Make a video? Facilitate on ZOOM? We’re on it.

Here’s the hard part:

transposing our responsive, interactive, in-person practice

to settings that partially or totally separate us from our students.

How is that supposed to work?

 

 

Ask the right questions, and you’ll be in a better position to plan (and bid, if the compensation is at all flexible) distance learning gigs. Find out what is being asked of you by asking these four categories of questions. Maybe you don’t ask all of these questions at one time, but the answers will come clear sooner or later – and sooner is better!

Goals/vision come first: who are you trying to serve, and how will this experience benefit them? Next, logistics/nuts and bolts, which should be easy to figure out; your sponsoring organization should have a vision for what they want, and a budget to support it (including your compensation). Finally translating your teaching artist craft from live-in-the-room to online.

Let’s take a look at all of it, so that any distance learning you facilitate can be some of your best work, and genuinely benefit each community of learners you serve. Near the end of the blog, I’ll share my personal thoughts about the quality, merits, pay and purpose of distance learning, as well as some tools for scripting your videos.

But to start with, I’m going to stick with those four categories of questions.

 

1. GOALS/VISION

This is the foundational part. Most Arts-in-Ed orgs have clear mission statements and goals (their funding depends on it) and should have specific answers to these questions.  However this View is defined (Youth Empowerment, social/emotional awareness, self-expression, arts integration, fulfilling mandated standards), it should determine the Design of the students’ experience; the links between values and beliefs and the program’s design should be explicit, and TAs and Arts-In-Ed orgs should see eye-to-eye on these foundational ideas:

• • • who are we trying to serve?

 

• • • how will this experience benefit them?

 

2. LOGISTICS

This is the easy part. These questions are a distance-learning subset of what any TA needs to know before committing to a teaching project.

• • • compensation offered?

 

• • • interactive (Zoom etc) or non-interactive (video, or some combination of PDFs and audio)?

 

• • • if video, what level of production values (editing, titles, FX)

 

• • • free form (just make something up), or linked with a curriculum or program?*

 

• • • how many sessions? how long is each session?

 

• • • if multiple sessions, are they one-offs, or creating some kind of learning arc?

 

*Heads up: that “free form / or linked…” checkbox is not as innocent as it appears: linked, connected to, informed by, based on are so subjective that your linked lesson might require, dependent on meaning, five or fifteen hours to plan and realize. Creating a learning arc is an even bigger mystery – will that even be possible? We’ll take a closer look at this in the Translating section.

In “All The Right Questions” (the first section of the DESIGN chapter in my book A Teaching Artist’s Companion – How to Define and Develop Your Practice, Oxford University Press, 2019 ), I detail these questions, and why they are crucial for a TAs success (download those pages here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w9h04gh0impwgxt/Levy%20on%20DESIGN%20%28book%20excerpt%29%20.pdf?dl=0). In the Designing A Curriculum chapter, you’ll find an even more complete Workshop Space, Time, and Resources Checklist. Both are applicable to any teaching artist gig in any artform.

 

3. COMPENSATION

This is the “as yet to be seen” part. After the spring 2020 mad rush to create online Arts-In-Ed content, many TAs and Arts-in-Ed orgs have a better idea about the effort, time, skills involved. The Kennedy Center is currently offering $750 for a 3-10 min video (https://thekennedycenter.smapply.io/prog/online_teaching_artist_proposals/), and other orgs have been steadily producing and compensating TAs for the work (The New Victory Theater’s ARTS BREAK series https://newvictory.org/stories/category/family-engagement/, and ArtsCorps Seattle’s work that includes materials packages sent to students’ homes https://artscorps.org/programs/covid-19-online-learning/).

But any standards for distance learning work and compensation are at the moment up for grabs – and for negotiation. As communities figure out what they want and need from their arts partners, then arts-in-ed orgs can formalize a plan and be able to answer these TA compensation questions. These aspects should inform your fair compensation, and should be spelled out in a Letter of Agreement (aka LOA, a brief contract) before you start the work:

• • • Video scripting or editing support? (does the TA do it all, or…?)

 

• • • Writing, shooting, editing compensation?

 

• • • Ownership of underlying activity plans?

 

• • • Licensing: exclusive, or not? If TA-created materials are being licensed to the Arts-in-Ed distributor, is the license exclusive, or not (can the TA license the materials to other distributors)?

 

• • • Credit: how is the role of the TA recognized, and where does that recognition appear (In the video title, and credits? FB posts? YouTube, Vimeo, or org-based website descriptions? On the orgs website, blog posts, emails?)

 

• • • Access: Who can access the finished materials, and when, and for how long?

