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Clark started an online fundraiser to pay for bikes. He raised more than $10,000, and neighbors donated dozens of bikes and helmets for the rides.

She couldn’t be sure whether her kids were uninterested or whether they lacked the necessary pens, paper and crayons at home.

He decided he would take his students on socially distanced bike rides across the city. “It was a leap of faith. I got extremely nervous. I was trying to find a way to connect with kids,” Clark said.

her young students are musical detectives, in search of learning. She teaches most grade levels and the school chorus.

t he’s found other ways to keep his students engaged and cycling the city. He invited students to a weekly entrepreneurship class for which they rode their bikes uptown from Dunbar to the gym where Clark works, Sweat DC. The students met with the owner of the gym and the owners of a nearby bar, Hook Hall, and the bagel shop Call Your Mother Deli to learn what it takes to run a business.

She wanted them to create their own composition, their own snowy-day song.

When Clark wanted to teach them about resilience, he took them through the hilly streets of Georgetown.

In lessons for older students, some days there were makeshift drums involved or recorders that students had taken home.

she was able to use the treehouse as a key part of her lessons.

She lugged a bookshelf, desk and heater into the 5-by-7-foot space, and ran an Ethernet cable from the house so she’d have Internet.

before climbing into what passes for her classroom in 2020: her daughters’ decade-old treehouse.

So as one class studied architecture this fall, Daney, 54, encouraged them to walk in their neighborhood to take photos of houses of different styles: ranch, colonial, Victorian.

nd he stuck with his usual method of helping students learn about the design process, asking them to prepare a meal. They started with ideas and research, made a plan, carried it out and evaluated it. The result: soups and pastas and pastries.

Kids need connection, he said. “I think they’re starving for conversation,” including with adults.

In fifth grade, students are expected to learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide with whole numbers, decimals and fractions. Through a computer application the students have, they can program the robot to move a certain distance, stop, maybe even turn.

With learning all-virtual, he packs a big Ziploc bag — for each student, each quarter — with things like fishing line, foam board, pipecleaners, magnets, Popsicle sticks and rubber bands. Whatever they will need for their projects.

And a lot of the math is a little sneaky. They think they are trying to get the robot to move, when they are actually measuring the angles to get it to move.”  

Others complete their math problems directly on the computer, which can lead to some troubles as they try to show their work.

When Kristin Gavaza interviewed for the music teacher position at Dorothy I. Height Elementary in the summer, she told the principal she had some ideas for how to create a festive concert while students were scattered and learning from home.

Research  Teaching students to research is a common standard across all grade levels, elementary, middle school, high school, and beyond. Diigo excels as a research tool: Students can save relevant websites to lists in their Diigo student accounts. Each saved bookmark captures the URL and a screenshot, and can be searched later. Students can highlight important information right on the website, using Diigo. Later, when students return to the website, they find the reason they saved the bookmark in the first place. Students can use virtual sticky notes to summarize the important points of information from the website. This activity will mimic the time-tested procedure of using note cards to summarize and organize research projects. Students working on similar topics can create and join groups in order to collaborate. Later, when students need to document their sources, Diigo can be used to recall website URLs for citing sources.

It is hoped that the themes that emerge by setting twentieth and twenty-first century professional composers' accounts of certain compositional experiences or phases of their creative processes against one another will provide a philosophical framework for teaching composition.

Furthermore, the knowledge of how professional composers compose offers the potential of finding the missing link in music education; that is, the writing of music by students within the school curriculum

Such involvement may deepen their understanding of musical relationships and how one articulates feelings through sounds beyond rudimentary improvisational and creative activities currently available

raw philosophical implications for music composition in schools from recognized composers' voices about their individual composing realities

It is hoped that the direct access to these composers' thoughts about the subjective experience of composing Western art music in the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century may also promote the image of a fragmented culture whose ghettoization in music education is a serious impediment to the development of a comprehensive aesthetic education.

n other words, there is a striking unanimity among composers that the role of the unconscious is vital in order to start and/or to complete a work to their own satisfaction.

I need . . . to become involved, to come into a state where I do something without knowing why I do i

This is a complex problem and difficult to explain: all that one can say is that the unconscious plays an incalculable rol

Nonetheless, these self-observations about the complementary roles of the unconscious and conscious aspects of musical creativity do not cover the wide range of claims in psychological research on creativity

I strongly believe that, if we cannot explain this process, then we must acknowledge it as a mystery.25 Mysteries are not solved by encouraging us not to declare them to be mysteries

When Ligeti was commissioned to write a companion piece for Brahms' Horn Trio, he declared, "When the sound of an instrument or a group of instruments or the human voice finds an echo in me, in the musical idea within me, then I can sit down and compose. [O]therwise I canno

Extra-musical images may also provide the composer with ideas and material and contribute to musical creativity.

ome composers need to have something for it to react against.38 Xenakis, however, asserted that "all truly creative people escape this foolish side of work, the exaltation of sentiments. They are to be discarded like the fat surrounding meat before it is cooked."

as, as these examples show, dreams can also solve certain problems of the creative process.

