EE Band Talk Episode 16: Coming Out of the Turn with Terry Little

Light at the end of the tunnel

[00:05:35] Charlie: Dr. Tim, I trust you’ve continued to present virtually around the world. Tim: It’s been really busy. You can be literally any place in the world a punch of a button. Charlie: Are you getting a sense that we’re heading in the right direction? Tim: No question. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. And this time, it’s not an engine coming at us.

[00:06:22] Paul: We’re trying to figure out what the best next step is. When you write and produce music, it works great when you have a place for it to go and be played. Lack of a better term, it’s difficult to write music if it’s just going to end up as black dots on a white page. Charlie: New rollout for 21–22? Paul: Sure, many things in the pipeline. But we’re being cautious — we want to know what teachers need from us. Flex Band worked on many levels through these months and we’ll continue to make more. We’ll be listening as much as doing.

From vinyl records to Score Play

[00:08:11] Charlie: I remember teaching, going to the mailbox, getting a little vinyl record about as thick as a piece of paper. Couldn’t wait to hear the new arrangements. Now we go to a website. Paul: Our YouTube has four channels for instrumental — concert band, marching band, jazz ensemble, orchestra. Type “Hal Leonard concert band” and our channel comes up. Hundreds of scores with audio synchronized to the pages. We call it Score Play but it could just as well be called Score Study. Some college teaching friends are using these channels exactly that way — if they can’t get together and play, they get together and study.

One million recordings, and a one-click deep link

[00:10:55] Steve: Sometimes you have an idea on Monday that comes to fruition on Friday and it’s huge. We’re going to have a way for teachers and students to stay logged in on EEi. Sounds simple but I teased it on our Facebook group this morning and it’s our most popular post in the history of the group. The other thing it enables: when teachers share assignments on Google Classroom or Canvas, they can drop a deep link from EEi straight to the Music Studio at the specific exercise. Kid clicks once and is at exercise 46 in Book 2, ready to record. Used to take seven mouse clicks. Now one.

[00:15:23] Steve: We just passed one million student recordings in EEi. A million. One of our major users posted on Facebook “I feel like I’ve listened to half of those.” He’s actually our number-one user and yeah, he’s listened to a ton.

[00:16:15] Charlie: How do you anticipate teachers integrating EEi when they’re back in the classroom? Steve: A friend said, don’t create permanent solutions for temporary problems. We’ve been creating solutions that work both for right now AND when we get back to seeing kids regularly. The in-class recording feature we previewed last episode — a teacher today told me they’re using it; it’s so much easier than what they were doing before. Essential Elements has become the hybrid method.

Terry Little — a year of pivots

[00:20:01] Charlie: Terry Little, welcome back to Essential Elements Band Talk. Terry: It’s an honor to be here with you gentlemen today. Charlie: Best compliment I can give you, Terry — if I were lucky enough to have a child, we’d have to move to your district so that kid could be in your band. Terry: You guys make me blush every time.

[00:21:27] Terry: Our district went virtual last year from March through the end of the year. I felt my students were really ready for that because we’d already implemented EEi — they’d already been submitting recordings and getting feedback from me through EEi. Compared to a lot of my colleagues, I was really ready. As music coordinator, we had a long, stressful summer trying to plan for fall — mitigation strategies, what can we do in school, how do we keep music going. Our committee would bring things to the district; the district made the ultimate decisions; then we figured out how to make that work.

Cohort math and no sixth-grade ensembles

[00:22:46] Terry: For 2021 our district went back face-to-face, all students, five days a week. No hybrid. We also ran a virtual school alongside, staffed with virtual teachers. The face-to-face mitigations — our middle schools were cohorted by their math sections, and that took away all of our music choices for kids. Our sixth graders normally sign up for band, orchestra, or chorus — all of them were in a general music class instead. No band, no orchestra, no chorus. We were teaching perform-create-respond-connect through non-performing activities.

[00:23:58] Terry: Our high school was able to function similarly to past years with masking and distancing. They didn’t change the schedule, so high school ensemble directors still met with their students and ran rehearsals. In the fall, a lot of it was outdoors — the district put up these great big event tents, kids were playing and singing outdoors into November.

[00:24:34] Terry: At elementary, we have instrumental band and orchestra starting in fourth grade. We did not have instrumental music at school at all first semester. The district decided to keep specials students in their classrooms all day — teachers came to them. My first-semester assignment for fifth grade was: I was the general music teacher, the PE teacher, and the art teacher. Students even ate lunch in the classroom. They never mixed with other fifth graders.

The split-shift teaching day

[00:25:18] Terry: Our instrumental music team convinced the district to let us continue Zoom lessons before and after school. In the spring our students were home so we could do Zoom during the day, but now they were in school all day. So we operated on a split shift — Zoom lessons in the morning before school, go to school, teach fifth-grade general music / PE / art till 2 p.m., then go home and teach Zoom lessons until six. We still have some instrumental teachers doing that because our elementary schools aren’t all running the same way.

[00:26:13] Terry: Second semester I was lucky — we went to in-person small-group lessons in January. To actually be in the same room as a fifth-grade saxophone player and listen to him play, after teaching via Zoom from March till January — only people like you would understand how I almost had tears in my eyes. I was so happy. And the kids were so happy. Charlie: Most people have tears in their eyes because of a fifth-grade saxophone for a different reason. Yours was joy.

