I am proud to be a Certified Teacher Educator by the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (AOSA). Most of what I teach to children and adults is based on the Orff-Schulwerk approach to music education, but only my summer teaching and occasional workshops revolve around the recorder.

I have served as the Recorder Instructor at the following AOSA-approved Teacher Education Courses:

Accessible Improvisation and Composition for All Ages (4 hours) - Improvisation and composition activities in the elementary General Music classroom are some of the deepest and most fun learning opportunities music students can have! In this workshop, participants will learn a variety of strategies to "pull back the curtain" on composition and improvisation, and will learn and practice many straightforward techniques for helping guide students in creating their own original music and movement. Using classic processes and ideas from Orff Schulwerk, combined with ideas taken from Project-Based Learning and Social-Emotional Learning, participants will experience improvising and composing alone and with others, on instruments and with their voices, in words and in movement, and will come away with a toolbox of ideas and a pile of lesson ideas to bring back to their students.

Yes, Really — Fun with Uneven Meter and Polymeter for Kindergarten on Up (4 hours) - Is your classroom instruction stuck in 4/4, 3/4, and 6/8? Kids love catchy rhythms, and aren’t scared of unusual or overlapping meters! Come dive deep into kid-friendly, accessible, super-fun repertoire, and be ready to move, sing, play instruments, and create, in activities and lesson processes that are sure to grab your students’ attention. You don’t need to be a master drummer or experienced Balkan folk dancer to enliven your classrooms with metrically adventurous music and movement – if you have an open mind and a playful spirit, you’re ready to rock!

Project-Based Learning and Orff-Schulwerk: A Perfect Match (4 hours) - Have you ever struggled to keep your older students engaged and excited in General Music class? Have your students ever asked you, "What does what we're doing in this class have to do with me?" Have you ever wondered how to make your lessons more relevant, lasting, or impactful, especially with your harder-to-reach older students? One way to counter all these worries is by incorporating real-world problem-solving and project-based learning into your classroom. In this workshop, participants will experience many different ways to combine current events, classic creative and student-centered Orff-Schulwerk teaching processes, and a big handful of evocative questions, and will leave with concrete plans and strategies for bringing these ideas to students.

Ideas for Integrating Composition and Improvisation into the Elementary Music Classroom Without Fear (6 hours) - This workshop will provide a deep dive into a wide variety of creative activities for students in the elementary and middle school General Music classroom. Just some of the activities included are dances and "play-parties" with creative elements; student-accessible instrumental improvisation prompts and frameworks; songs that students complete or compose; open-ended creative challenges that can be easily differentiated for students of different ages and experience levels; distance-teaching-friendly creative projects including technology; and more!

Orff-Schulwerk: From Basic Building Blocks to Epic Instrumental Pieces and Back (3 or 4 hours) - This presentation will give participants hands-on experiences in the uniquely expressive, creative and student-centered world of Orff-Schulwerk, and will focus on how to adapt musical materials organically and authentically for students of varying ages and levels of experience. Participants will sample a wide variety of activities, games, songs and instrumental works, with the common themes of creativity, experimentation, movement and musicality running throughout them all. Participants should bring a soprano recorder if they have one.

Recorder Masterclass for Music Educators: Using the Recorder as a Creative Tool (2 or 3 hours) - Three different iterations of this workshop have been prepared for and presented to the music educators of Newark City Public Schools, each emphasizing different strategies, tools, repertoire, techniques, and pedagogical suggestions for helping students improvise and compose with the recorder as well as play songs out of method books.

Work Smarter, Not Harder: Amazing Websites and SMART Technology in the General Music Classroom (3 hours) - This presentation will review some student-tested and pedagogically organic ways of incorporating technology resources into a General Music classroom environment. The workshop will focus on locating and using the most efficient and effective tech tools for a variety of classroom activities, tasks, and assignments. The SMART Board hardware and SMART Notebook software will receive particular, but not exclusive focus. Participants should bring a tablet or notebook computer, since there will be "sandbox time" reserved at the end of the workshop for attendees to work on their own tech-inspired units.

