It was another inspiring day at the New Jersey Association for Independent Schools (NJAIS) Innovation and Collaboration Conference! There were thought-provoking sessions and a wonderful keynote address. Here are my takeaways from Day 2, how some can be implemented personally and how some can be implemented in elementary music.

Chasing Cicadas: Collaboration Stories, Secrets, and Systems for Innovative Educators with Dr. Reshan Richards and Stephen J. Valentine

Dr. Reshan Richards is a familiar name to me as he is the CEO and co-founder of Explain Everything, an app I used many times before our school adopted Seesaw. He is also a Lecturer at the Columbia University School of Professional Studies and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Stephen J. Valentine is the Assistant Head of Upper School and the Director of Academic Leadership at Montclair Kimberley Academy and the author of Everything but Teaching, Blending Leadership, and Make Yourself Clear.

Their keynote address focused on innovation and even had us collaborate to theoretically create a new product from two objects. The activity had many similarities to the Design Thinking process, but I really enjoyed hearing about their experiences and journeys into, and their takeaways from, the world of entrepreneurship and how innovation played a big role in that.

Their hope: That you are more eager and excited to form or further develop meaningful partnerships in your professional work. - Dr. Reshan Richards and Stephen J. Valentine

Foundations of doing well in school vs. Foundations for innovative practice

The slide that struck me the most was the one that had the comparison of “Foundations of doing well in school” vs. “Foundations for innovative practice”. I felt that they made a point about how the foundations for doing well in school are almost opposite to the foundations for innovative practice. For example, students in high school have been known to choose courses based on teachers who will give As. The bullet point under “Foundations for doing well in school” read, “To get an A, start with an A and repeat the formula.” The innovative practice bullet read, “Iterate from startup, pivot when necessary”, meaning you begin, check your progress which would need improvements, and pivot instead of repeating so you can work on how to improve to an A.

Another point in the school column read, “Primacy of position/hierarchy”. The example given was that the same group of people is expected to solve every problem due to the hierarchy in the organization. However, does the same group have to solve all of the problems because they are higher up? The bullet in the innovative practice read, “Primacy of problem/emergent strategy”. The questions asked were, “Who should be in the room to solve the problem?” and “Wouldn’t having those people, though they might not be at the top of the hierarchy, be the better solvers for that problem?” It gave a good pause to think about whether or not schools are falling more into the “Foundations for doing well in school” column or the “Foundations for innovative practice” column, or a little bit of both columns.

Non-Failures and Non-Successes

These are great terms to live by as they help you to feel more hope than disappointment. Dr. Reshan Richards and Steven Valentine showcased and discussed their ideas that came to be non-failures and their ideas that came to be non-successes. I liked that they showed the same amount, around five, for each category. When they showed their non-successes, it made me feel that they were very real and not two people who always experienced non-failures and rarely ever experienced non-successes.

One of their non-failures was the Small Online Kindness Generator. This kindness machine came from their 2016 book and from the lockdown pandemic with online learning and etiquette. They noticed that there was a problem with people being forced to do all communication online. This online communication inadvertently brought about a lack of kindness. Since communicating solely online was new to most, people were not aware of when they were lacking kindness in their communication.

Reshan and Steven decided to solve this problem. They recruited an experienced online school teacher, other teachers who just started online teaching, and some more experts to help them create and test their idea. They made rules about how they would create together. One rule was that when they sent each other an idea, they had five minutes after they opened their email to process the idea and write their review of it. They experienced a non-failure when launched their website: https://www.leadingonline.net/

How do we begin problem-solving?

These points come from their keynote slides:

Start with a question runway of a problem they want to solve. 

• What’s the problem we notice, find important, and feel like we have some kind of advantage or head start in solving?

• What kind of team do we need to build to solve the problem? In a way that is authentic, immediate [access at the point of need], and delightful [not just transactional]?

• What roles will we, ourselves, fill on the team?

• What roles are left? Who can we recruit?

• What are the rules of the game? [A rule can be that we will communicate with Slack? Or only in email and no emails left in the inbox so we always respond. Or meet in person once a month.] And stick to those rules. 

• Ideal: common purpose + different skills + overlapping interests + rules + non-overlapping networks for bumps in the road and eventual launch. 

We then were placed into groups of whether we classified ourselves as a good doodler, one who could write a description well, one who could write silly nicknames, and one more about creativity (I believe). We found others to group with so that we would not be a group of all ones who could write silly nicknames. We were given a wheelbarrow and a grand piano to use to create a new product to draw, write up, and advertise. We tried to figure out a problem that we could solve using the parts from both objects. Then, we created the drawing, the name of the product, and an advertising description.

