Before your mentorship begins, Dr. Burrack will help you identify which topics will benefit you most during your time together. Choose from the 30 topics listed below!
MENTORSHIP
The only constraint to how many topics you cover is the number of days your mentorship lasts.
TOPICS LIST
Balance of ensembles
Focus on instructional strategies through which students make decisions about how to adjust their playing to fit within the ensemble sound.
Using visual art to enhance stylistic performance
Learn ways to teach tone color, articulation, balance, stylistic nuance, and historical appropriateness to your ensemble through the use of visual art.
Developing student analytical skills
Master ways of guiding students to make musical decisions while performing through their own analytical processes.
Teaching big band styles
Deepen your understanding of encouraging your band to perform jazz styles stylistically and appropriately.
Jazz articulations
Confidently teach students how to differentiate between unique jazz articulations as compared to their concert articulations.
Developing a rhythmic feel in a big band
Learn how to best spend your time developing the rhythm section and the rhythmic feel in a jazz ensemble.
Historical foundations for Jazz
Add beneficial layers of musical understanding by applying the appropriate type and amount of historical knowledge to jazz ensembles.
Developing improvisational skills beginning through advanced
Learn how your approach to your student’s development of improvisational skills in a big band must evolve as they increase their skillset and experience.
Performing across your community
Discover new ideas to get your students out into the community, garnering additional and renewed support for your programs each year.
Advocacy for music education
Gaining community support for your music program is of utmost importance, and learning to do so effectively can drastically change your outcomes.
Grow your own teacher through apprenticeship experiences
Learn how do develop a program where students experience private teaching, conducting, and administrative skills.
Developing assessable student learning outcomes
Discover methods for developing useful outcomes that reflect your teaching and student learning.
Using an LMS to document learning
Receive in-depth instruction on how to use the Canvas Learning Management Technology to assess and document student learning in music classes.
Developing listening skills through assessments
Take a deep dive into strategies that develop and assess students’ capacity to listen and analyze.
Integrating state ballots as assessment tools
Explore the process of effectively using large and small group ballots as a teaching tool.
Assessing student learning through sectional leadership
Refine your strategies of developing and assessing student leadership capacity.
Assessments as concert preparation
Hone in on ways to assess student learning while preparing for concert performance.
Developing and using scoring rubrics
Learn to identify effective and useful assessment scoring rubrics and how to make them.
Using performance standards to support student assessment
Receive a guide to using performance standards as a foundation for your assessment and curriculum.
Assessing student development across your program
Develop strategies to assess musical learning and development across multiple grade levels and types of music courses.
Applying the national standards
Learn how to understand and apply the National Standards and Model Cornerstone Assessments.
Developing combos in a school music program
Explore the reasons why developing combos can enhance student musicianship and improvisation skills.
Teaching through use of questions
Develop strategies to teach students through questions instead of telling them answers.
Facilitating music learning rather than disseminating content and skills
Receive practical methods on using discovery learning rather than telling students what and how to learn.
Getting students to think and make decisions
Take a hard look at developing musicianship as an internal thinking skill for your students.
Curriculum: a teaching guide instead of a document
Learn how to make a curriculum that reflects what you teach and that you can use as a guide.
Using curriculum to unify a school music program
Master the art of developing a curriculum that addresses sequential and consistent learning across all courses in a school music program,
Score study for student learning
Receive time-tested strategies of using score study as a foundation for lesson planning.
