Instructor of Music, Director of Choral Activities, Black Hawk College | leitesi@bhc.edu

     In Fall of 2019, I started my first ‘real’ job in academia – serving as an Instructor of Music at Black Hawk College in Moline, Illinois. I was bushy-tailed and bright-eyed, ready to take on an established choral program and make it my own. My initial semester in this position was tough but rewarding. I felt like I was making connections with students and building a choral ‘family’ – a safe space where lasting friendships and musical collaborations can exist. In Spring of 2020, my enrollment nearly doubled what it was the previous semester. I saw so much potential and possibility.

     In the foreground, news of a looming global pandemic started to dampen my hope and enthusiasm. By March, all of my choirs had to cease rehearsing in person and move to rehearsing online. Directing choir using Zoom was not anything that I had ever thought of doing nor was prepared to do. After a few initial attempts at conducting and singing on camera, I realized that trying to teach musical shaping, articulation, phrasing, and dynamics was nearly impossible. More importantly, I saw that most of my students did not have adequate internet bandwidth, nor rehearsal space, to sing at home and thus were mostly disengaged. Within a week or so of trying to rehearse on Zoom, I pivoted my goals and focused on enriching my students’ understanding of historical and stylistic elements to our choral pieces. Even with this shift in focus, it wasn’t enough. As a collective, we wanted to sing together – that’s what we set out to do. As we realized that this would not be possible, we spent the last weeks of the semester processing our collective grief through listening and sharing music.

     Amidst the confusion, stress, and pressure of the situation, I began to wonder how other choral directors were holding up. I joined pedagogy groups on social media but seldom saw posts related specifically to choral teaching. Within online communities of choral professionals, I saw that most educators turned to creating virtual choirs as means of keeping their students engaged. Choral programs with large resources tended to produce more virtual choir recordings than others. Coming from a smaller program with a budget already accounted for, I could not afford to contract our professionals to assemble and sync individual videos into a virtual choir format. I tried to put together a virtual choir recording on my own. Many of my colleagues did as well. We all felt the pressure to figure out how to create a virtual choir, regardless of how difficult it was and how much time it took away from other important tasks, such as pivoting our other classes to an online format, supporting students, or attending to our own families and individual circumstances. Seeing that just about everyone I knew was teaching choir over Zoom and spending countless hours creating choir videos, I thought it would be interesting to conduct a study and capture this moment in history.

     I called my colleague Dr. Scott Rieker at Frostburg State University and asked if he would be interested in conducting a research study together. Scott and I graduated from University of Southern California, where we both studied Choral Music and Music Teaching and Learning. His expertise in quantitative analysis complemented my skills as a qualitative researcher. Together, we set out to conduct a study that captured a moment in time – a time when choral directors had to shift gears and take on a whole new skill set in order to do their job, all to survive in their positions and support their students. We wanted reading the published result to be a cathartic experience for choral educators, where they can see our data and say, “Yes, this resonates with me. I was in the exact same boat.”

     The goal of our study was to try to understand the impact of moving from in-person to online instruction in a choral setting, the teachers’ feelings of preparedness before the pandemic, the adaptations teachers made during the pandemic, and any shifts in perceptions and attitude regarding their experience. Since pivoting to online instruction (and doing it completely on their own) was such a crucial piece to capturing choral educators’ experience, we used the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPCK, later TPACK) framework for professional development as a theoretical lens and established our guiding research questions (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). From there, we put together an online survey. The first section of the survey explored choral educator perceptions of preparedness in thirty different technological areas. The second section of the survey contained twenty-seven questions gauging choral educators’ attitudes and perceptions on a variety of topics related to online education. The third section consisted of two open-ended questions, asking what skills/abilities/etc. they wished that they had gained for online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for whatever other information they thought we should know. Data derived from this section constituted the qualitative component of our mixed-methods study. The final section consisted of demographics. Once we finished collecting data, Scott took on analyzing the quantitative data, while I analyzed the qualitative responses. At times, I felt like taking on this project was more than I could handle. In the end, however, I do think that conducting this study helped validate my own feelings surrounding what was happening, ultimately enabling me to make meaning out of the situation that I was in.