Orff-Schulwerk 101: How to Help Your Students Sing, Say, Move, Play, and CREATE (5 hours) - This presentation will give participants hands-on experiences in the uniquely expressive, creative and student-centered world of Orff-Schulwerk, and will focus on how to adapt musical materials organically and authentically for students of varying ages and levels of experience. Participants will sample a wide variety of activities, games, songs and instrumental works, with the common themes of creativity, experimentation, movement and musicality running throughout them all. Participants should bring a soprano recorder if they have one.

Orff to Keyboard (90 minutes) - This workshop will focus on pedagogy for how to use barred instruments, arrange simple songs for Orff ensembles, and building a meaningful relationship between barred instruments and keyboards. We will spend some time translating or adapting barred-instrument arrangements to be played on keyboards.

Orff-Schulwerk: Making Mallets Work for You (90 minutes) - This workshop will focus on the barred instruments common in many elementary music classrooms. Participants will learn and practice important technical elements for playing expressively, and will learn a variety of pedagogical techniques for teaching students how and what to play on barred instruments. Participants will also experience playing in more complex instrumental ensembles that include barred instruments, and will experience using the barred instruments in improvisation and composition activities that are central to the unique spirit and emphases of Orff Schulwerk.

Collapse and Recovery: The Soundtrack (90 minutes) - designed and presented alongside economists from the Human Development sector of the World Bank at their biannual conference in March 2023, this workshop led World Bank employees in a musical exploration of the most salient points and conclusions of the recently-released report, "Collapse and Recovery: How COVID Eroded Human Capital and What To Do About It."

Presenter Training for Teaching Artists (45 minutes) - designed for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) of Newark, NJ, this workshop opened a daylong training session in spring 2023 for those NJPAC Teaching Artists who were building their pedagogical and presentation skills in advance of going out into the wider community.

Addressing Real-World Problems with PBL (90 minutes) - Students want to make positive change in the world! In this presentation, teachers will learn frameworks to help empower them to do that with music. This workshop provided many examples of “kid-tested and kid-approved” project-based learning opportunities, each of which empowered students to address a real-life problem they see in the world by composing and sharing original music or movement. There was also time for participants to design and engage in a project themselves, based on the templates at hand or not.  Delivered twice at the AOSA National Professional Development Conference in 2023 in Albuquerque, NM.

Teaching Like a Box of Chocolates (90 minutes) - Inspired by senses and emotions, teachers and students together improvised a “delicious” multimedia experience via evocative and intuitive teaching. Delivered twice at the AOSA National Professional Development Conference in 2021 in Charleston, SC.

Improvisation + Intuition = Evocative Teaching (90 minutes) - This workshop explored ways that teachers can combine pedagogy and "the seats of their pants" to help their students bring their creative ideas to life. Delivered twice at the AOSA National Professional Development Conference in 2019 in Salt Lake City, UT.

The Potomac School, McLean, VA | Middle School Music & Movement Teacher (grades 4-6), including Music & Movement class (previously known as General Music), Recorder Consort, and Sixth Grade Chorus | 2011-present

Mt. Vernon Woods Elementary School, Alexandria, VA | General Music Teacher (grades K-6), including General Music, Recorder Consort, 5th-6th Grade Chorus, and Drumming Club | 2006-2011

After three years of studies with me (fourth through sixth grade), I sincerely hope that my students:

• Are "tuneful, beatful, and artful" (with thanks to music pedagogue John Feierabend)
• Have experienced a wide variety of methods, media, and modalities of performing and creating music and movement
• Have improvised and composed a wide variety of musical works of various dimensions, and feel justified in identifying themselves as "composers" (or at least no longer think of "composers" solely as dead white European males with funny names)
• Have performed and choreographed a wide variety of dances and expressive movement pieces, both in service of other musical tasks and for their own sake, and feel justified in identifying themselves as "movers"
• Can play recorder(s), barred instruments, drums, 'ukulele, or some combination with facility, and feels comfortable improvising and composing with instruments
• Have sung in many genres, languages, and styles, and have vocabulary to differentiate better singing from worse singing
• Have performed for peers and adults dozens of times, in small and large settings

I prioritize the act of hands-on creation over nearly all others in my classroom. Students must create their own music and movement to be invested and to learn deeply! I enjoy assigning students complex problems and solutions and allowing them substantial amounts of time to work together—with as little guidance from me as possible—to create a satisfying artistic product. I strongly believe in allowing students to make their own creative and artistic choices as often as possible.