Practicing Safe Music: Create an Emotionally Safe and Magical Space for Your Music Students ...While Rocking Your Self-Care!

By Janet Feld

A book about helping music students COME ALIVE and discover joy on a level they never had access to. A style of teaching and modeling in the classroom that touches their deepest desires, activates their playfulness and courage.
A self-assured, playful, loving teacher can make all the difference in the world. That's where this book comes in. Its content is here to elevate your practice as a teacher, and in so doing, help you emancipate your students from whatever place their learning has gotten trapped.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667892672

Book preview

BK90076047.jpg

© 2023 Janet Feld All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

978-1-66789-266-5 eBook 978-1-66789-267-2

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I - THREE KEY SPIRIT-RELEASING INSIGHTS TO HELP YOUR STUDENTS PRACTICE SAFE MUSIC

CHAPTER ONE : Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #1: Clearing the Emotional Path

CHAPTER TWO: Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #2: Offering Permission to Suck

CHAPTER THREE: Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #3:Teaching Students to Sound Like Themselves

CHAPTER FOUR: Classroom Management (i.e. Herding Cats)

PART II - THE PROPER CARE AND FEEDING OF A MUSIC TEACHER

CHAPTER FIVE: Rocking Your Self-Care (for Everyone’s Safety)

CHAPTER SIX: Money, Honey: Recovering from a Starving Artist Mindset Without Becoming Someone You Can’t Stand

PART III - IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

CHAPTER SEVEN: The Ripple Effect of Raising Our Vibration

CHAPTER EIGHT: Time to Rock ‘n Roll: Your First Bold Steps Forward

Suggested Reading

INTRODUCTION

Have you ever been excited to teach a cool, fun, and deeply creative music lesson you’d prepared, only to have it totally bomb? Yeah, me too. I wish I could say it only happened once.

One time, I’d planned a class in which eighth graders would have the opportunity to write their first original song. I excitedly shared the lesson with my students, only to be met with their blank stares. One student, Jose, raised his hand and said, Ms. Feld, why can’t we just practice free-styling? I wish I’d gone with the flow, but I insisted that they do the class exactly as I’d planned. They were pissed. I was eventually able to salvage my lesson plan by finding a way to teach what I wanted while also giving them the space to freestyle and then record their work.

But initially, I was heartbroken.

Another time, I’d planned to teach my adult students an exercise that helps beginner guitarists learn to switch chords faster and become more comfortable with fingerpicking, but they totally rebelled. I’d pissed off their inner Hermiones. The exercise made them feel as if they were practicing their mistakes, so they and their inner Hermiones never signed up for my classes again.

These scenarios, plus a few others like them, helped me get better at:

pivoting in a pinch,

letting go of enough control to nurture the flow of a lesson plan, and

re-thinking how to invite inspiration, rather than shut it down.

PART I

THREE KEY SPIRIT-RELEASING INSIGHTS TO HELP YOUR STUDENTS PRACTICE SAFE MUSIC

What if three simple, Key Spirit-Releasing Insights could make it possible for you to avoid these awkward, frustrating scenarios? What if all that prevents you from having a classroom full of lively, engaged, devoted students is a clear understanding of how to work with, rather than against, all those fearful, doubt-filled, disconnected energies that students tend to unconsciously drag with them into your classroom?

I have spent years pondering and studying what works, what bombs, and what recovery on the back end can look like. The lessons I’ve learned from my epic failures are my little gift to you. My willingness to learn from them has brought me to a place where I can bestow upon you the insights that I deeply believe will not only free you up to have a ball but will wake up every student who comes into your orbit. In this book, you and I will be journeying through the three Key Spirit-Releasing Insights that can, if you let them, change everything:

Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #1:

Clearing the Emotional Path

Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #2:

Offering Permission to Suck

Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #3:

Teaching Students to Sound Like Themselves

Once we’ve explored these insights, I’ll help you understand what a world of difference it can make to your classroom and to your teaching experience to know how to rock your own self-care. Everything you know about how to work a room becomes exponentially more powerful when you are on solid footing deep within yourself. (More on that in Section 2 of this book.) For now, suffice it to say that YOU are every bit as sacred, glorious, brilliant, adorable, and in need of love, attention, and encouragement as any of your students. Teachers who know and can attune to that wisdom are the teachers whom students love, connect with, and remember best.

With all of that in mind, let’s dive right on in with Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #1.

CHAPTER ONE:

Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #1: Clearing the Emotional Path

When students discover their teacher is an emotional sherpa, they immediately relax, expand, and grow.

Staying one emotional chess move ahead of your students and previewing the discomfort they are about to feel can open the way for them to celebrate the wonders of their blooming musical selves and back away from their natural inclination to stay safe, small, and resistant.

You may be thinking, That all sounds great, but what does this look like in real situations?

Check out how Key Spirit-Releasing Insight #1: Clearing the Emotional Path can help you prevent or transform the following potential classroom nightmares:

What if you try to get a bunch of 13-year-olds to trust you enough to sing for you by singing something to them first, hoping they will sing back, but they just stare at you instead?

What if you choose partners for the kids who’ve been left out during partner-picking, and some of the kids you’ve partnered them with say mean things because they don’t like whom you’ve chosen for them?

Or what if your adult students, who have always wanted to play the guitar, don’t have confidence in their ability to learn? With this mindset, their constant second-guessing of themselves blocks their joy in learning and playing. Countless times, I’ve watched students’ fingers unconsciously go to the right chords or notes, but because it felt too easy, they then assumed they’d gotten it wrong. Then they bungle what they were playing and become discouraged on a whole new level.

What might it look like to stay one emotional chess move ahead of your students—from preschoolers to senior citizens—and preview for them the discomfort they are just about to feel?

No matter the student’s age, acknowledging their sense of reality can be astonishingly healing and affirming.

Example: Do you know why it feels hard to do this at first? That’s because it’s hard to do this at first!

Offering them such a targeted jolt of reality not only affirms their own sense of reality but also acknowledges that doing something well takes practice. It directly contradicts the unspoken cultural fantasy that we pop out of the womb with or without musical talent, and that some people are born luckier than others.

Clearing the emotional path is a way to inoculate students against the belief that their normal learning curve issues are evidence that, if they can’t do something well right away, they’ll never be able to.

Next, let’s look at how this concept can be applied to specific lesson plans.

Passing Out Instruments

If you don’t set up the process well, passing out instruments, whether to preschoolers or middle schoolers—seriously, we don’t change that much as we age; we just get taller and have more complicated issues—can literally take an entire class period. With each part of the following set-up, everyone can easily understand and participate in a way that feels safe: the instructions create a simple, doable way to offer inspiring clarity while being kind. By anticipating the potential moments of meanness (intentional and not), any teacher can facilitate a flow that gets everyone to the fun zone and keeps them there for the entire class period.

Set-up Strategy: Jam to the Blues in E Flat

A really fun way to keep a class of any age engaged while you’re passing out instruments to individual students is to teach the class to jam together.

Jam to the Blues in Eb Step-by-Step

First, announce to the class that you’re all about to play a very special song called Blues in Eb.

Explain that each student will have a turn to play the piano, only playing the black keys.

Tell them that if they stay on the black keys, every note they play will be correct. If anyone asks why, explain that the black keys on the piano are an Eb pentatonic minor scale, and all sound good with the 1, 4, and 5 chords in Eb. Note: This explanation can trigger a stress response, so I usually add something like, Doesn’t that sound like something you would need to take anti-biotics for? Like, ‘Why didn’t you come to school today? Oh man, I was home with a pentatonic minor scale in Eb…..’. This is usually enough to help people over their fear hurdles.

Then tell