“The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.“ Jon Kabat-Zinn It’s easy to think about gratitude when the calendar tells us to. Thanksgiving Day is a traditional time to celebrate gratitude as we gather with others and eat a large meal (and fall asleep afterwards to the lulling sounds of the big football game). […]
Search Results for: purposeful teaching
Go and Shine! Nine Strategies for Cultivating a Positive Mindset
ChorTeach is ACDA’s quarterly online publication, designed for those who work with singers of all levels but specifically K-12 and community choirs. A full annotated ChorTeach index is available online at acda.org/publications/chorteach. Over 160 articles are organized into seventeen categories. For more information, email or visit acda.org/chorteach. Following is an excerpt from an article in the Spring 2023 issue […]
Leading Voices: Promoting a Sense of Agency within the Ensemble
While I was out sick recently for a week with COVID, one of my lesson plans for the Select Choir consisted of having the students break into their Sectional Sprint Groups and check and memorize their music for their upcoming Pops Concert the following week. At the end of each student-run Sectional Sprint rehearsal, I […]
Leading Voices: Developing Audiation in the Choral Classroom
I almost stopped conducting. It was the first song for our first concert of the 2021 school year. My 9-12 Select Choir was singing Set Me As a Seal by René Clausen, and they struggled to lock in D major for the first few measures – it was a bit wonky. By the second phrase, the choir […]
The Conductor as Yogi: Why I Yoga
We are busy people. We have full lives; we live at the center of a wheel that turns constantly, with professional, family, health, spiritual, and personal spokes of responsibilities, challenges, and joys. We bounce between feeling full and satisfied and just plain busy with lots of activities that don’t seem to be organized into anything […]
The Conductor as Yogi: It’s Buffer Time
Ramona M. Wis A few years ago, I became aware of how energy-draining it was to move directly from one rehearsal to the next, with the short in-between time filled with “quick” questions from students (they never are), “emergencies” of colleagues (they never are), and singers filing in as I am re-arranging chairs and figuring […]