Tanner Oglesby, SSAA Choirs R&R Chair
Starting on the Right Note: Back-to-School Tips for Choral Directors
Though I typically mourn the close of summer vacation, I must say that the beginning of the year is the most exciting for me. Exploring new ideas, building program culture, establishing ensemble identity, and cultivating relationships all make the start to a school year fun. However, getting the ship out of port can be the most challenging and daunting task of the school year. So, I’ve decided to outline some tips for you to consider as you get your school year started.
Event Planning… Dates, Times, and the Inevitable: Conflicts!
It’s not a matter of ‘if’ there will be a conflict but ‘when’. However, there are steps we can take to avoid as many major conflicts as possible.
Review your school, district, and community calendars and try your best to plan around big dates.
Get with your department colleagues and collaborate with them on dates that work for everybody so as to avoid scheduling a choir concert on top of a band concert. This is also a great time to agree on a proactive plan for when students will have conflicts. Ask essential questions like: “If a student is on the basketball team and they have practice during a choir performance, which activity should the student prioritize?” These are questions that are best addressed as a department or school so you aren’t on your own taking a reactive approach.
Once you’ve got your dates set, share them with administrators, colleagues, and others for a quick perusal/approval. Sometimes a fresh perspective will catch a conflict you might not have noticed. Choir concert during testing week? Your school may not allow that, and a counselor or testing coordinator will usually help you catch those things.
Communicate event dates, as well as attendance expectations, with your students and families as quickly as possible. I add them to our choir handbook, which parents must sign. It’s a great way to ensure every expectation has been communicated.
After communicating event dates, consider what help you’ll need from parents or your parent organization in order to make sure the events are successful. I prepare a spreadsheet with all of the events as well as duties for each event for myself, my co-director, and parent chaperones/volunteers we will need.
Update Administrative Materials
This work is tedious and one of my least favorite parts of getting started, but it’s so important! In my district, we utilize a choir handbook where we communicate expectations for students, event dates, and so on. This is the first thing I update from year to year. You might also want to prepare medical forms, permission slips, and other forms you will need mid-year. New teachers, make sure to communicate with a school-based or district-based mentor who can walk you through all of your district’s processes. Each school is unique in how they handle procedures. It’s incredibly important to know what your administrator’s expectations are before sending out materials to students/families.
Prepare the Rehearsal Space
Have you checked your rosters? Is your rehearsal space big enough for the number of students you will have? Is your space safely laid out? Have you considered foot traffic flow from when students enter to when they leave? Where in the room do you want students to avoid gathering? Is your space accessible to all students?
These are just a few of the many questions I ask myself when making sure my rehearsal space is set up. I believe that spaces have energy and how we arrange space may be conducive to a productive learning environment or our biggest headache. Think of your room from the student perspective. For our choir room, we have an “SOS” or “Student Opportunity Station” where students may find basic essentials like hand sanitizer and Kleenex, as well as pencils and so on. I’ve made sure to place it in an area of the room that won’t become too crowded at the beginning and end of class.
Curriculum Mapping & Literature Selection
First, what do you want your daily rehearsal outline to look like? This is different for everyone, and I believe there are multiple “correct” answers here. The important thing is that you have a daily rehearsal plan of some sort. When I started teaching, I viewed “fundamentals” as its own portion of rehearsal, where we focused on specific rhythmic and pitch patterns for sight-reading and so on. However, I’ve since learned that the best learning happens when we are intentional about choosing quality literature as the vehicle for teaching fundamentals. After all, the reason we teach fundamental concepts is so that our students may continue to grow as independent musicians and apply learning to literature and music-making. I find literature selection to be a choral director’s most important duty, and it takes me weeks to comb through all of the literature that exists to find the right fit for my ensembles. I wrote an article for the January 2025 edition of Southwestern Connection that specifically outlines strategies for literature selection, including ensemble identity, difficulty level, voicing, programming, and diverse perspectives. I encourage you to check it out!
With that being said, be prepared to try a couple of things with your students right away so you may assess the ensemble’s current ability level and build from there. As you choose literature, consider what vocal concepts you want your students to learn as well. It’s easy to get too focused on sight-reading and forget that you are a teacher of voice, too. I like to reframe vocal “warm-ups” as “vocal technique”. We warm up our voice as a consequence of daily technique training at the beginning of rehearsal.
Establish Community Early
Communities are complex. People from different backgrounds, beliefs, and experiences make up a community. When a problem arises in a community, it’s up to community members and leaders to solve it together. Communities set goals and work toward them. Communities succeed together and fail together. Communities experience loss and tragedy together.
To me, a choral classroom has the opportunity to be the best model for community. That’s the culture my colleagues and I work to cultivate. The beginning of the year can easily feel overwhelming with rules, policing, gatekeeping, and an overall sense of rigidity. Or… the beginning of the year can be inspiring, hopeful, exciting, and positive. Your students’ ability to feel safe enough to be vulnerable will be paramount to quality music-making, and it all begins with how you set the tone at the beginning of the year. With helpful guidance, consider including your students in establishing goals and expectations, but also accountability measures. I like to start these conversations with guiding scenarios to ponder. These scenarios are real-life, likely-to-happen scenarios.
Here’s an example:
“Scenario: We have solo auditions in front of the class, and the person auditioning messes up or their voice cracks. First, discuss with your team how you would feel as the soloist in the situation. Next, discuss ways that you, as a listener, can help alleviate some of the soloists’ negative feelings. What should we never do, as a team of listeners, if this were to happen? As a team, what do you think is a fair accountability measure if a listener makes this mistake?”
This is an activity that I would do in about 5-10 minutes of class, and I do about 3 of these a week for the first couple of weeks of school. It is a game changer! You will no longer find yourself as the “enforcer” of rules, but a community leader who follows through with community expectations. For the first several weeks, we do an activity like the one above, lots of vocal technique, and fundamentals of sight-reading through literature. Most importantly, we have fun!
Final Reflections
Remember, you don’t have to accomplish everything you set out to do in one year, especially if you are newer to teaching. Building an excellent choral program is a marathon, not a sprint! Focus on small successes for yourself and your ensembles in the beginning and even throughout the year. If you are struggling with imposter syndrome like so many of us have, please know that we all just teach black ink on white paper. Don’t feel discouraged if your program isn’t where you want it to be yet. Your best resource and frame of reference are the students in front of you; let them work with you to define success for your program. I hope this article was helpful to you, and I look forward to working on more resources for you and your students throughout the year.
Best wishes for a fun and exciting new school year!