Pressing the Reset Button by Stacy Harris CMEA Music Supervisors Representative
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s I write this article in early June, most of us are currently wrapping up our school year. Some are already on break for summer and the rest of us will be there by the time this issue is published. To call these last 15 months difficult would be an understatement. Pre-COVID, most of us experienced difficult years scattered throughout our careers. Looking in the rear view mirror now, many of us may even laugh a little at what we called “difficult” prior to March of 2020. As we move further and further through the pandemic and watch as things around us begin to shift back closer to what we might label as “normal,” we are wrestling with some challenging questions: • • • •
What does a return to “normal” mean for my program that may have been highly impacted this last year? What are the barriers to that return? What about the previous “normal” was not really working in the first place? What was born out of necessity this last year that can continue to truly benefit students and teachers?
And the most crucial question of all: •
What do my students need moving forward and how will my program meet that need?
As we all wrestle with these questions and more, I’d like to invite us all to take this moment to consider pressing the reset button. The last 15 months have been a practice in adapting at a moment’s notice. As a music supervisor, I have created and recreated the instructional program for our elementary instrumental and general music teachers more times than I can count at this point. In this type of fast-paced, transitional environment, we are creatively and quickly developing solutions to problems of the moment. As soon as each problem is ironed out in this type of environment, it is replaced by a new one. While the work that music educators across the state and nation did this year was incredible, most of our solutions were short-term in an effort to cobble together anything we could for our students in the midst of constant change and extreme limitations. In this moment of preparing for a “return,” there is an
opportunity to rethink what we do and why we do it lying in front of us that we may not collectively see again in our careers. How much of what you did in your position pre-COVID was done that way because that was the way it had always been done? Who or what was at the center of the decisions about what would be taught, how it would be taught, and why it was taught? Was it the students? Was it some other stakeholder group? Was it your singular vision for the program? This is a time for us to take a collective breath and slow down for the first time in over a year. It is a time to pause and ask ourselves questions that will allow us to really consider why we do what we do and how we can transform that work to better serve students. If we do not take this opportunity to reflect, I imagine many of us will jump into next school year and quickly be hijacked by the fast-paced environment that school always is and fall back into old, comfortable habits. While those old habits will undoubtedly lead to positive results in many ways, they will also limit our ability to seize this opportunity for transformative change in music education. Here are a few of the positives that came from this last year and some of the points I will be reflecting on this summer. My goal is to determine how best to not only keep the progress my team and I made in these areas but to purposefully expand on them and consider how they can drive our continued growth as a team.
Technology Literacy for Staff and Opportunities for Students This is obviously one of the easiest positives to call out from the last year. While technology was already being used masterfully in some music classrooms pre-COVID, in other classrooms it was absent. The disparity between our most tech-literate staff members and those that struggled with tech was astonishing. We would never have seen the massive leap in tech literacy amongst teachers that we did this last year without distance learning and, while so much of what we do as music teachers can be done artfully without technology, a new world has been opened up for us in how we can engage students in music-making through technology. We will not only benefit by continuing to use many of the tech resources we embraced out of necessity this year but I am hopeful that we will continue looking for ways to expand opportunities and access to all students as well as our own ideas about what music education
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