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10 Things I Love About Middle School Choir Part 3: Middle School Kids Are Inconsistent

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Part 3: Middle School Kids Are Inconsistent


As choral directors, we are trained to approach rehearsal as a linear process. We introduce the music, the singers learn their notes and rhythms and text, we work on it together, diagnosing problems and introducing interpretative ideas along the way, we polish the pieces and then we perform them for an audience. And then after the concert we start the process over again from the beginning (okay so linear and/or cyclical). 

But implied in this approach is the notion that each rehearsal builds on what transpired in the last rehearsal. Information is retained, skills are developed, ideas are remembered and transferred, and the overall cumulative effect builds towards a performance which is then the culmination of everything that took place throughout the process. 

Now we all know it doesn't really work that smoothly at any level, high school, college, church choirs, etc. for any of a vast array of possible reasons. However, middle school singers are special. They take inconsistency and turn it into a way of life. 

I'm not sure that I ever saw the same choir twice. Every single time my kids walked into rehearsal I didn't really know what I was going to get. I think an important key to success with this age group is to expect this complete lack of consistency and then be flexible in your expectations and response to whatever they are giving you that day. Managing your expectations helps prevent frustration and disappointment, and flexibility allows you to still have productive rehearsals even when conditions aren't ideal. 

Most of the reasons for the inconsistency are developmental. Hormones and rapid biological change make it difficult to focus on anything, brain development affects emotional regulation and processing and makes retention difficult. Vocally, ranges and agility are changing daily, especially but not exclusively with male voices: the net effect may be trending in a more developed direction, but it is by no means linear. Ranges will grow and shrink, the passaggio is a moving target, and a middle school singer who could produce a particular note with a particular tone on Monday will not necessarily be able to do so on Friday.  I tell my young male singers all the time that their voice change does not just move inexorably in one direction (down), but that it is going to be all over the place. It will move down, then back up, and won't settle into a fairly set range for many years. And of course that doesn't even take into account the changes in agility, tone color, and size of the voice that will take place with each singer from month to month, week to week, and day to day. All of this is going to have a tremendous impact on the way our choirs sound. [not a vocal pedagogy expert or adolescent changing voice researcher, just sharing what I have seen out in the field during my career]

Emotional issues and events, especially when added to all of the developmental changes going on, also are going to affect retention of information with your middle school singers. I still will get mad at my middle school singers for not doing a thing that I have specifically told them not to do in previous rehearsals even though I should know better by now ("Sopranos STOP sliding in that measure!"). Maybe they just forgot. Maybe they are physically unable to do the thing I want them to do at this present time. Or maybe the bad habit is already ingrained and I just have to accept it. But it happens, and it happens a lot. You learn to ride with the peaks and valleys of your middle school ensemble. Sometimes they are just having an off day for some reason as bizarre as the barometric pressure dropped that day (that's totally a thing by the way) and you just have to accept you're not going to have the most productive rehearsal.

Sometimes a piece just is not working that day and you need to cut your losses and move on. Sometimes you'll pull out a piece that sounded incredible two days ago and today it sounds like garbage and you need to take a deep breath and trust that it's just a fluke. And if you want to be a happy middle school choir director, you 100% need to make your peace with the following fact: your singers will almost certainly not sound the best they ever have on their rep during their concert. It is a wonderful and serendipitous event when your middle school choir peaks at just the right time and the concert is the best that piece ever sounded, but it's rare. Rehearsal one or two weeks ago was probably that peak. It's the nature of the beast and it's totally okay. 

I discussed in the previous paragraph about how changing your mindset and expecting the inconsistency (riding the wave) is extremely important because it allows you to manage expectations and avoid constant frustration when it feels like your singers are moving backwards. What else can be valuable in navigating the glorious inconsistency of your middle school choirs? 

*A willingness to change or even abandon your plan. I am a natural-born improviser who shot from the hip early in my career and said things like "lesson plans are those things you only do in ed school." For years I would just walk into my choir room, see what the kids were giving me that day and then go to work. It was a very reactive as opposed to proactive style of teaching. I have since learned that teaching in that fashion has its limits and that there is value in preparation and score study, but those years of teaching reactively have given me the ability to roll with the punches. Have a plan, but understand that it may not work and you need to adapt on the fly based on the needs of your singers that day. This skill takes time and experience to learn, but at least be aware of the need to learn it. 

*As you plan and try to be more proactive, you will learn the more common issues that your middle schoolers (or middle schoolers in general) will have. When you prepare to introduce a piece, you can draw on your experiences of introducing past pieces and pay extra attention to those spots you  know they're going to have trouble retaining. You can put structures in place to help them navigate their voice change: for example, you have a piece that is really great and developmentally sound but there's that one section that you know will take your singers weeks to get? Maybe you start with that section and introduce it very incrementally in warm-ups and/or on solfege. If that one passage is just oging to be far too difficult for them to ever retain, maybe you adapt it and change it to make it easier without tossing out the whole piece. I have done that many times. The more experience you get with your kids, the more you will see where potential pitfalls in your rep (or the pitfalls of teaching on a day where they're whole school routine has been disrupted) are going to be. You may still need to adapt on the fly, but you can also put proactive measures in place to meet their inconsistency with predictability. 

*Expanding on that, your singers are going to be inconsistent but you shouldn't be. Your singers are going to be experiencing so much instability in their lives (especially if they are high needs and/or have experienced a lot of trauma), so you can help them greatly by making your choir room as predictable of an environment as possible. A predictable routine and consistent responses from you (I'm not great at this one, sometimes my emotions vary wildly from day to day...we're all on our own journeys!) will help your singers view your choir room as a safe place. Not only is this just a great thing for singers and for your choir culture in general, but it also helps mitigate some of the wild fluctuations from your middle school singers (especially on the emotional side of things). If they associate your room with safety and relative calmness, they may be less likely to become emotionally dysregulated during rehearsal. 

*Finally, building off of that last point, reinforce, reinforce, reinforce. They aren't going to remember all of your expectations, they're not going to remember when the concert is or how you want them to act during the concert, you have to tell them. Over and over again. You drill those expectations into them, you remind them constantly, and you hold them accountable until it finally sinks in.  It's the same thing with musical concepts: your warm-ups are your time to build and reinforce technique. Those vocal things that your students are having trouble with? Hit them every day in warm-ups, work on them even when they are struggling to implement the concept based on whatever is going on in their voice that day. Teach them to navigate those challenges by always working technique even when it's clearly an off day. You may have to change your expectations for that day's outcome, but you can and should still reinforce the concepts so that there is a greater chance they will remember the next time. 

The vocal, mental, and emotional inconsistency of middle school singers is one of the greatest challenges to having a successful middle school choir, but it's also a blessing. The absence of a linear path keeps you engaged in the process, and it forces you to adapt and respond quickly to challenges and changes. This ability has served me well especially in situations like being a guest clinician or an honor choir conductor, where you walk in and you don't know the kids at all and you have maybe one day or less to make something happen musically. You have to take whatever they are giving you, immediately diagnose and then come up with a plan for how to proceed based on where they are at, how they sound, and how they are acting/feeling that day. It's not an easy task, but my years in middle school have forced me to be incredibly light on my feet. For whatever reason all that flexibility never quite made the transfer over into my personal life, but I digress. 

Expect and embrace their inconsistency. Rather than let it frustrate you, let it motivate you to find new and better ways to rehearse and prepare your choirs. 




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