The Student-Centered Music Ensemble

I have been privileged to work with a multitude of inspiring colleagues over the years, many of whom have had a profound influence on my own path as an educator. When I was a middle school music teacher in Boston, Massachusetts, I worked with a progressive visual arts teacher who was an early adopter of Teaching for Artistic Behavior (TAB). TAB is an approach to teaching visual arts that was born out of a grassroots movement in Massachusetts. In essence, TAB aims to minimize traditional teacher-directed instruction and put creative decision-making directly in the hands of students. It is teaching for creativity, such as generating ideas, persisting through challenges, clearly conveying an idea, mood, or place with your artistic work, and more.

Over the years I worked at that middle school, I transformed my general music classroom using the three guiding principles of TAB:

1. What do artists do?
2. The child is the artist.
3. The classroom is the child’s studio.

In practical terms, this led to the development of a general music curriculum that was centered on projects, heavily choice-based, and leaned toward contemporary popular music. Units typically began with the exploration of a central concept or theme and then immediately moved into several days of project work with partners or small groups. On those days, I would begin class with a mini-lesson on technique or skill, such as strumming patterns to use on the ukulele or the demonstration of a useful tool in Garageband, before opening the class up to independent work. I would then rotate around the room, checking in with individual students, monitoring progress, and offering feedback.

My general music students have invented and constructed their own musical instruments, arranged popular songs to perform on ukulele and guitar, produced vaudeville shows, and composed commercial soundtracks using digital audio workstations like Garageband, Mixcraft, and Soundtrap. For more student-driven project ideas for secondary general music, take a look at Music Mosaic from Alfred Music.

TAB in the Ensemble

It has been more difficult to make a shift in choir. Although I was first introduced to choice-based art back in 2016, I am still working on implementing the approach in my traditional ensemble classes. In the world of Western choral music, artistic intent has not traditionally been a primary consideration. Creativity has typically been limited to the interpretation and presentation of someone else’s work. When I was a student, I rarely did any meaningful creative work of my own other than improvising a few measures here and there when we were performing a jazz standard. And until a few years ago, the experience of my own choral students was similar.

Of primary importance in this process for me has been reducing the number of performances during the school year in order to make room for other creative activities to occupy time and space in my classroom. That means getting administrators and parents on board with the shift. The 2014 National Core Arts Standards are your friend in these conversations. They place artistic literacy and intent at the center of music education and elevate connecting, responding, and creating to the same level as performing. In fact, just one of the 11 anchor standards specifically addresses performance: number six, conveying meaning through the presentation of artistic work.

The next step is letting go of control. Or perhaps, leveraging control as a variable that can be increased or decreased according to the maturity level of your students, safety considerations, type of performance, etc. You will have to simply and/or completely cut performances that don’t truly serve your needs. You will have to release expectations about your students learning a full program of classics to make room for students to select some (or all) of the repertoire. You will have to let them fumble through sectional rehearsals that you know you could run more smoothly. And you will have to let go of preconceived notions of what choir or band or orchestra should be and start considering what your ensemble could be . The possibilities are endless.

For me, letting go has become easier as I have established very clear routines and structures for the independent work we do. I don’t expect my students to read my mind; instead, I explicitly teach each process and then have them practice it until secure. For instance, before I allow my students to work in small groups, I teach the process, have a capable group demo for the rest of the class, and then have the small groups practice holding a small group rehearsal. They record their practice session and reflect on it together. From that point on, we are generally set up to go straight into small group rehearsals that run themselves without much interference from me. I borrowed this procedure from a middle school ELA teacher who runs book clubs in a similar fashion.

Applying the Strategies

Here are some changes that have worked for me as a middle school choral educator. For context, I teach in a large middle school of 1,000 students. Approximately 200 of them are in choir, split between three grade-level ensembles. Elementary ensembles are not offered at my school, so most of my students come into sixth grade with little to no choral experience, although a significant number of them take piano or guitar lessons.

1. Encourage students to contribute creative ideas in rehearsal . For instance, when we are working on a particularly emotional moment in a piece of choral music, we discuss phrasing and try out several places for taking a breath together. And when a student raises their hand to suggest an idea, I almost always say, “Okay, let’s try it!”
2. Have students lead sectional rehearsals , either using pre-made practice tracks that I’ve created in advance, their own piano skills, or run a cappella if feasible. This is something I typically introduce in seventh grade and expand in eighth grade.
3. Incorporate small group work into your performance schedule. In January and February, we dedicate our time to small group performances. Students work in groups of four or five to select a piece, arrange it for their voices and instruments (some choose to use piano, guitar, ukulele, auxiliary percussion, and/or body percussion), and then perform for the class. We incorporate the best of these performances into our spring concert.
4. Allow students to help you make thematic repertoire choices . This could be in a limited manner, such as when doing small group work, or extended to choosing one or two pieces for a concert. I have found that having a clear theme helps students move past simply choosing the music they enjoy listening to at home and prompts them to make social, cultural, and historical connections between pieces.
5. By far, the most difficult shift I’ve made has been to involve students in concert planning . It has also been the most rewarding. I have now been running the same process with my eighth graders for two years, and it has been a tremendous success. We start big. I show them lots of examples of concert programs before we brainstorm themes as a class and narrow our list down to three finalists. We then co-construct a list of requirements for our program: multiple pieces by composers from historically underrepresented groups, opportunities for solos, at least one piece in a language other than English, an uptempo closer, and more.

Then we spend an entire day exploring ways to find choral music online. I show them how to search for music, where to find key information about a choral, and talk about which voicings are possible for our group. They then search for and contribute ideas for programming (I contribute ideas, too) so that we have a clear idea of the possibilities presented by each theme. Only after that do we vote on a theme and solidify the concert program. Last year’s spring concert was Seize the Day: Songs of Resistance, Empowerment, and Hope.

I hope I’ve left you with one or two ideas for elevating creativity within your ensemble programs in a meaningful way. This ongoing work has energized me as a choral educator and opened up entirely new possibilities for what choir could be. For more information about Teaching for Artistic Behaviors, visit the websites of Teaching for Artistic Behavior or The Art of Education. I also learned a lot from reading Studio Habits: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education . These resources are not music-specific but have value for all visual and performing arts teachers.