Classroom Community: Combat Bullying Through Choral Retreats

I was bullied as a kid. I was nerdy, a little standoffish, and horribly awkward in my middle school years. Cracking the social code was tough for me, and I spent a lot of time feeling misunderstood and out of place, even though I loved learning.

The music room was the first place I found a sense of belonging, appreciation, and safety during those tough transitional years. Within those walls, I made friends who were older and younger than my grade. They modeled leadership, musicianship, and kindness for me, which I was able to turn around and offer to others.

In my career as a choral educator, no matter the age group I’m working with, I’ve tried to nurture a larger sense of community within my singers. In my experience, one of the best defenses against bullying is creating a shared culture that models respecting and valuing all its members. It’s one of the reasons that I’ve started using choral retreats as one way to build that sense of community.

What’s a choral retreat, anyway?

A choral retreat is an intentional event outside of traditional rehearsal that is meant to help bond the group together more strongly. Some groups may have the budget to hold an event at a separate location or over an entire weekend. While that’s a lofty goal we’d like to achieve, all the bells and whistles aren’t really necessary to create a valuable and meaningful experience for your singers. Start with the basics: a chunk of time to be intentional about community, and a place to hold it that works for your group’s size and budget. If time and money allow, you can always expand from there.

At the Ithaca Children & Youth Chorus (ICYC), we started with one three-hour event on a Saturday in the fall, held in our normal rehearsal space, and invited singers from all three of our choirs to come together on that day.

Objectives of a choral retreat

What do you want your retreat to achieve, and how are you going to go about it?

When ICYC’s conductors got together to talk about what should happen at our retreat, we had the following objectives in mind:

• Introduce all the singers to conductors of all of the groups as a way to promote interaction and retention
• Sing together as a large group
• Sing for each other as individual choirs
• Team-build as a large group
• Team-build as individual choirs
• Time to eat and chat together

Creating a Schedule

With objectives in place, our next task was to create an event schedule that would let us meet those goals. The building where we hold rehearsals has rooms that could accommodate the entire group (around 80 singers), and each of the 3 choirs on their own.

Here is how we structure our event each fall:

9:00 – 9:15 am: Welcome and large group warmup with all three conductors (each conductor has 5 minutes)

9:15 – 10:00 am: Large group song practice. Each conductor works on a large-group song. We used songs like "Jubilate Deo," " Tongo " (Gilpin), and "Yonder Come Day" over the years for this purpose. One year we had a guest clinician come in to teach the whole group some African drumming and dance.

10:00 – 10:30 am: Individual choir team-building. Each conductor takes his or her choir to do some games/activities suited to the age group. For the youngest singers, these are often music games, while for the older choirs, we do everything from theater improv games to team problem-solving challenges. It’s not unusual for there to be a little bit of chaos and a lot of laughter during this half-hour.

10:30 – 11:00 am: Large group team-building. Each conductor leads a large-group team-building activity. Typically, during this time we mix all the choirs together into multi-age groups. One activity that’s been popular every year has been asking each mixed-age group to answer a written prompt at each of four stations, like “One reason why I sing in choir is _______,” “When I sing I feel ______,” “My favorite song to sing right now is _____,” and “My favorite style of music to sing is _______.” Older students wrote down the responses of younger students, and helped keep them organized while moving from station to station.

11:00 – 11:30 am: Large group presentation for parents. We invited parents back at this time for a short informance where we presented a little bit of the music we worked on that morning. In some years, we have each group sing all or part of a song they’ve worked on in their individual choir.

11:30 – 12:00 pm: Food and socialization time. Every family brings food or paper products to share, and the choir provides a light pizza lunch. We have families sign up in advance to let us know what they’re going to bring.

Each fall when we hold this event, I’m struck by how different the rehearsal room feels the next time we get together. Singers greet each other with more joy and familiarity, and they never fail to tease me a little about something silly I said or did in the group games. The youngest members of the choir feel a little less intimidated by the older singers, and the older singers feel more protective of the rookies. It also tends to break down barriers and cliques that may exist outside of the rehearsal room.

Ultimately, choral singing is about celebrating the wide range of the human experience together. A choral retreat can be one more tool to helping your singers feel and experience that more acutely.