Planning
Material
Know your material thoroughly and teach songs that are appropriate for the group and the occasion. Have an overview of the whole term – what are you working towards? Include seasons / festivals / holidays / themes.
Honour the origins, meanings and cultural and historical contexts of songs.
Research and acknowledge the source – where you first learnt or found it including the song carriers of the aural tradition who have kept songs alive and passed them on. See yourself and your group as part of that line of song carriers.
Choose songs you know really well or have time to embed thoroughly. It’s amazing how different it is to know a song well for yourself and to know it so you can sing it to a group of strangers!
Set your singers up to succeed with safe, easy beginnings.
Choose songs with:
Words – repeated, easy
Rhythm – patterns repeated
Melody – intuitive
Harmony – is 1 enough to begin with?
Use accessible language
High, low, middle, fast, slow, loud, soft.
Or explain what specialist musical terms mean as you work.
Call voice parts Tune and Harmony to encourage singers to explore their voices.
Structure
Think about how you structure each session. Pay attention to beginnings and endings. How to engage people and manage variety and pace, how to maximise involvement throughout and how to achieve a sense of completion. Consider:
warm up – how long?
new song/s
songs we started last week
songs we know well
an energising moment
Always have something easier up your sleeve in case the group are struggling and you just need to change tack.
Consider how you can incrementally add to a song over a few sessions.
What you want to achieve in the session? Is there something you could introduce in the warm up that will help to achieve this? How will this session lead into next week or future sessions?
Plan and prepare any materials / equipment you need.
Warm up your own voice before the start of the session.
Reflective practice
After each session
- What went well? What could have been better?
- Was the room appropriate for the group?
- Did I have enough time in the room before people arrived?
- Did anything not go as planned?
- What do I think my teaching looked like from the outside?
- Were there moments when I forgot what I was doing or was not quite managing?
- How did I manage those moments?
- What feedback do I have to support my answers?
BIG questions for the end of a Year / Project / Term
- Where am I now?
- What did I learn this year?
- What am I loving?
- What is working well? For: me; the group; individuals; the organisation / funder
- What is not working well? For: me; the group; individuals; the organisation / funder
- What do I want more of?
- What do I want to let go of?
- Where can I lighten up?
- Where can I ask for help?
- What needs attention?
- Where do I want to go next?
- What CPD or training would be helpful to me?
- What do I want to be known for?
Turn your reflective practice into a commitment to your development
- Find out what other practitioners are doing.
- Find out about training courses, conferences and workshops.
- Build a library of books, resources, websites, etc.
- Find a buddy for peer-to-peer support.
Next steps
If you identify training or resources you need through reflective practice but can’t find it available in Scotland or even the UK, please get in touch with the team and they will attempt to work it into the Scotland Sings programme.
Originally written by Ali Burns & Christine Kydd as part of the Choir Leaders’ Training Manual