All students are unique and must have a stimulating educational environment that promotes their growth mentally, emotionally, and socially. In every learning context, I strive to provide a safe environment where students are invited to share their ideas, take risks, and make mistakes on their way to high achievement. I believe there are five essential elements that are conducive to music teaching and learning. These essential elements center around the teacher acting as a guide and promoting student engagement through offering options, cultivating a safe space, and regularly integrating technology. 

Guide

Teachers act as sources or resources for students while they perform a learning task. Through thoughtful social assistance, teachers help to steer students toward deeper understandings and meanings by highlighting their achievements and identifying areas for further refinement and development. Working as guides, they alternate between stepping in to provide their expert feedback and stepping back to allow students to participate and perform. 

Engage

Students must engage in hands-on learning as the energy of discovery is tantamount to personal growth and agency. While teachers themselves can help to reveal the dynamic nature of learning, it is through the student’s own application of knowledge that they are motivated to pursue higher levels of proficiency and mastery. In my teaching contexts, particularly with respect to singing, I often incorporate props like straws, combs in storage bags, stretch bands, and pinwheels as a means to capture students’ attention even further so they focus more on the task at hand and less on the stresses associated with how they sound. As the instructor, props allow me to promote self-regulated learning and give way to their personal agency.  

Choose

Students need options so their curiosities help to direct their learning. Choices help to increase intrinsic motivation and allow for students to dig further into their interests and passions.  Tasks, activities, and assignments need to be designed in a way that gives students the flexibility to follow their curiosities so as critical thinking becomes a goal, not exclusively a byproduct, as in project-based learning (PBL). PBL begins with a thought-provoking question versus a convergent or closed-ended one such as: which genre of music is the most influential? This gives students opportunities to define terms and arguments, cultivate opinions, and research them to arrive at stronger conclusions. 

Practice

Students should practice with consistency in a safe and brave space. An effective way to curate this kind of sociocultural atmosphere is simple: celebrate creative risk-taking. When educators add some elements of humor, joy, and spontaneity and model them appropriately, music and musical theatre students are encouraged to incorporate a sense of play, which has the potential to revitalize their approaches and subsequent artistic work. 

Integrate

Technology must be integrated into learning nearly every day. Students who regularly engage with technology, beyond online learning management systems, are better positioned to create a set of skills that will help them throughout their future careers, musical or otherwise. Specifically, for music, there are a number of applications which I regularly incorporate into classrooms, coachings, and lessons. Applications like Harmony Helper and Appcompanist are a must for singers working toward performance while others like Tenuto and Musictheory.net are geared to improve overall musicianship and audiation skills through pitch identification, interval recognition and piano proficiency. Additionally, Soundcloud, Garageband, Acapella, and Anchor are utilized for composition, music production, and podcast assignments. Regularly implementing technology can promote students’ independent musical skills as well as develop their capacities for the more creative facets of music-making like arrangement and composition.

In conclusion, one-size-fits-all approaches for musical learning limits the potential for students to ignite imagination, creativity, and compassion, all of which might contribute to a student’s unique identity. This connection between the musical and the personal is a significant one particularly for singers as their instrument is somatic, much of which cannot be seen by the human eye. While many of us have shared interests in elevating the sonic dimensions of our students’ singing, high performance outcomes and learning strategies must be developed in a way which also allows students to grow their curiosity, agency and expression.