Every year it almost feels like a rat race to get a new wave of students interested in joining band, choir, or orchestra. It feels like all the stress is on impressing the young elementary students on your recruitment concert tour. Or maybe you’re a high school director and you’re stressed about making the pep music and the concert band music sound good to get those middle schoolers to become freshmen in your program. 

But recruitment and retention are two sides of the same coin. You can’t recruit more kids into your program if you aren’t able to retain the ones you’ve already got. And this idea that I’m going to tell you isn’t original at all. I heard it from a collegiate choir director at KMEA last year. 

Success + Fun = They will come

Simply, this means that if you make your students feel successful regardless of the level that they’re at and if you make sure they have fun, then this won’t be hard at all! 

Success

In order to build success in your students you need to make sure you choose appropriate and fun literature for your students. Please don’t program Lincolnshire Posy when your students are only capable of The Tempest. They will not feel successful, they will not have fun, and they will quit. 

Students deserve to feel great about the concerts and performances that they give! This includes making sure that you’ve taught students more than the notes and rhythms. Beginners love flexing that they can play music that sounds sophisticated with the dynamics and the articulations. Don’t ignore these things with your beginners; they are capable. 

Last year I was able to get my 8th grade band (half beginners and half second year, three IEP students) to play in three time signatures, six key signatures (some limited ranges for my newer members), and we were doing excellent with dynamic and tempo changes. If I had had another month of school we would have gotten all those subtle articulations as well. 

Build in assessments to check on skills and brag about the students that do really well. Hang up student work that displays great effort or something to strive for. Post pictures of students that travel to auditions with you and even more pictures of students who made the audition at the event (the candids are the best). If you have students that compose music then make sure to play a piece of theirs on the concert or let everyone know that they placed in a student composition competition. 

There is no wrong way to make students feel successful and this is half of the battle to get them to join and stay in your program. Let’s talk about the other half now. 

Fun

This is everything from you just being nice and fun with the kids to making sure there are non-instrument days where the focus is having fun away from the instruments. Part of having fun in a performing ensemble is just performing fun music. If I were still at my old school we were going to play a piece called Santa the Barbarian and another piece called Carol of the Boombuckets on the christmas program. My 7th graders becoming 8th graders loved both pieces and were so excited to play them. I’m not sure what they did instead, but hopefully the new guy is having a blast with them. 

Currently, I teach elementary music (I never got to finish blogging all things middle school, so I’m getting all these ideas fleshed out here). My students this year turned the story book “Snowmen at Night” into an entire production with musical performances and student-created creative movements and everything. The kids had a ton of fun and the parents and staff thought it was great. 

My middle schoolers loved traveling to auditions and performance assessment because who doesn’t love missing school to make music instead. We had just begun fundraising for a music in the parks field trip before I resigned. 

You can also gamify certain parts of your curriculum to help students buy into the class more. Don’t just assume that they love sitting in a chair in front of you and hearing you talk about half notes. 

Also, students like to know that you’re a real person. I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve just sat down and had lunch with some students. I had tons of students that always wanted to show me theri dresses or nails for the school dance and plenty of students also wanted to show me their suits. On reward days where we take a well deserved day of rest I would play card games with the students. So much of the students having fun is them enjoying who you are as a person. 

I’ll say this again here, if students feel successful in it they will have more fun without you having to ham it up. 

So wrack your brain and try to think about how you make the students in your classes feel successful. What do you do to make class fun?