If teaching leaves you exhausted, that does not mean you lack ability. In the early years, much of your teaching still requires conscious thought. Focused planning, reliable routines, and useful templates can reduce the number of decisions you must make from scratch and in the moment.
Why am I exhausted at the end of the day?
As an early-career music teacher, you are simultaneously thinking about content, pacing, materials, student behavior, transitions, assessment, and what comes next. This exhaustion is not evidence that you are unsuited for teaching. It is evidence that beginning a teaching career is highly demanding.
Consider the opening minutes of class. You may be greeting students, monitoring their entry, perhaps watching instrument assembly, and checking equipment. Once the students are in the room, you must take attendance, attend to student concerns, replace missing music, and fix broken instruments, all while you are redirecting behavior. All of this happens before the first note of instruction begins. Without well-established routines, your classroom can feel chaotic before the music even starts.
Experienced teachers recognize patterns
Over time, teachers organize their knowledge around recurring classroom situations. They recognize familiar patterns, anticipate likely difficulties, and draw upon strategies that have worked in comparable situations. They do not have to think through every familiar decision from the beginning.
This is part of what we mean when we say experienced teachers have “eyes in the back of their heads.” They have learned which classroom patterns deserve their attention and which changes signal that something is going wrong. Research comparing novice and experienced teachers suggests that experienced teachers draw upon organized routines and representations that allow them to respond more fluidly during instruction (Borko & Livingston, 1989). Beginning teachers are still figuring out many of those responses while they teach.
Keep in mind that experience alone does not automatically produce expertise. Teachers at any career stage can automate ineffective patterns. Feldon (2007) describes automaticity as a “double-edged sword.” It can make familiar work more efficient, but it can also make the thinking behind that work harder to identify and explain. Without reflection, teachers may also automate practices that are not helping students learn.
All this to say, give yourself time to examine your developing routines. Develop specific routines that help students work toward clear goals, recognize and correct errors, and become increasingly independent musicians.
Let planning carry some of the mental load
How can you prepare when you do not yet have years of experience to draw upon? Thoughtful, focused planning can carry some of that mental load.
1. Script the moments when clarity matters most
Write out important directions, transitions, questions, and rehearsal sequences. Then reduce them to bullet points that are easier to follow while teaching. I often see the bulleted plan come first. For beginning teachers, it may be more useful to start with an expanded plan that includes the learning task, teacher language, evidence of success, and possible next steps.
Typical bulleted plan:
Rehearse measures 24–32. Work on rhythm and articulation.
Expanded plan:
Students will: Clap and count measures 24–26.
I will say: “Clap measures 24–26 while counting aloud. Stop on beat four of measure 26.”
I will listen for: Accurate subdivision and a unified stop.
If students struggle: Isolate measure 25 and reduce the tempo.
If students succeed: Play the passage and listen for matching articulation.
These expanded planning notes identify the student task, the teacher’s language, evidence of success, and possible next steps. They also provide a visual reminder of how the instruction will unfold.
2. Prepare materials in order of use
A checklist might include:
- Score, teaching notes, and student music
- Warm-up or method-book exercise
- Visual support, such as a slide, rhythm example, bowing chart, or fingering chart
- Equipment needed for each activity, including pencils, percussion instruments, tuners, or metronomes
- An alternate way for a student with a missing or damaged instrument to participate
- Accessibility supports, adapted materials, or seating arrangements identified in student plans
- Exit question or assessment tool
3. Anticipate responses and possible next moves
Consider what you might do if students are ready to continue, partially successful, or not yet ready to move on. You may feel unclear about what these might look like in your teaching context. If you cannot anticipate how students might respond, borrow a mentor’s or colleague’s pattern recognition. Ask, “Where have you seen students struggle with this task? What would you look or listen for before deciding what to do next?” You do not have to know everything at the outset. Borrow from the expertise already available to you.
4. Add prompts to your lesson plan
Planning cannot prepare you for every possibility, but it can reduce the number of decisions you must make while students are waiting.
