‘Tis the season! Between spring concerts, adjudicated performances, graduation concerts and everything else, you may have forgotten about recruitment. Or maybe you haven’t forgotten about recruitment, but this is one of your first recruitment events that you’ve put on and you’re stressed out. I’ve got you! I’m still new to this rodeo, but I learned a lot from my first.
I’m fortunate enough that my recruitment concert is one time and all the incoming students come to us. My tips and advice are coming at you through that lens. If you have to travel to your feeder schools then you can still make some of this stuff happen, but it may look different. Take whatever ideas you can easily use and leave the ones that don’t make sense for your situation. But if you keep reading I’m sharing five ways to generate hype for you music program during recruitment season!
Put Together a Recruitment Concert of Pieces for your Target Audience
Last year for our recruitment concert I talked to the incoming 7th graders about what band was like from day to day. I explained that we would sound kind of bad on the first day of instrument playing, then I let my students recreate that sound.
Not only did my students enjoy getting to make absolutely horrible sounds on their instruments for a few seconds, but then my students sounded a lot more impressive when we played our pieces for the incoming 7th graders.
My plan for this year is to do the same thing. Then have my students play Hot Cross Buns and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. Those are just some of their favorites from the book and the incoming 7th graders should know those pieces too. Then I plan on telling the incoming students that after a while we graduate to “big kid” pieces and we will play “Ancient Hunters,” which is one of our assessment pieces.
For choir recruitment, I really want to emphasize that we play a lot of games to help the students learn. But I may save that for when the students are doing tours of our classrooms. My plan for the choral portion of the recruitment concert is to take the kids through a timeline of what we do in a year, similar to how we are doing that for band.
What this means is that I will have the students sing some of our favorites form the beginning of the year (all unison pieces). Then I’ll have students sing our favorite rounds. Then we will add vocal ostinatos to those rounds and we will culminate with the last chunk of “Cherry Blossoms,” another assessment piece form this year.
Try to Make the Concert Interactive
I have not yet become a master at this; however, there is a really great band director in my state that always brings little kids down to the floor or up to the stage and he has them conduct the band with him.
It’s so cute! He talks about how he has the power to control the band because of his baton and makes a huge deal out of, then he invites them down. He gives each student something to hold while they conduct (think fancy straws or pencils). He and the young kids will conduct together for a while, then he just takes off and lets the little kids keep conducting the band. He only comes back to conduct the end of the piece and help the band end together.
I imagine that you could do this with choir as well. I just haven’t seen that happen. I have seen conductors do the choral warmup where every section sings part of a chord and then the conductor will tell each section to raise or lower their pitch by a half step. I think that could be very engaging for a whole audience.
If you use the S-Cubed sight singing curriculum, like I do then I might play a round of forbidden pattern with the audience. I personally would swap out melodic content with rhythm content, but that’s because of the area I teach in. This would also be a great way for incoming students to see a bit of your classroom if they stop buy for the tour after you’ve covered that part.
Showcase the Positive Things about Your Program
By the time that our recruitment concert happens all of my performance assessment will have happened for the school year. One of the things that I plan on doing for our recruitment concert is pulling out every performance assessment certificate that my program has earned and displaying them on a table. Since we haven’t done anything where you can earn a trophy, this is our closest thing.
The recruitment concert is close to the award banquet that I’ll be having at the end of this school year. So whatever prizes (think pins, trophies, plaques, medals, certificates) that my current students have earned will be on display, but my current students won’t know that they’ve earned these awards yet.
I’m also going to place all the news articles that I’ve written about the band and choirs this school year on the bulletin board where I showcase excellent student work. This is a way for students and parents to see that your students are out here doing the work to become very excellent musicians and are being rewarded for their efforts. Students like to see that they will be rewarded for working really hard!
In my classroom we do progress monitoring through badges and sticker charts (it depends on the class). Those are on full display in my classroom and will be explained in a bit more depth when the incoming students come into my room. these are very visual, eye catching ways for my current students to see that they are making progress and should be proud of themselves. I’m hoping that it is also something that incoming students decide that they want to be a part of.
Let Kids Know that they don’t have to choose between sports or music
If you also teach in a really small school district then you probably run into this problem frequently like I do. I have anywhere from 8-15 students each year that come up to me and say that they wanted to join band or choir, but they were afraid that it would interfere with sports.
To remedy this, I have been asking my students for their sports photos and action shots of them participating in sports. So far, I only have a few pictures. But I know that I will get more pictures with more reminders. my ultimate goal with this is to explicitly say that I only ask for two after school commitments all year (the rest of the performances are during the school day). None of my students have ever had to miss a game because of a concert, none of my students have ever been penalized for missing a practice due to a concert either.
I hope that bringing this up and having pictures of my students doing both and being successful at both will help curb some of that and I’ll hopefully have fewer 8th grade beginners as a result.
Have Your Current Students talk about the Program
Your students are your biggest advocates! Your music parents are also your biggest advocates! You should try letting them talk about all the wonderful things that go on in your program and classroom.
I am going to have my students complete a Google Form and tell me what things they like about the music program at my school this year. This will allow my more introverted or shy students to have their voice heard. With their permission you can also put their quotes into a presentation and have it play in the background while you’re performing for the incoming students.
You could also have current students talk about the program while you are transitioning in between pieces or performing groups. Let the student (or even small group of students) talk about a fun memory that they had in the music class, or on a trip, or anything that makes it sound like band, or choir, or orchestra is the place to be!
I hope that you’ve found something helpful during this blog post!
Displaced Pedagogy 