There’s so much that you need to know as a beginning ensemble director and if you’re a brand new teacher it can also seem very overwhelming. I’m going to give you three tips that I wish I had learned faster as a new teacher and that have honestly helped me stay sane. These three tips are very broad, so adapt them however you need to, but I believe that they’re super helpful nonetheless.
Sweat the Small Stuff
Obviously, don’t dwell on the very first note for the first half of the school year, but do make a big deal out of the small things. Make a big deal out of embouchure and breathing, this will pay off in the tone quality of your students. Make a big deal about learning scales and scale chunks, this will help improve pattern recognition in music and make their sight reading better. Make a big deal out of routines, procedures and behavior expectations, you will eventually have less interruptions during rehearsals.
Develop Some Healthy Habits
If you aren’t healthy then you won’t feel good. If you don’t feel good then my next point will be near impossible to do. Start implementing healthy habits one after the other and soon you will feel like a whole new person. Last spring I started strength training two times a week and I started feeling like a whole new person. I was never able to stay consistent with three times a week because I was constantly on the move with school functions in the spring, but two times a week was enough for me to start noticing more energy, a better mood, and better sleep after about a month.
This fall I’ve started getting enough sleep finally. I start morning duty at 7:10 daily, and that lack of leeway has finally pushed me into getting enough sleep each night. At my old school it was easy to sleep in a few minutes (or an hour) here and there because I only had morning duty a few times a year. Now I am going to sleep anywhere between 9-10pm each night and am waking up anywhere from 5-5:30am. I’m writing this on Fall Break and today I woke up at 5:45 without an alarm set. I’ve noticed that I need a lot less coffee to start and stay going and I’m able to establish a stronger morning routine, so theres no more running around my house looking for my stuff before I leave the door.
Some other healthy habits to think about starting:
- Eating a vegetable at each meal
- Regular classroom decluttering
- Regular house decluttering
- Cleaning routines for your house or classroom
- Reading daily
- Take a vitamin
- Journaling
- Meditating
- Doing cardio
- Meal planning
The sky is the limit. My advice is to start with something that will help reduce your mental load (which we all have enough of as teachers). I started with meal planning and now I’m batch cooking and freezing for extra busy weeks. I’m trying out a weekly lesson planning routine right now so that I don’t have to think about it so much.
Stay Consistent
This is easier said than done. Especially if you don’t feel good at work one day. Staying consistent in your expectations can be difficult if you don’t feel your best, so that’s why it’s important to start developing healthy habits.
Staying consistent will also help kids get used to a routine and structure and therefore help with classroom management. If students know that every time one of them forgets their instrument for rehearsal that they will have to write a responsibility essay, then they will eventually stop forgetting instruments. If you are consistent in assigning bell work every day then students will just automatically start bell work when they come in.
This is where planning instruction well in advance is also helpful. If you aren’t planning instruction on a daily basis then you get to go through the motions if you feel sick on a particular day, which means more consistency for the students.
Displaced Pedagogy 