Large-group rehearsal in the gym

[00:27:12] Terry: Now we’re able to have a large-group rehearsal with mixed cohorts inside the gym, spread very far apart. I have 35 students in my fifth-grade band right now, still wearing masks. The challenges of fifth-grade saxophones and clarinets trying to put their instrument in their mouth through their mask without wrecking their reed — that’s a very big challenge.

[00:29:09] Terry: Some of the biggest takeaways: I feel the teachers I work with are complete heroes. Our middle-school teachers worked so hard to keep middle-level kids engaged — they hadn’t had an ensemble experience all year. Our sixth-grade band, orchestra, and chorus teachers had to develop a curriculum for general music starting in August for September 1st. It took a good amount of bravery just to get in there and get face to face with kids — nobody knew in September how safe it was.

Planning for the wide-range year

[00:30:23] Paul: Things forced on you with virtual learning — some of which opened your eyes to it as a potential tool as more of a supplement going forward. That’s how EEi was originally imagined — a virtual supplement. It became a virtual necessity this year. Terry: We’re definitely going to need this. We’re planning for next year now: most schools didn’t start fourth grade this year, so we’ll be starting fourth AND fifth graders as beginners. Our sixth graders didn’t get a lot of lesson time, so as seventh graders they’re going to be beginners as well.

[00:31:58] Terry: Plus some fifth-grade students who’ve been getting almost 1-on-1 Zoom lessons throughout this whole time, and many have gone very, very far. So there’s going to be a wide range of ability and knowledge — especially the first two-three years. I’ve always been a learner-centered teacher, someone about individualizing instruction. This is the perfect tool for that because it allows students to move at their own pace. Our district has developed learning targets by level through Books 1 and 2.

January-start band

[00:40:23] Terry: Nobody knew the answer — nobody had time to start another group of kids. We weren’t sure how many families would be on board starting something new in January. Between band and orchestra, we got every single fourth-grader except four to be either in band or orchestra. The parents are super supportive about reminding kids. How do I know they’re engaged? They don’t forget their instrument. Even though they only need to bring it one day a week, they always have it at school. Same with my fifth graders — they weren’t great at it last year, but they’re engaged now because they never forget.

[00:41:42] Tim: The race car driver says, when you go into the turn — which is the hardest part — you can make all kinds of mistakes and almost have a wreck. But if you come out of the turn, yeah, it looks like you made a good turn to everybody. Terry: We’re hoping we’re going to come out of the turn. My fifth-grade band is going to get to perform in May. We’re pretty excited about that, outside.

Michaela’s four-minute tutorial

[00:42:13] Charlie: Have you had any surprises with the videos that have been submitted? Terry: So I’m going to talk about Michaela. I haven’t spent a ton of time with these kids — the video recordings have actually helped me learn their names because I’ve only seen them in big groups, and they have masks on. I asked for a 10-second first-sound video on the mouthpiece or head joint. It’s my prep period, 37 videos to go through, the clock is ticking. I pull up Michaela’s. Hers is four minutes and 30 seconds. Everyone else’s is 10 seconds. I start watching and Michaela does this complete tutorial, everything you’d want to know after your one trumpet lesson. She spends a lot of time talking about how much spit is produced when you’re buzzing.

[00:43:54] Steve: I had stuff I was supposed to do. As soon as I pulled it up — oh, I’m watching this. It was the cutest thing. You could tell that kid just loves a lot of things, but band and your class is one of them for sure. Tim: That’s what keeps people teaching. When you have experiences like that, when you get to interact with kids in that way, then you realize — yeah, this is what this is all for.

Numbers, hunger, and the way forward

[00:45:55] Terry: We got our numbers and they were not bad at all. We were very concerned about sixth into seventh grade, and in one of our middle schools we’re going to have the largest seventh-grade band we’ve had in a while. We credit that to the hard work all the teachers did keeping connected with kids and keeping everything learner-centered — but just that kids want this. They’re hungry for it. They miss making music with other people, having performances. We’re feeling a little less worried now.

[00:48:04] Tim: Good teaching is good teaching, but the greatest form of teaching and leadership is role modeling. If we can get Terry Littles on every podium in this nation, every kid’s going to be in band. You’re a mirror of all the right things. Terry: This is my 36th year. I’ll throw that back on all the mentors I’ve had, all the great teachers I’ve taught alongside, and I’ve learned a lot from my students. All good teachers learn from their students.

[00:49:03] Charlie: Any final words of wisdom? Terry: Better days are coming. We all have a lot of hope for next year. There’s going to be some hard work to do, some rebuilding. Our students are going to need us more than ever. Better days are coming.

Signing off the series

[00:50:08] Charlie: Thank you to Dr. Tim Lautzenheiser, Paul Lavender, Steve Smith, and special thanks to Terry Little for joining us. Special thanks to you, our listeners, who make this all possible, and our friends at Hal Leonard for their support of music teachers and musicians around the world. This is your host, Dr. Charlie Mangini, saying thanks for listening.