My Many Hats: Juggling the Diverse Demands of a Music Teacher

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Relief teaching: juggling expectations and uncertainty

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Amazon Restaurants Food delivery from local restaurants. The fact that students, teachers and school administrators might not regard their substitute staff as full professionals who are expected to deliver the same calibre of educational instruction as permanent teachers is a concerning one, and certainly a theme that is echoed in much of the albeit scant research in the area.

There are relief teachers out there who are relief teachers by choice and those are the teachers that really need to be nurtured as well Brandis says that many relief teachers face the difficult position of not knowing where exactly they fit in the educational system. In an ideal world, a relief teacher might opt to limit him or herself to a select few schools, but in reality, many must spread themselves around to maximise their opportunities for paid work.

There is no doubt that relief teaching comes with its own set of in-classroom challenges.

Delivering a lesson to an often unknown group of students, on a topic that might offer little in the way of familiarity, is just one potentially unnerving aspect of a job that demands multiple hats be donned throughout the school day. Without the luxury of forward planning, Lunay says relief staff must rely solely on their own teaching strategies and hope that they are provided with a detailed list of instructions in order to competently run a class. Brandis says this often results in a stilted delivery of lessons as ill-equipped and ill-informed relief teachers try to maintain classroom control.

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Coming armed with a solid bank of resources and basic lesson plans that can be easily applied to a range of classroom situations is a must, as is immediately taking charge of the learning happening under your care, he adds. Just as tenured teachers are required to be competent, skilled and qualified to teach in accordance with the national curriculum, so too must relief teachers. Yet despite having to meet the same PD requirements to maintain their accreditation, relief teachers are often left to their own devices to source and fund their learning opportunities.

Lunay agrees that a lack of access to relevant and ongoing PD underscores much of the professional isolation felt by relief teachers. Both say it is in the best interests of schools to ensure that their relief teaching staff are kept up-to-date with relevant and ongoing PD. While truly changing any sort of cultural attitude on a grand scale takes time, there are a number of simple and cost-effective strategies that schools can look at implementing to better support and include relief staff immediately.

Subscribe to SBO today! News feed Current Issue. In , the NCTAF National Commission on Teaching and America's Future reported that the nation's widely publicized and often-lamented teacher shortages are, in fact, symptoms resulting from a teacher retention crisis in the United States. Beginning teachers had an attrition rate of over 46 percent for their first five years.

And American schools lose about the same number of teachers as they hire each year. Music educators can be particularly vulnerable to burnout because of the many different "hats" we must wear in a given day.

These proverbial hats can tax the energy of even the most enthusiastic teachers. It isn't because we are teaching too much, of course, but because there are just too many things to do.

The solution is to find ways to reduce the outside factors, allowing us teachers to simply teach music. Technology can be a critical aid, as music office software applications can relieve pressure with quick and efficient administrative applications. In his book My Many Hats: Juggling the diverse demands of a music teacher published by Heritage Music Press, , Richard Weymuth summarizes the many roles of a music educator:. Music Admin Applications There are two different types of music office applications: The advantage of desktop software is all that data can be stored on your computer without accessing the Internet.

Some products can be networked for school district use so that data can be shared, such as libraries and inventories.

Juggling the Many Hats of a Music Educator - SBO

However, with these products, you must back up your data on a regular basis fortunately, good backup applications are abundantly available in today's market at a minimal cost. Web-based applications do not require any software installation or technical support, since the programs are run and upgraded from a server. In the past 10 years, there has been a major shift from "hard disk" software, which runs on your computer, to "online" software, which runs on a server and is accessed on the Web.

For music teachers with large performing groups and multiple productions, this can allow students and parents to access important information, such as schedules and calendars, from home. They now have a tenth program, Small Schools Music Library, designed for managing band, choral, and orchestra programs.

It tracks performances, creates program notes, catalogues composers and keeps track of equipment and music loans.

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