The Choir Director Corner Podcast Matt Walker

Maybe you got your class registrations for next year and thought, "Maybe I should do some recruiting!" But all of your time and energy didn't produce the results you wanted, resulting only in stress and frustration.In Episode 101 of the podcast, I'm sharing the audio from my recent video over on YouTube (Yes, I have a YouTube channel!) where I discuss five of the common reasons why your recruiting efforts aren't working as well as you'd like. At the end of the video, I also share ...

It seems like just yesterday, I uploaded the first episode of the Choir Director Corner Podcast, not knowing where the road might take me. And here we are, at 100 episodes!In Episode 100, I'm going back into the podcast archives and sharing with you ten of top 10 episodes of the podcast. Not only are these some of the most downloaded episodes, but they are also episodes that cover topics that are often discussed inside of our CDC Community. If you are new to the podcast, th...

The question came from one of the members of our CDC Community Membership: "How, or where, do I start in teaching music literacy to my choir, when almost all of my singers are beginners when it comes to sightreading?" Our elementary general music colleagues know--it's all about starting with "sound before sight"! We need to give our singers an aural vocabulary to work from before we give them tools and strategies to start tackling music notation.In my teaching I've developed a 5-s...

As choir directors, we often find our teaching centered in the "Performing" set of the National Music Standards--it can be difficult to find ways to incorporate the "Responding" and "Connecting" sections of the standards. In Episode 98 of the podcast, I share with you how I use my Choir March Madness Listening Project to cover some of these "harder to reach" standards--it's a project you can use in a variety of ways to get your singers analyzing and discussing choral music!And even bett...

After several days off due to snow and dangerous wind chills, I knew it was going to be a challenge to get my singers back into our routine. As they started coming into the room, I thought to myself:"I'm going to have to go all Ted Lasso on these guys today!"And it got me thinking--there are lots of lessons that we as choir directors can learn from Ted Lasso. In Episode 97 of the podcast, I discuss seven of the lessons that we can take from Ted to build community and move our choi...

The social post said, in so many words--"My Choir is SO Unmotivated!" And this is obviously a widespread problem, because the responses were flying fast and furious, all from choir directors with the same problem! But most of the responses never dealt with the real question, which is WHY our singers are so unmotivated. Pinpointing the root cause is the first step to coming up with potential solutions to combat the issue.This is an issue that I have dealt with myself as well, and i...