Proactive advocacy
No matter your situation, building a foundation of support that underscores the value of your program is an important priority. We know music programs often face scrutiny during budget cuts, shifts in curricular philosophy, leadership, or a combination.
Being an empowered advocate for your program doesn’t require an overhaul in what you already do, but rather, it can be a shift in perspective.
We could go right to data, but wherever you stand on measuring student success, we could agree that effective advocacy in music education thrives on creating relevant, authentic, and memorable experiences beyond facts and figures. You can positively influence, educate, and even charm your constituents by helping them understand what makes your classroom so special, unique, and a place where kids thrive!
Some of these suggestions might offer you a light-bulb moment or a nod of affirmation, but I’m hoping some are just a 1-degree turn that can positively impact your program and give it roots of flourishing growth.
- Showcasing Student Creativity: Hosting an “informance” in a school setting, like your classroom, where parents and administrators can witness students demonstrate activities they enjoy in your class, is a powerful way to offer a “window-in” on a student’s experience. Yes, I know it would be during the day, but now, post-Covid, many schools continue to offer live-streaming to their outside school community. When parents and admin personally experience the authentic engagement and connection you make with the students and the connection students make with music, your argument for support just multiplied ten-fold!
- Leverage Technology! Use technology to share your message. Create videos of in-class student performances, showing the steps in your process. What about interviews with music teachers and students or virtual tours of the music rooms led by students?! You could do all of this! Of course, post responsibly only on those platforms approved by your school, like Seesaw or Google Classroom.
- Make a Greatest Hits Album: Compile audio recordings of songs and pieces accomplished by any of your music classes throughout the year. At the end of the year, release your school’s Greatest Hits album! It could be as simple as a playlist, or it could become a larger project in which students create artwork for the cover (collaborate with the art teacher!) and generate program notes that are authentic to their learning.
- Share Student Success: No matter how big or small, share your students’ success with their parents. Send a short email home for that one kid who has been struggling and has just had a breakthrough (‘cc your administrator). Sharing success stories is a genuine way connection with your broader community. Remember, there is power in small moments!
- Tying Music to Broader Goals: Frame music education as essential, not extracurricular, by demonstrating how your program supports other educational goals like literacy, cultural awareness, social-emotional learning, and STEM skills. Occasionally try to tie into the units of the homeroom teachers.
For example, my fifth-grade students recently studied the water cycle and its effects on sustainability. After learning a piece for barred instruments that exercised several music skills, we brainstormed what the piece could represent (they chose an angry ocean). Working in small groups, students created rhythmic ostinati pieces for unpitched percussion that they transferred to recycled plastic items, noting how we could clean up our “angry oceans” from plastic pollution. This became a B section. Kind of a stretch, but it felt relevant to the students, and my colleagues really appreciated the connection to their unit.
- Collaborate With Other Arts Disciplines: Partner with other arts educators to create interdisciplinary projects. Such projects can showcase the interconnectedness of the arts and the value of a well-rounded education. Maybe you can create a “Tempest” creative movement activity to tie in with the theater program’s Shakespere unit, or what about doing a dance unit with the P.E. teacher and then offering a “Family Folk Dance Night?” Or, just dance as a school community. In addition, I’ve had barred instruments (xylophones, glockenspiels, etc.) be included in orchestra and band programs for just a piece, demonstrating the scope of development between elementary-middle-upper school performances. My administrators loved this! When the second grade does their poetry unit and includes sound poems, collaborate with their homeroom teachers to include imaginative sounds from the music to accompany their poems.
When we create opportunities that leave a lasting impression, we help our audiences—whether parents, school boards, or policymakers—see music not as an isolated subject but as a cornerstone and a co-collaborator of a vibrant and meaningful education. These personal connections are what drive lasting support and investment in music programs.