Beautiful Classroom Management

A TEAMM Conversation

This month’s TEAMM Masterclass session was an amazing collaboration between some unbelievable educators. We had TEAMM All-Stars, and new members in the session, from the far corners of the country and with a variety of experiences! Everyone shared their perspectives and we all learned from one another. This is exactly the kind of community event that makes MusicXT special. Our TEAMM members are philosophically aligned, thoughtful, and engaged with the deepest questions about music education and its purpose. In this post I’ll recap the meeting, share the video of the conversation, and break down some of the ideas around Beautiful Classroom Management. But first…

Housekeeping:

I’m giving a FREE WORKSHOP to kick off the school year on Aug 15 at 7 PM Eastern Time. I’ll be going over an overview of the method is applied to public school teaching and how to start playing with these ideas in your classroom.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THE FREE WORKSHOP

In this TEAMM event we’re going to de-mystify Dalcroze training and talk about the various experiences people have with summer programs! I’ve invited TEAMM All-Star Kayla to the meeting to share her unique perspective from her experience this summer, and we’re going to all talk about how Dalcroze training might differ from other pedagogies, and how the various training centers differ as well. It will be a ton of useful info, reflecting right after the summer when the memories are fresh! See you there! If you want to come learn about this subject and you AREN’T on the TEAMM, then you should upgrade today!

From the Archive:

I always begin every conversation about classroom management with the same disclaimer. No one… and I mean NO ONE… was worse at classroom management than me when I first started. Really it was two whole years of disaster before I started to get some things in place in year three. It was still rough for another year or so but by year five I was feeling pretty functional as a teacher. I had systems and procedures. My lessons started to be efficient and resemble the kind of utilitarian classrooms I had experienced growing up.

When I was exposed to some very special teachers, especially those in the Dalcroze tradition, I began to understand that there was another level of aspiration in classroom management. It was possible to have a classroom experience that was not only functional, but AESTHETICALLY BEAUTIFUL. There was a way to have the students participate in the creation of something beautiful that they valued as such. I felt like I needed to figure out how that was done.

I broke down the elements of this experience into four quadrants:

This was useful as a tool of assessment, to decide in what area I needed to focus in order to elevate the classroom from functional to beautiful.

I explain the quadrants in more detail in the video.