Best of 2020: Year in Review

The phrase "best of 2020" seems a bit ironic given how difficult the year has been, but I do still want to take a minute to look back on the past year here on the Organized Chaos blog! It's always so interesting for me to see which posts were most read, and look back on what we, as a profession, were thinking about most. January seems like so long...

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More Contemporary Instrumentalists of Color

One of the easiest ways to better reflect minoritized people in the music room is to include examples of people of color in our everyday lessons. About a year ago I shared some contemporary instrumentalists of color I like to feature in my lessons when I am introducing instruments of the orchestra, and today I'm sharing some more musicians on...

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Zoom for Music Teachers

Like many teachers around the world, I have been using Zoom to teach distant learners since the beginning of this school year. For most of the fall I taught distant learners on Zoom while teaching in-person learners in the classroom, but now our district is fully virtual and I am teaching everyone through Zoom every day! So today I'm sharing my top...

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An Inclusive Holiday Sing Along in Pandemic Times

I have been doing an all-school holiday sing-along the last day before December break for several years now, and when I started talking with my principal about schoolwide events we could do in full distance learning, I knew I wanted to do it this year despite the obvious challenges. We started the school year in a hybrid model, which meant no singing...

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November Highlights 2020

November was... quite eventful! When I first started writing these monthly recap posts I had a few intentions in mind: have a way to share some of my day-to-day, amplify content from other bloggers I was sharing on my Facebook page directly on this site, and highlight some of those little things I share on my Instagram account that aren't lengthy enough...

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