CMEA Mentorship Program

For a better outcome, we need a different process.

Take time to learn before calling for change. For genuine transformation, you must first understand what you are trying to transform. Before criticism you must first truly know and love what you are critiquing, because then you call for change from a place of knowledge, and you will do so with great thought and care. This is very different from blaming and shaming. It requires taking the time to work and know a profession—the good and the bad--before calling for change. In other words, intimately know what you are attempting to transform. This is how to change with intention, with direction, and with vision.

We must create a vision of what we want. Rather than simply raging against what we hope to change, we must provide a tangible image for what we hope to achieve. We need a goal, a vision, a destination.

When you know better, do better. Maya Angelou wisely wrote, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” We are in a time when we now know better, and it is time to do better. However, there is also grace and forgiveness in this—for us and for one another as we all try to do better.

Finally, it is important to take moments to pause and reflect. Reflection allows us to rest and better respond from a place of calm and efficacy. It reminds us we are all in this together, and no single one of us must do everything alone.

We have learned to gain satisfaction from mic-drop moments, shaming, and anger. Our natural anger will not drive change. It sometimes gives us courage, but we must find a wise way forward if what we want is true and lasting change. This may go against our most natural, emotional, and human responses, but is far more effective than reactivity. For our “new” to be better than our “old,” we need to be thoughtful and visionary, not reactionary.

Speaking personally, let me say that I have spent a lot of years working for social justice, and somewhere along the way I began researching what works and what does not. My younger self believed that my good intent would somehow be enough if I worked hard and just kept pushing forward with tenacity. And often that was true. But when I encountered complex or systematic issues, I found good intent to be inadequate, and so I have spent some years looking for models and paradigms that work.

There is a lot of work ahead of us, but the good news is everyone is now awake to the need for change. However, this is also chaotic and unsettling precisely because everyone is now paying attention. With everyone in the discussion, there is an urgency and angst. There are people on all points of the continuum with all sorts of agendas and viewpoints, testing their voices, creating differing rules of engagement, and intense emotions color everything. Our challenge is to create a vision, so we have something to move mindfully toward. We must engage everyone. In other words, we must dig in and do the hard work, because now we know better.

Educators Supporting Educators.

In a nutshell, that’s what our mentorship program is really about – building professional relationships between music educators to the benefit of all.

We have officially launched our first cohort of mentees for this academic year and I would like to personally thank all of our members who have stepped up as both mentors and mentees. At this point you have hopefully met at least once with your paired educator and have planned out ways you can support each other throughout the year.

But we still have the capacity to help even more music educators.

If you want to know more about our program and the supportive systems that we are building together, I invite you to check out this brief overview video.

If you want to get plugged into this membership resource, you can find our mentee application on the mentorship page of the CMEA Website. Mentees may apply for our program at any time.