Add these four questions to your lesson or rehearsal planning template:
- What will the students do?
- What will I say?
- What will I look and listen for?
- What will I do if students need a different next step?
Here is an example for developing singing accuracy in a second-grade general music class:
What will the students do? Students will listen to a short tonal pattern and sing it back on a neutral syllable, first as a class and then in small groups.
What will I say? “Listen to the entire pattern. When I point to you, sing it back on ‘loo.’ Echo what I sing on the starting pitch and follow the same melodic shape.”
What will I look and listen for? I will listen for whether students begin on the starting pitch, follow the direction of the melody, and maintain a singing voice. I will notice whether the difficulty is shared by the class or limited to a smaller group.
What will I do if students need a different next step? If most students struggle, I will shorten the pattern. If they follow the melodic shape but miss the starting pitch, I will establish that pitch separately. If only a few students struggle, I will provide another opportunity in a small group rather than stopping the entire class.
Assessment is an important part of this instructional plan and can be used in every musical setting. The students’ singing provides evidence that guides your next decision. Music education research has examined how formative assessment and individualized instruction can be embedded in elementary general music rather than treated as separate from teaching (Gallo, 2019; Salvador, 2019).
Use routines to reduce repeated decisions
Establish, teach, and reteach procedures for entering, warming up, distributing materials, transitioning, and ending class. If students know how to enter, retrieve folders, assemble instruments, complete a board task, and begin the posted warm-up, you no longer need to direct five separate actions while taking attendance and addressing other issues that crop up naturally in a music classroom.
Routines do more than maintain order. They preserve time and attention so students can spend more of the class making and learning music.
Create reusable lesson and rehearsal templates. Keep this year’s plans so you have a starting point next year. For more ideas about classroom procedures, see the Just in Time Starting Strong posts.
Protect focused planning time
The reality is that music teachers may have duty assignments, meetings, repairs, interruptions, or inadequate planning periods. Poor organization is not the only reason work spills into the rest of the day, and no system can create sufficient time when a workload is unreasonable. Still, having a plan may help you protect the limited time and attention you have. Give each planning period a primary purpose. You might group similar tasks, such as score study, grading, communication, or preparing materials, into focused blocks. Research outside education suggests that repeatedly switching between unfinished tasks can leave part of our attention on the previous task (Leroy, 2009).
You may not always leave every task at school, but protect some time when you are no longer working. You need time for relationships, rest, movement, and interests that have nothing to do with teaching. Protecting that time is part of building a career you can sustain.
The goal of structure
Structure is most useful when it helps you respond rather than attempt to control every moment. Planning and routines provide a starting point, while student responses tell you what should happen next. Over time, you can become more efficient with familiar work while still recognizing when students need a different explanation, task, pace, or approach.
Good planning gives you more mental space to notice students and adjust your teaching.
A Just in Time practice
Choose one moment when students seemed confused. Write down what you asked them to do, what they did, and what you said next. Do not evaluate the entire lesson. Examine one instructional exchange, make one adjustment, and observe what happens the next time.
Closing reflection
What decision are you repeatedly making that could become a routine, checklist, template, or scheduled block?
What routine is taking less mental energy now than it did at the beginning of the year?
Bibliography
Borko, H., & Livingston, C. (1989). Cognition and improvisation: Differences in mathematics instruction by expert and novice teachers. American Educational Research Journal, 26(4), 473–498. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312026004473
Feldon, D. F. (2007). Cognitive load and classroom teaching: The double-edged sword of automaticity. Educational Psychologist, 42(3), 123–137. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520701416106
Gallo, D. J. (2019). Formative assessment practices and children’s singing accuracy: A mixed methods inquiry. International Journal of Music Education, 37(4), 593–607. https://doi.org/10.1177/0255761419852172
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168–181. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2009.04.002
Salvador, K. (2019). Assessment and individualized instruction in elementary general music: A case study. Research Studies in Music Education, 41(1), 18–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/1321103X18773092
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