The Beth and Kelly Show: Music Teaching (and Life)

The topics we discuss with WA music educator Sarah Hart have to do with shining a light on how the mental health of teachers plays directly into the ways that we can then turn around and serve our students and school community. Unfortunately, the systems we exist within are designed to both keep us perpetually “small” and we are made to believe we need give and give and give and just suck it up. It is an emotional topic and we need to start unpacking it. Thanks Sarah for helping us touch on the tip of the iceberg.

We had such fun reminiscing with former colleagues Blake Saunders & Jared Sessink, both former Washington Middle School and current Garfield High School music educators. We start to unpack some complexities of these schools, the pipeline, and making big moves in the name of equity.

As we wrap up what many would consider one of the toughest teaching years on record, it is a great time for secondary instrumental; and choral educators to dream big about ways to utilize the understandings and knowledge we’ve gathered over this trying period about our students, and what really matters. It has been a time of reckoning for many of us as we realize that many of our students (and we) have different needs after all that has happened, yet we are still often obliged to engage in many of the same types of adjudicated events that likely needed an overhaul pre-covid, with unadjusted requirements, and unchanged rubrics. This has to be causing some cognitive dissonance for us as we saunter into the summer. Join Beth Fortune and Kelly Clingan (co-hosts of the popular Music Education podcast The Beth and Kelly Show) and string specialists Dr. Kelsey Nussbaum (University of Washington), and Corie Benton (Cobb County School District) in an interactive discussion and idea-gathering NAfME Council for Orchestral Education Town Hall all about putting the FESTIVE back into student festivals!

This convo with James Falzone, who oversees all programming at #cornishcollegeofthearts allowed the The Beth and Kelly Show to engage in the big picture dreaming we like to do when we think of how music and arts studies in higher ed could morph to be more and more person-based and reality-based. Cornish is doing some cutting edge things!

This show with music educator, performer, and creativity coach Steve Treseler is still spinning around in our brains. We talk about how imperative it is to teach our students that it is ok and healthy to be creative, and we confront what stops us from doing this as we maneuver within the rigid structures of music education in the US that never really did leave much room for creative decision-making . Unleash your / your students’ inner-artist!