 

The intellectual property questions this brings up are worth a blog post of their own. Start a conversation in good, constructive faith, with the understanding that bringing up these points is in everyone’s best interest – we all want to do our work in a fair and sustainable way. For a more in-depth look at TA compensation, please see my earlier post https://daniellevymusic.com/teaching-artist-compensation-101/ ‎

 

4. TRANSLATING

This is the hard part. What happens to TA practice when we are by degrees partly (via ZOOM) or totally (via video lessons) separated from our students? So much of what we do is determined by the beautiful living feedback loop of our students’ responding to our invitations, our responding to their responses, and so onwards. Earlier in the blog I referred to View, Design and (now) Respond:

Teaching artist work falls into three parts or phases: View, Design, and Respond… View is your personal take on how teaching and learning happen, your values and beliefs. It includes your overall point of view (such as your definition of your roles as a teaching artist and the overlapping communities where these roles play out) as well as your ideas about how to apply what you know. Design and Respond are the phases of teaching artist work where View manifests in real time and space. To Design is to plan a teaching and learning experience before entering the classroom. Respond refers to our actions in the company of students as we actually teach a workshop.  – from the author’s book A Teaching Artist’s Companion – How to Define and Develop Your Practice, Oxford University Press, 2019

During Respond, we discover what works and what doesn’t; we shift modalities, adapt, differentiate – and in doing so end up altering our Designs and often our Views. To re-state the opening question in this translating section: what happens to teaching and learning when there is no Respond phase?

I guess we are all about to find out.

My own very recent experience with distance learning has included teaching 80 individual online private music lessons; creating 70 minutes of curriculum-specific videos (four videos for 92Y Discover Music Series) and 65 minutes of skills-based workshop videos (three videos for a middle school after-school guitar workshop ADD LINK), a one-off songwriting lesson for Little Orchestra Society ADD LINK, and taken part in multiple online ZOOM distance learning PDs for TAs. I’ve seen most of maybe twenty of the recent home-made and organization-supported TA videos across disciplines. I’ve coached TAs on making videos. Before that, I‘d scripted and edited around two hundred educational and promotional videos in the past eight years, so I’m handy with the gear and the medium. But in spring 2020 I found the biggest learning curve (for me and others too) is not the shooting and editing, but the planning, which requires that translation process, our taking an interactive, responsive teaching practice and re-casting it as a static video.

Here is where, gentle reader, my expertise fails us both. I’m still in process figuring out how to do that translation. To complicate the matter, I’m resistant to doing so, because I believe -as deeply as I believe anything- that a teaching artist’s Responding is irreplaceable. The idea of teaching without being able to interact with students makes me want to just STOP, until such time as we can get back to human-to-human contact. Do you have any answers? I hope you will communicate with our TA community by responding to what I am writing and sharing: what have you learned about translating what we do?

For now, I can offer these two unrelated supports with confidence:

Access old or build new relationships

The work will be easier with students who already know you. You’ll be re-establishing connection. However with old friends or with a new community, take extra time to be personal, share yourself, name and recognize the individuals you are addressing (to whatever extent you can), and the Covid-19-altered situation we find ourselves in. It’ll take some time and some doing, but the Vygotsky-style community of learners you want won’t form without that trust and connection. Cultivate it. The beginning and end of my ONLINE GUITAR LESSON #1 are an example of what I mean, and maybe MEET UNCLE EARL isn’t too bad either (read on for both).

Script your videos before you shoot

Especially if you are making a series of videos. Create and include recurring rituals (openings, closings, warm-ups, physical motion breaks and activities that can be video copy-pasted). Figure out the right balance of direct-address lead and modeling, mixed with interpolated video from YOUTUBE and other sources, such as this K-4 music lesson (the first of five video lessons that finish up a four-concert, twelve-classroom-visit year that as you will see had a TON of support from 92Y in the form of the printed curriculum, student activity books, and videos they provide their TAs, all referenced and used in the video):

 

Meet Uncle Earl Video Lesson (16 min)

live      greet: final concert / this is video lesson #1 of 4: meet uncle earl

live      hello song with TA

VIDEO ASL hello song

live     do you remember all four artists? review

VIDEO MOTA VIDEO (full length)

live     turn to page 41 in MMJ (on screen) / read aloud + show 41 (all)

VIDEO meet uncle earl

live     this is going to be a lot of fun, much more to share with you, but now …

live     goodbye song with TA

VIDEO ASL goodbye song

Hmm, maybe outline is a more accurate term here (while shooting script is the industry term for a script + each shot planned out). A simple script (even at the above level of detail) will help you

• • • stay on topic and on-process (i.e. stay engaging)
    • structure sensible transitions (Now that we’ve…, let’s try…)
    • stay active (making & doing, rather than talking & telling)

 

Once the activity sequencing and transitions feel clear, you can in good conscience go ahead and spontaneously demonstrate as needed (and very occasionally instruct a bit – I’m anti-lecturer, pro-make-&-do) as you shoot an activity, just the way you would in a live situation: you’ll intuit that at a given moment it would be better if participants experienced THIS, demonstrate it, then get back to the making and doing. Often this will be a step in the scaffolding of an activity that you forgot or neglected to imagine when you Designed. These moments when your natural relaxed artist-educator-self steps up don’t need to be scripted, and in fact trying to do so (and trying to adhere to such a script) will REALLY slow you down.

