"The Show Must Go On!" Building a Choir Program from the Ground Up
- Anna Clark
- Jul 6, 2024
- 7 min read
If you've made it this far into my website, you already know that I was - and still am - a Theatre kid. Well, I was also a Choir kid. A wombo combo, if you will. The wombo combo. So when I started teaching at a high school, I was excited to get back involved with a choir. Maybe I could help out with their concerts or sit in on rehearsals every now and then. But I was very surprised to see that the school didn't have a choir; they had excellent Band and Theatre programs but no voice ensembles.
One week before the beginning of my 4th year with this school, I received a phone call from one of the assistant principals. It went something like...
Hey! We heard you sing at the student vs. teacher talent show last year. The new principal wants to start choir. We have you as the teacher.
Well. What could I say? I hadn't met the new principal yet and didn't want her first impression of me to be someone to say no to an opportunity... And if you've ever worked as a teacher in a public school, you know that sometimes even an explicit "no" is not honored. And because I had considered listing Choir as an elective I could potentially teach on the schedule interest form the previous semester, I decided to go with it. [NOTE: This school year taught me quite a lot about the importance of setting boundaries, but that's a story for a different day.]
As I've mentioned, I was in a choir once but that had been high school. We were award-winning because our director, Nathaniel Roper, is incredible. So I had an excellent model, but I wasn't otherwise qualified. I sent out the bat signal to all the former choir kids that I could think of asking for their insight on what they enjoyed, found helpful, found frustrating, etc. about their own choir experiences. I ordered the equivalent of "Choir Directing for Dummies" off of Amazon. And just 6 days later the school year began.
Choir was scheduled to take place during the day's only "skinny" period. Our schedule had 4 classes that were each roughly 70 minutes long and one "skinny" that was 45 minutes long: 2nd period. Well, that wasn't ideal as we'd have to get set up, warmed up, and rehearse all within that short amount of time. Additionally, the 2nd period started at 8:20 in the morning. Not ideal for the pipes.
So the first day arrives, it's time for 2nd period, and I'm waiting to see which kids had supposedly expressed interest to admin about having a choir. I'm a little stressed because I'm not sure how to arrange my classroom to accommodate English classes, Theatre classes, and a Choir class. The keyboard they found for me has a mysterious sticky glob on the top, ants are crawling in and out of the crevices, and the speakers crackle every time you touch it. But it'll be fine, right? The 1 minute warning bell rings during transition and nobody has arrived. That's okay, they may not have noticed their schedule had changed. After all, the class wasn't added until the week before school started. The tardy bell rings. Still nobody has arrived. I wait for 5 minutes. I wait for 5 more. I draft an email:
Morning! I hope all things are going well with it being day one and all. This period is my Choir class and there are no kids. And now that I'm looking at the roster online, I see that it's empty.
The response? "Yeah since it was added so late, you'll have to get kids to join. They'll need to submit a schedule change request with their counselor."
Wait, nobody told me that I would have to go around canvasing for kids. The way it was pitched to me on the phone - 7 days prior - was that there was a high amount of interest from the kids coming out of our feeder schools' programs. This was not at all what I had expected.
But if you know me, you know that I do love to make a fun little poster. So I hopped onto Canva, made the first of many interest generating posters, and sent them to print. I pinned a copy to literally every bulletin board I could find, stuffed multiple copies in each teacher's mailbox, and sent in a blurb for the morning announcements.
The first week goes by and I still had 0 students. A few had filled out the interest form and I sent their names to the counselors, but nobody had been added to my roster.
Another week goes by with nothing.
A few more students had filled out the form, but nobody was being added to the roster. I was frustrated, but I was also happy to have an extra planning period if you know what I mean. You can never have too many planning periods.
FINALLY, on a dreary September morning, my first student was added. She was a transfer who had moved from out west. We were both excited; she was happy to have something continuous from home and I was excited to have a student with some experience being in a choir. But for the next two and a half weeks, it was just the two of us. She helped me staple more posters.
But then, one more student was added. And then another. And then another. And by the end of the week there were 8 students on my roster. The students were from all grade levels, but most were Juniors and none, save for my one transfer, had ever been in a choir before. And given that we'd had a rather unconventional start to the year, they were clearly feeling nervous and awkward.
We got started with some community building activities. Something I've found to be true in all the different contexts that I've taught in is that community and ensemble building at the front end is key to longterm success. So we started small. We started casual. We made a shared class playlist of music we liked and made posters for our own personal music festivals. I was able to get a sense of prior musical knowledge and skill levels through karaoke parties; I put YouTube on the overhead projector and let kids sing what they wanted. We made it clear at the beginning that this would be an inclusive and accepting space. Performance can be a very vulnerable thing, so we were going to approach everything with empathy. And we were going to need a LOT of empathy given that I still wasn't entirely sure how to teach Choir. The school's Student Government Association organized a club-sponsored car parade for homecoming, so we decorated my car as promo for the newest performance group.
Did I mention I love to make a cute little poster?
Once it felt like we were on solid ground, we started focusing on content at the end of September and beginning of October. We started with going over how to read sheet music: staff lines, different note types, scales, and other basic terms. Then we started looking at rhythm patterns and would clap together to work on recreating what a combination of notes represented. And I must say that they caught on quickly. Several of the kids had taken an intro level class to piano, band, or guitar before so we weren't working from absolute 0. We did vocal warm ups daily.
We were ready to start singing; I had 6 altos and 2 sopranos. Talk about balanced. The first song we learned was a self-made arrangement of "What Was I Made For?" by Billie Eilish from the masterpiece that is The Barbie Movie. Well they were a little confused as to why the altos only sang "oo's" for the verse and how a lot of the notes were not the melody line they were already familiar with. We struggled to put the sections together; sopranos were solid on their own; altos were solid on their own; together it was a hot mess. But we stumbled through.
We worked on a few more songs, gained a tenor and another soprano, and were invited to sing at the school's first pep rally. They were nervous and we had a lot to learn about volume and sound equipment set up, but look how fun it was! The kids planned the choreography and everything.
In December we had our first full length concert! We wanted to keep it relatively simple by having a short set and a smaller, invite-only audience. We managed to get 5 full ensemble songs on their feet and had 3 small group performances. This was a great learning experience for everyone.
When we returned from Winter Break, the number of kids enrolled in the class increased and continued to increase throughout the rest of the semester. By the end of the year we had a choir of 17 students. Not bad for a new program.
The spring semester brought new challenges with large chunks of classes being taken for the sake of state testing. I had to learn how to balance reviewing old material with learning the next piece as well as how to get newly enrolled students caught up without sacrificing too much of our already limited rehearsal time.
This was an incredible group of kids. They put together 5 more songs and each of the seniors had a solo for our spring concert.
While this was not an opportunity I had expected or ever planned to have, teaching Choir was one of the most joyful parts of the school year. I am proud beyond measure of these students and how they were so brave to spearhead a brand new program. It is because of their creativity and hard work that this was a success.
I've included the full spring concert below so you can see how much progress they made. Scroll back up and watch the first video at the pep rally - the difference will blow you away.
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