Music Teacher Ben Byrom uses creativity to transform his classroom into a space of living music. He arrived at Raleigh Oak Charter School in North Carolina shortly after the height of the pandemic and found a community where music mattered deeply and was woven into daily classroom life. “My role became one of expanding and deepening what was already there,” he explains. “I worked to align my teaching with what students were experiencing in their classrooms while bringing consistency, experience and continuity across grades.”

Waldorf education, and its emphasis on teachers bringing their authentic selves into the classroom, plays a significant role in how he approaches teaching. “I teach music effectively because I genuinely love it,” Byrom says. “I share that enthusiasm openly — for sound, theory, history, instruments, repair, acoustics and musical culture.”

He has the support of a school community that trusts his unique and sometimes unorthodox ideas. For example, instead of standard ukuleles, Byrom restrung them as “mandoleles” using nylon mandolin strings. His goal was to build transferable muscle memory for orchestra-bound students because mandolins and violins share tuning.

In Byrom’s classroom, music is experienced through thinking, feeling and doing. “Students move, clap, speak, listen, imagine and reflect,” he explains. “Understanding develops in the body and emotions before it’s named intellectually.”

His classroom is a place where care and accountability coexist. “Students know that I’m glad to share my passion, but they also understand that they must do the work of learning themselves — I can’t unzip their brains and pour knowledge in,” Byrom says. “That balance has allowed students to take real ownership, including a middle school performance group that formed independently, organized rehearsals, navigated auditions and leadership changes and continues to perform at school events. Not to mention, rocking out at the school dance in front of all their friends and classmates is quite possibly the coolest feeling ever at that age!”

Across grades, students investigate sound science and acoustics through hands-on exploration of vibration and tone. Middle schoolers have participated in music history electives as schedules allow. These have included studies of early music-making civilizations across the globe (protomusicians), semi-traditional European music history and 8th-grade explorations of American music from the 1800s to the present in alignment with their social studies curriculum.

Composer studies range from Bach and Shostakovich to B.B. King, Yoko Kanno and emerging digital forms like Vocaloid, which have led to discussions about hologram concerts and what it means to perform music without a physical performer (this was before AI music exploded). “We also make connections between classic ideas like antiphonal singing and modern recording concepts like panning, which helps students see music technology not as static history but as a living, evolving language,” Byrom says.

As the school and music program have grown and evolved, so has Byrom’s teaching. “We’ve changed buildings, schedules and resources,” he explains. “Sometimes I’ve had a dedicated room, sometimes I’ve taught off a cart. Rather than limiting instruction, this flexibility has allowed me to shape content responsively.”

This includes observing how modern students already interact with technology and successfully introducing emoji-based lyric systems for kindergartners as an immediate, developmentally appropriate bridge for students learning sight words.

At the heart of his work is a commitment to sustaining wonder. “A lot of ideas come from how busy my brain is,” Byrom jokes. “I have entire worlds, at least a couple jukeboxes, an abandoned movie theater and a radio DJ in there. Sometimes my body is on autopilot while my mind is off daydreaming in sound and color until pieces click together.”

Byrom continues, “I intentionally engage my head, hands and heart in my work, refusing to let teaching become stale or copy-paste year after year. I choose to continue learning about new technologies, musical forms and cultural shifts, not to chase trends, but to remain genuinely curious — growing older and growing up aren’t the same thing at all.”