concerts, have all of your students write a paper on what it means to them, and YOU talk about it frequently. Vision leaks so you can't just cast it once and expect it to hold.

It has to be short. It has to be memorable. It cannot be so long that they forget it because, remember, this is the age of tweets. It won't include everything you are about but it will identify your purpose. For me, this has never been done in one class period. It has always taken multiple times to whittle it down perfectly, to think overnight about what we came up with. The goal is to get around 8 words or less! The simpler, the better. Whatever your purpose statement is, you have to have one.

One of the most gratifying feelings I have had was my first year teaching at that high school, both of the valedictorians were leaders in our music program. One even referenced us reaching our goal of "Creating Exceptional Art and Entertainment." Folks, it truly makes all the difference. So Lead Them...