Give Student Leaders a Voice

A positive culture is crucial to the success of your music program. It directly impacts students’ feelings of belonging as well as their participation and engagement. The culture of your program is influenced by your approach to teaching and rehearsing, but students are essential to promoting the positive culture you want to build.

Student leaders have firsthand knowledge about the temperature of your ensemble and how they feel about the environment in which they are working and learning. Collaborating with your student leaders will give you valuable information and help create a positive, open culture with your ensemble. If you are looking for ideas on where to start, check out this article on choosing student leaders.

Have regular meetings

A few years ago, I felt that our culture and community were not as strong as they had been previously. Afraid of what that meant for the health of my program, I met with student leaders — the four elected positions of president, vice president, publicity manager and social chair — to discuss their thoughts and feelings on the current climate in our rehearsals (as someone who constantly worries about what people think of him, I felt proud to have had the courage to ask this question!). As I should have expected, they provided a lot of really good, constructive feedback.

This started a tradition of regular meetings with student leaders to constantly evaluate the band’s culture and come up with ideas on how to improve it. There’s always room for improvement, and these frequent meetings have been a great way for me to meet with my student leaders, give them directives, and for them to bring their own ideas to the table. Each leader serves a unique and important role in improving culture, which they were elected to do. As the year gets busier, we might go longer between meetings, but that hiatus is often met with an inquisitive “when are we meeting next?” by one of the officers.

Give them autonomy

It’s important to give your student leaders autonomy in their ideas to engage students more. It is extremely rare for me to veto an idea from the leadership team. I’m willing to try something at least once. During our regular meetings mentioned above, the leaders wanted more section-building activities that may or may not be musical in nature. We decided that the last rehearsal before a break, we would run through our rep, then play Jeopardy! or Kahoot! The leadership team wanted a full block to play their game, but they knew I would never agree to something like that, so we agreed to the compromise of rep first, then the game.

The student leaders come up with great ideas that I am willing to listen to and try. Some of the ideas might be half-baked, but I just direct the team to figure out how they actually see it working, and once they can articulate that — sure, let’s give it a shot! You can trust that they have the ensemble’s best interest in mind because they were selected to be leaders (by their peers or by you) and they take that responsibility seriously.

Give them directives

Your student leaders want to help make your ensemble a fun and engaging place for everyone. It’s part of the reason why they chose to take on a leadership position. I admit that I’m often of the mindset of “if you want it done right, do it yourself.” But take my advice: Let the students take on some of the responsibility. Give your leadership team directives on what you would like to see and let them problem-solve on how to achieve that.

As mentioned earlier, student leaders have great ideas. If they have direction, they can solve all of life’s problems — OK, maybe not, but they will have ideas on how to achieve goals for your program. This is another reason why frequent meetings are important. Being able to discuss goals and ideas with the students is incredibly valuable for everyone.

Give them face time during rehearsal

Your students see and hear you repeatedly giving them announcements during rehearsals, and you know they aren’t actually listening by how surprised they are when a concert is coming up. Giving students face time during rehearsals can be beneficial to engagement for upcoming events, initiatives, fundraisers, and the list goes on.

The band president speaks frequently to the students at the beginning of rehearsal. As leadership changes, so do their agendas. You will find that different leaders take different initiatives.

For example, a band president from a few years ago asked for bulletin board space. Of course, I was willing to give it a chance. He put up a piece of the week, student of the week, motivational quotes and pictures. He had time at the beginning of class each week to share these with everyone — most band members thought it was a positive addition to our beginning-of-the-week rehearsal.

The initiative he took led to student leaders after him asking for time to engage with their peers on a variety of things, from socials to fundraisers and beyond. I’m happy to give up that time to further engage the students and help my leaders grow and feel that they are making a difference because they are.

Everyone is a leader

Every member of your ensemble can be — and should be — a leader in their own way. There are many ways students can be leaders, and I’m sure you could identify leadership qualities in every single one of your musicians. I am open to input from all my students, regardless of whether they have an official leadership role or not. Sometimes, I get ideas from students just from casual conversations in the hallway before or after rehearsal. Sometimes, students approach me with ideas. They all have skin in the game, so why not give them a chance to be a leader by bringing ideas to you?

Being open and receptive to all students’ ideas has created a positive culture in my program where students feel welcome and heard. This openness is a quality of being a leader yourself.

Regardless of whether you have a leadership structure in place, everything above can still apply with some modification. You could have meetings with students who asked to plan a social or outreach event. You can share your vision for your program with your students and give them autonomy over their ideas to help you achieve that vision. You can allow students to share important events or ideas during rehearsal.

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You need students to create a positive culture. Students want to be part of something great; something bigger than themselves. It’s important to utilize student input from your leaders in order to create a culture that they find worth being a part of. By giving students a voice, autonomy, and direction, you are demonstrating to them how to be great leaders.