Here is the script/outline I used to create a three-video sequence for a lovely middle school after-school guitar class that was rudely interrupted by Covid-19, along with links to the resulting videos:

 

Distance Learning: Daniel’s Guitar Class #1 of 3 (19 min)

live    greeting with names / set up space with no distractions

live    LH hands and fingers review /  RH hands and fingers

VIDEO tuning

live    play through who did

live    play through miss mary mack

live    play through polly wolly doodle

 

Distance Learning: Daniel’s Guitar Class #2 of 3 (25 min)

VIDEO greeting (repeat)

VIDEO tuning  (repeat)

live    play through Bob Marley Three Little Birds

VIDEO play along with Three Little Birds video + graphics

VIDEO play along with Bronx’s Prince Royce and Royal Wedding Stand By Me

live    play through Stand By Me chords and strum

live    strum Stand By Me chords with live melody and metronome

 

Distance Learning: Daniel’s Guitar Class #3 of 3 (24 min)

LIVE     greeting / how’s it going?

VIDEO tuning (repeat)

LIVE     play through Hey Mama Kanye chords and strum variations

VIDEO play along with Hey Mama Kanye + graphics

Full disclosures: A) all three scripts were different, not as fun, before I started shooting. I only sensed that during the shoot, when my imagining of being with my students – seeing them in front of me- was stronger. I jettisoned certain activity sections in favor of the ones that are represented here. B) Inserting the chords and lyric sheet graphics is editing-labor intensive – but I was/am so in love with that class that it didn’t matter – they’d just been sent home from school (with their guitars!), and it was the right moment to pitch in and try to make a difference for them. C) The occasional crackling sound you hear was 14-year-old analog to digital audio converter slowly dying. I went through a closet, and sold off enough old gear to pay for a new interface = happy ending.

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I have a lot more to say about activity Design, be it distanced or not – structuring invitations, accessing prior knowledge, using multiple modalities… and most of it is in my book, which I hope you’ll read and find useful.

I’ll end with a more personal ramble, some of the questions that led me to post this in the first place. I find myself asking Is doing distance learning really good for our field? Is this work really needed? and wondering about…

A) Quality

Is this our best work? Look at the content we’ve been putting out so far. Our home-made stuff, not the Carnegie Hall three-camera shoots with pro lights, sound, and editing. Good vibes? Yes. Entertaining? Mostly. Shows each artist’s genuine expertise as an artist? Some. Shows each TAs expertise as an educator? Hmm, maybe too few. As this content lives online for an unspecified amount of time, it may become a de facto observation / TA audition (i.e. here is a video of me at work) one that may be used to judge our work (should I hire this TA? Hmm, let’s look at their video…). Are we each aware of this? Is it what we want? Should we be content to have work that is less than our best be what represents us?

B) Merit

Are we educating and healing, or filling time? We are mostly doing one-offs, what at Lincoln Center we used to call “back-pocket lessons” that we all have handy. These hit a wide age range, are easy to do, easy to teach, are road-tested, and translate fairly well into the static, non-interactive video medium. Deeper work will be much harder to structure. Is it a good idea to say “yes” to the one-offs, when they do not reflect the quality and merit of the work we really want to do?

C) Pay

Artists may once again be asked to step up to the plate to be of benefit for a reduced fee. For example, my usual fee for creating video content is $125/hour (soup to nuts: scripting, vetting existing footage, shooting, performing, editing, watermarks, graphics, FX). The most recent work I’ve been offered (to create a ten-minute video) budgeted a fee that was the equivalent of teaching two 40-minute classes. I accepted and completed the work, 1) in the spirit of being helpful during a crisis, 2) because I wanted to see if I could solve that “translation” problem and come to an understanding of what kind of time and effort would be required to make the format really work, and 3) because I wanted (as we all do) to do something positive and healing for my students. In the end, creating work that I was reasonably proud of (https://youtu.be/dqMC87PRcGs), my effective rate of pay was $20/hour. Is this a good precedent to set? Will we be asked in the fall to create similar content for similar too-low fees?  

D) Necessity and Purpose

Why were we in such a hurry to post and share video content? Future conditions and resources are still unclear. Would it hurt to slow down a bit, and think about goals? Who does the content serve? How does it serve them? What is the longer arc these decisions imply for TA practice, and our relationships with sponsoring Arts-in-Ed orgs and schools?

Readers: you are all generous people, or you wouldn’t be doing Arts-In-Ed or TA work, and I don’t want to impose on your time. Thank you for considering my blog thoughts. There is a lot happening that I do not know about, and I have surely overlooked possibilities and successful practices here. If you have the bandwidth, kindly respond, and I’ll share out:

What’s resonating with you?

Where am I off-base or uninformed here?

Which of these would be constructive topics to address in a more public or interactive forum? What’s next?