The Beth and Kelly Show: Music Teaching (and Life)

Today’s guests, members of the ultra creative brass quartet The Westerlies, were Riley Mulherkar and Willem DeKoch. In our conversation, we unpack at length the observation that the creativity/ vision/ intuition/ collaboration aspect of the Artistic Process is the hardest to cultivate in our students.

We're joined by Marcus Pimpleton, Executive Director for Racial and Educational Justice for Yakima Public Schools. He is also an experienced school administrator AND a band director! Marcus makes the point that these are the things kids want: happiness and pride. He challenges us to focus in on these things and watch the transformation start to happen to our music making communities!

Ever wonder what college music ed majors wish could be a part of the undergrad curriculum? Listen to CWU Junior, saxophonist Shaina Ellis, a student leader in the CWU music program and the CWU JEN Chapter talk with us about what she wishes could be required courses of study. We also get deep into the concept of student teaching (from both the student teacher and mentor teacher perspective).

Anu shares some courageous ideas, approaches, and mindsets for giving more choice and control to students, which stand to transform and empower their present AND future lives, should we decide to put them to practice! Are you interested in making the most of this unique moment in time and furthering music education? Then listen to this!

Listen in for Sarah’s (quite frankly genius) ideas about approaching a total overhaul of an instrumental music program in a secondary public school setting. Many of us have thought that change is needed in our “traditional” approaches to teaching music in the public schools...take it from Sarah: It can be done, in super cool ways, and the time is now.

ASTA President-Elect and professor of future orchestra teachers at UNC Greensboro, she has worked to ask the tough questions and seek collaborators/ helpers in her mission of person-centered and community-centered music teaching. Check it out (then go make sure your association dues are up to date)!

This episode is RICH in really valuable culturally responsive concepts and ideas that can bring us closer to serving all students, transforming ourselves as teachers, AND transforming music education as a whole. This is our charge! And luckily, as Laura points out, it is not too late to start right now.

This episode was super special. We get real specific feedback for music education from recent students, who are now studying music in college. It is important to hear what these two young musicians have to say!

President-elect of the Washington Music Educators Association joins us to talk about the future of music education. We also put in a good word about keeping all those association memberships going.

We highlight NAfME's 3-part Orchestra Town Hall series exploring Mission, Models, Methods & Materials.

We welcome Kate Olson, multi-instrumentalist, music educator, and creative visionary. We talk about going for it (the word “no” doesn’t exist for this Wyoming native), artistic skill coupled with artistic expression, and a very cool and very accessible program Kate has developed for middle school aged youth focusing on protest music and uke!

Nate Omdal visits from The Musician's Association Seattle, Local 76-493. He's a major force for good in our city. We also reminisce about the importance of hiring professional audio engineers for school concerts.

We get down to BUSINESS (that is, the MUSIC BUSINESS) with Tiffany Kerns, Director of the Country Music Association Foundation. The music industry is a real, successful world, and our students can become the innovative force of the music industry’s future.

We are joined by acclaimed performers, trumpet player Chloe Rowlands and cellist Andrew Yee who share with us about how we can better serve trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming students in our programs. It’s a new year, folks! Let’s set an intention that we are going to make this imperative work a priority in our practice going forward.

We ring in the New Year with four visionary artists, educators, and collaborators who make the case that the Grateful Dead is the “power strip of American music,” and that with our students we need to PLUG IN! Joe Craven, Ari Joshua, Matt Hopper, and Ricky Gene Powell: The Beth and Kelly Show loves you!

JEN has great resources for all types of music educators AND students. They have outdone themselves making it easy and affordable to become a member. This is a great org, folks!

In this episode we learn from Native music educator Michelle McCauley who has done so much of the work, maneuvering within our limited euro-centric structure, to help us all understand how to appropriately approach the incorporation of Native culture within our curricula. We close with a Northern Paiute numbers song that uses the dialect Michelle learned as a little girl. This song is a circle dan...

Maryland MEA are examining their structures and offerings through an equity lens, and changing them to center process and learning.

On this special Earshot Jazz episode of the Beth and Kelly Show, we discuss making jazz available FOR ALL of our music students. Congrats to Joe & Kamala!

We're joined by music education power couple Theresa and Chuck Hulihan as we make the case that NOW IS THE TIME to start incorporating the National Music Content Standards. Key takeaway: PROCESS over PRODUCT.

We discuss the importance of integrating Hip-Hop into the world of music education, and spitball ideas about how to do that, all with our new friend Clovis de Milo from Sourcery Records.

We're talking Music Education at the collegiate level with Kevin Weingarten from the University of Washington School of Music. How can we use design thinking to transform our teaching practice? Kevin demonstrates true ally ship while Beth and Kelly discuss the painful ways that gatekeeping almost crushed their dreams.

Sammy Miller, and everything he touches, is drenched in sincerity. Tune in and find out how to engage with this awesome human, his music, and his band. info@thisisplaybook.com

Joined by our very good friend and Hawks-watching (and wings eating) pal Tom D’Angelo — a former Roosevelt Jazz student (the self-appointed transition director in Scott Brown’s first year of teaching at RHS taking over for the legendary Waldo King), AND former parent of a Roosevelt Jazz student! We talk about inspiring mentors in our lives (Scott and Robert Knatt), and we talk about the many ways...

We debrief about our all day zoom camp that focused on decolonization and making the Ballard H.S. music department more culturally responsive with guest Courtney Rowley (Choir Director at Ballard High School) . During camp there were lots of learning moments; and we had tough conversations. Camp was like a turbulent flight that landed safely and we're ready to do it again with your students!