In other words, to compose does not mean to merely carry out an initial idea. The composer reserves the right to change his or her mind after the conception of an idea.

n sum, self-imposed restrictions or "boundary conditions"55 seem to provide composers with a kind of pretext to choose from an otherwise chaotic multitude of compositional possibilities that, however, gradually disappears and gets absorbed into the process of composition which is characterized by the composers' aesthetic perceptions and choices.

Therefore, it is not surprising that influences from the musical world in which the composer lives play an important role in the creative process

Thereby the past is seen as being comprised by a static system of rules and techniques that needs to be innovated and emancipated during the composers' search for their own musical identity.

I strongly suggest that we play down basics like who influenced whom, and instead study the way the influence is transformed; in other words: how the artist made it his own.

Nothing I found was based on the "masterpiece," on the closed cycle, on passive contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure.61

Furthermore, for some composers the musical influence can emerge from the development of computer technology.

If a general educational approach is to emerge from the alloy of composers' experiences of their music creativity, it rests on the realization that the creative process involves a diversity of idiosyncratic conscious and unconscious traits.

After all, the creative process is an elusive cultural activity with no recipes for making it happen.

n this light, the common thread of composers' idiosyncratic concerns and practices that captures the overall aura of their music creativity pertains to (a) the intangibility of the unconscious throughout the compositional process,68 (b) the development of musical individuality,69 and (c) the desire to transgress existing rules and codes, due to their personal and social conflict between tradition and innovation.70

In turn, by making student composers in different classroom settings grasp the essence of influential professional composers' creative concerns, even if they do not intend to become professional composers, we can help them immerse in learning experiences that respect the mysteries of their intuitions, liberate their own practices of critical thinking in music, and dare to create innovative music that expresses against-the-prevailing-grain musical beliefs and ideas.

Therefore, it is critical that the music teacher be seen as the facilitator of students' compositional processes helping students explore and continuously discover their own creative personalities and, thus, empowering their personal involvement with music. Any creative work needs individual attention and encouragement for each vision and personal experience are different.

After all, the quality of mystery is a common theme in nearly every composer's accoun

Failing this, musical creativity remains a predictable academic exercise

Music teachers need to possess the generosity to refuse to deny student composers the freedom to reflect their own insights back to them and, in turn, influence the teachers' musical reality

Indeed, it is important that music teachers try to establish students gradually as original, independent personalities who try to internalize sounds and, thus, unite themselves with their environment in a continuous creative process.

Music teachers, therefore, wishing student composers to express and exercise all their ideas, should grant them ample time to work on their compositions,

n sum, music knowledge or techniques and the activation of the student composers' desire for discovery and innovation should evolve together through balanced stimulation.

While music creativity has been a component of music education research for decades, some of the themes arising from professional composers' experiences of their creativity, such as the significance of the unconscious, the apprehension towards discovering ones' own musical language, or the personal and social tension between tradition and innovation, among others, have not been adequately recognized in the literature of music education

By doing this, I strongly believe that musical creativity in general and composing in particular run the risk of becoming a predictable academic exercise

which merely demands problem-solving skills on the part of the student composers (or alleged "critical thinkers").

. On the other hand, only few music educators appear to draw their composer students' attention to the importance of the personal and social conflict between staying within a tradition or code, even if it is the Western popular music tradition, and breaking new ground at each step in the creative process and, possibly, shaping new traditions or codes.

Culture is a precious human undertaking, and the host of musics, arts, languages, religions, myths, and rituals that comprise it need to be carefully transmitted to the young and transformed in the process."85

Nevertheless, further research is needed in which women's voices can be heard that may offer an emancipatory perspective for the instruction of composition in education which will "challenge the political domination of men."

Ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl explains that "societies differ, however, in their attitude toward musical stability; to some it is important that a song remain stable and unchanged, while in others individual singers are encouraged to have their personal versions."

but he believes educators must determine at what point that musical experience is no longer acceptable as representative of that culture.

Having clear visions of educational goals and the broad curriculum is vital to making these determinations.

Bennett Reimer states, "Those inner workings are themselves the project of cultural systems, so they must be revealed in their contexts, historical, cultural, and political, in order to be grasped appropriately; that is, 'knowing about' becomes an essential ingredient of artistry and of listening."[ 15] For example, children might not fully understand the meaning of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" unless they understand what baseball is or realize that the song is traditionally sung at baseball games.

text in an unfamiliar language should include a translation so students understand the meaning of the words.

However, a culturally valid work is not necessarily bias free; and conversely, bias-free music is not necessarily culturally valid.

Selecting the best music to represent a culture in an unbiased manner is a process of discovery. You will first need to educate yourself before you can educate others.