     The trends that we observed in our findings were in line with our expectations. First, teachers were not prepared to teach choir online because they had marginal formal training to do so. Most study participants shared that they had to teach themselves by watching tutorials on Youtube, attending webinars or reading through online PowerPoint presentations. When asked what they thought were the biggest challenges with online instruction, teachers ranked lack of community, latency (the “lag” between when a person on one end creates a sound and the person on the other end hears and responds), and technological “haves” and “have nots” among students as the top three obstacles. We also found that the experience of teaching choir online shifted our study participants’ perceptions and attitudes toward using technology. Within our inquiry into perceptions, we considered two avenues: teachers’ perceptions of their students, and teachers’ perceptions of their own experience and abilities in an online environment. When it came to their students, teachers were disappointed and disheartened at how few students actually attended online Zoom rehearsals. Like their perceptions of their students, teachers did not feel that they themselves were effective in the online environment. They felt disconnected from their craft, their teaching, and their colleagues. After fully analyzing the data, we saw what was becoming a familiar picture – isolation, struggle for competency, feelings of frustration and loneliness, and a lack of clarity on how to move forward.

     When we published our study, several of my colleagues and former mentors reached out to say how glad they were that something like this came out. While some said that they were relieved to see that they weren’t the only ones who felt that they did not do a good job of pivoting to online instruction, others said that our article gave them something to bring to their administration and say, “Look! I’m not the only one who is struggling and needs professional development to be successful in this new online landscape.” To me, the most salient results of the study were not in the analysis of the findings but rather in the fact that we were able to take a snapshot of a moment in history within our profession, with all of the emotions that went into it. By giving study participants room to share their opinions in an open-ended section of the survey, I believe that our study normalized the emotional response to the pandemic – feelings of anger, despair, confusion, loneliness, and shame.

     As things continued to change and guidance about the COVID-19 pandemic was constantly changing, we wanted to publish our study during a time when the discussion on pivoting to online teaching was still relevant and students were not back in the classroom. We recruited survey participants via announcements in choral-, higher-ed-, and music-centric Facebook groups to which we belong, as well as announcements on our personal Facebook pages and personal emails, to create a hybrid convenience and snowball sample. What surprised us was the rather high 27% completion rate by participants. The final sample was primarily female (77%), white (82%), predominantly working in suburban settings (43%), and employed at only one job (74%) in the realm of K-12 education (71%). We had hoped to recruit a more diverse sample, but that did not work as planned. After we submitted our article for publication and heard that it was accepted, we waited for over five months to see it published. It seemed as though interest in the topic of the pandemic was waning. Perhaps with our study particularly, going back in time and dissecting what happened during one of the toughest moments choral educators have faced in their careers, wasn’t very appealing. We were approaching summer, after all, and many of us wanted to forget what just happened. In retrospect, I am glad that we worked on the article as efficiently and quickly as we did. Capturing a moment in time requires swift response, and although the sentiment was not one of hope and positivity, there was merit in that as well.

     Going through the process of working on this study refreshed my commitment in collaboration. Had I taken this idea and ran with it myself, I likely would have lost momentum and quit. Yet together with Scott, I was able to accomplish so much more. Not only was it motivating to work with a colleague (and thus combat my own feelings of loneliness and disconnect that I was experiencing at the time), but it enabled us to look at data from two different vantage points – quantitative and qualitative. In reflecting on our study findings, pivoting to teaching choir online resulted in many teachers gaining a new technological skill set.

     Just recently, while leading an in-person rehearsal, I had to tell my students that it may come to us needing to rehearse online again. They looked up at me in dismay, but I was able to reassure them – now that I have gone through it once, I’ve learned and can now do it better. Even within impossible circumstances, with latency issues and constant disengagement from students being the looming reality that may happen again, educators have gained a sense of resilience and grit. Now that most choral classrooms are back to teaching in person and using Zoom infrequently, it would be interesting to look at how the period of Zoom instruction has impacted the students and consider whether participation in virtual choir projects (that were so popular during the onset of the pandemic) has had a positive impact on students’ musical and emotional development. We captured how teachers felt about what happened; now, is there a way to find out the impact the switch to online instruction had on students? Undoubtedly, we will see some answers to these questions emerge in our classrooms soon.

Reference

Punya, M., & Koehler, M. (2006). Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record 108(6), 1017-1054.