I was first introduced to the works of John F. Feierabend from my cooperating teacher back when I was student teaching. I had owned many of his different books, such as The Book of Echo Songs, but never knew there was an entire curriculum! The Heart of America Orff Association in Kansas City has many wonderful music educators come and do trainings with local teachers and when I saw John Feierabend on the list, I knew I needed to go! The day with Dr. Feierabend was a one day run-through on the First Steps in Music curriculum, and let’s just say, I drank the Kool-Aid! I felt like the philosophies of Music Education Dr. Feierabend was speaking on were right in line with my views. I started teaching the whole First Steps curriculum the week after that day training, but I knew I needed more. Luckily, The University of Central Arkansas was offering a five-day First Steps in Music Certification course and I signed up immediately. Here is a link to all the current Feierabend courses and events, while the biggest chunk are finalized around February and March for summer certification courses!
So let’s say you’ve signed up for a course. What is it like? It’s honestly extremely fun and a great way to make friends with other music teachers! I stayed in a dorm room for the week (costing around $25 per night) and got to hang out with the other teachers in the evenings!
My teacher training was Chris Obida Powers, and she was a student of Dr. Feierabend at the Hartt School of Music. In both First Steps and Conversational Solfege trainings, Chris started every morning and afternoon with a Tuneful round, Beatful dance, and an Artful Move It activity. It was great to gather a huge arsenal of new rounds and dances to bring back to my students! During the sessions, Chris took teachers through every step of the curriculums in depth! She gave us many examples for each step and we participated in those warm-ups, songs, movement activities, and games. In addition, she gave us tips on how to best teach each step of the curriculums. For the First Steps training, Chris even spent a whole day with us on the First Steps for Infants and Toddlers curriculum, so that we could teach our littlest music makers to be Tuneful, Artful, and Beatful! In the Conversational Solfege Training, we learned the extensive histories of all the pedagogies that influenced Dr. Feierabend’s work, such as the teachings of Zoltan Kodaly and Edwin Gordon.
We had a few assignments for each training that were graded by Chris, but they were given to set up a solid foundation so that we could do these tasks on our own when we left training. For both trainings we created Unit Plans where we picked out appropriate songs for each step of the curriculum and which days in our plans we would teach each part of our unit. For Conversational Solfege, we also made an example of a lesson plan that included Tuneful, Beatful, and Artful activities and how we would start and end with some fun for each lesson.
We also had a test for both trainings, which basically insured that we understood the non-negotiables of each curriculum and how each Unit was set up. The tests were a bit intimidating, but not too scary (everyone passed)!
Our final project was to teach the class an activity to go along with the curriculum. For First Steps, I taught a small lesson on Arioso with puppets to the other teachers. For Conversational Solfege (CS), I created a dance to go with the round Ghost of John and taught this dance to the teachers. This dance goes along with Unit 7 of CS. Chris was amazingly encouraging during this process and treated everyone with respect. She truly wanted to help us hone our crafts and she was not intimidating in the least! Here is the video of The Ghost of John! You can see me in the middle as the conductor. I’m very proud of how this turned out, as it’s beautiful to listen to and watch!
I asked my friend, Eric Bottorff, that I met at the Conversational Solfege training “Why would you recommend teachers go to the First Steps and Conversational Solfege Trainings? What were you favorite things about the trainings?” Eric replied back:
I think a huge benefit to go to the trainings is that, if you truly follow along, it forces a mindset change. Since music teachers are very often so separate from other music teachers and can be seen as separate from the staff at our schools, it is easy to get in a flow and feel, “That is just the way I do things” without questioning WHY. The trainings are very social and while you do learn the specifics of the Kodaly and Feierabend methodologies, you share approaches and strategies from other classrooms that might work as modifications to the methodologies.
Eric Bottorff
Eric is completely right! We had a class Padlet where we shared some of our best teaching tips and tricks, along with our favorite resources. It was wonderful to learn from other music teachers and to share with others!
I would HIGHLY recommend every music teacher to look into both the First Steps and Conversational Solfege certification courses. They have both helped me become a much better teacher than I was before and I’ve made some fantastic friends. Below is a gallery of some photos from the trainings!
If you have any further questions about the certification courses, feel free to ask in the comments! If you’ve been to a certification course, what was your favorite activity?
Patton The Beat 
Team Bull Pup!
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BULL PUP!
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