It reminded me a lot of the process of Design Thinking. However, I feel like it takes it a few steps further because it made me think about how I communicate and problem-solve with my colleagues and students. I will keep reflecting on this address in the future.

ThingLink: Create Visual Experiences for Student-Centered Learning with Susan Murray, Educational Technology Coordinator at Oak Hill

ThingLink has been around for years and I have played with it a few times. Susan showed amazing student examples where they used ThingLink to create diagrams, resources, and even escape rooms.

What is ThingLink?

From their website, “ThingLink is an award-winning education technology platform that makes it easy to augment images, videos, and virtual tours with additional information and links. Over 4 million teachers and students use ThingLink for creating accessible, visual learning experiences in the cloud.”

There is a free trial as well as a $35/year for 60 students. There are also educational licenses between $2-$9/year depending on how many students subscribe.

Thinglink is very intuitive to use. You could make a resource for students in ThingLink and they interact with that resource. You could create a background image and then choose icons that link to various items from websites to videos to images, and more. Here is a very simple example I created during the session:

The small eighth-note icons have videos linked to them. When you click on an eighth-note icon, a video of a musician performing on that instrument appears and plays within the app. If I had more time, I would have picked some other examples, but I liked that I made this in ten minutes.

Ideas for the Music Classroom

• Resources of links to instruments, composers, etc

• Escape Room

• Map of where a composer lived or a group of composers lived

• Students study a current singer and create a ThingLink to all of the facts they discovered. For example, it could be a background with the singer and the icons lead to a map of where the singer grew up, a video of the singer’s current hit song, websites of artists that influenced the singer, and more

• Students create melodies or compositions in Flat or Soundtrap. Then, create a ThingLink where you place their sheet music on the page and the icons lead to an audio or video file of the song being played.

• Create a ThingLink of a popular music venue and create a tour of it. Who knows? Maybe the venue has already created a ThingLink for you to use. Here is one example of the CSO Music Hall:

COVID and Music: What's Changed for Good with Joe DeVico, Coordinator of Educational and Visual Technology at Gill St. Bernard’s School

I liked this session a lot. Not only is Joe DeVico the Coordinator of Educational and Visual Technology, he is also a professional musician who has played drums for decades for famous rap singers and Broadway composers. When the pandemic caused the lockdown, the arts took a large hit. Even as the pandemic’s guidelines changed, the arts were one of the last to come back in-person. It has only been recently that masks became optional and people could come to a live show and sit next to each other.

Joe spoke about this and discussed the good changes to the arts that came from the pandemic.

• Students learned how to video themselves performing. There were many times we asked students to video themselves so that they could learn more effectively. The pandemic forced them to learn how to video themselves well and they can now do this to improve their playing skills.

• Playing along with click tracks. Ask any music teacher and they will tell you that they have at least once, asked their students to practice with a metronome and the student will not do it. It is challenging to practice with a metronome because it reveals your weakness in playing in time and how that can really throw off an ensemble. When we had to perform virtually, all of the musicians you saw playing in a box on the screen were recording with a click-track. A click-track is the accompaniment track. The student had to perform accurately. If they sped up or played too slow, their video was mostly likely muted in the final virtual performance because it would sound out of time with the rest of the ensemble.

• Private instruction still continuing remotely. I teach younger students and I feel that in-person is much better than teaching private students remotely. However, with older students who have played for years, studying online with an amazing professor is far better than studying in-person with a professor that is not the right fit for the student. For this reason, online lessons have been a great advantage to the student who wants to learn with a specific professor or wants to study an instrument and the school does not have a teacher that teaches it.

• Masterclasses online. When the pandemic closed the city orchestras, many of the musicians offered to Zoom into music classes to talk to students and play for them. I was so fortunate to have one of my best friends from college, Anna Mattix who plays English Horn for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra (BPO), Zoom into my elementary music classes to play the English Horn and Oboe for my students.

• Audiences. Another positive that also came to the arts from the pandemic was that the audiences appear to be more attentive and appreciative because they realized that they missed hearing live music and live theater.

It was an amazing and innovative two days. It helped me focus back on my music classroom and my students and how to implement numerous ideas that I learned from this wonderful conference. Many thanks to the presenters, speakers, the Peck School that hosted the event, the sponsors, and the coordinators, especially Rachel Folan and Jenn Garvey!