That Music Podcast: A Podcast for Elementary Music Teachers

208 | Rethinking Recorders with Erin Elliott

• Bryson Tarbet, M.M.Ed. • Season 7 • Episode 208

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If you’ve ever felt nervous, overwhelmed, or downright stressed about teaching recorder, this episode is the breath of fresh air you’ve been waiting for. Bryson sits down with Erin Elliott, who brings a balanced, practical, and joy-filled perspective to an instrument that often gets a pretty bad rap.

Erin shares why recorders so easily spiral into chaos, the hidden reason many teachers dread teaching them, and the surprising story of how she completely rethought her approach after realizing her old system wasn’t serving her students - or herself. Together, she and Bryson dig into what actually works when teaching recorder. This episode is packed with practical takeaways that you can apply this week. Whether you’re recorder-obsessed, recorder-avoidant, or somewhere in between, you’ll walk away feeling encouraged, grounded, and ready to bring more joy (and less noise) into your recorder unit.

Tune in and let this conversation reshape how you think about, and teach, the recorder.

Episode Chapters:

  • 0:00 Introduction
  • 1:18 Why Recorder Gets a Bad Rap
  • 3:20 Common Mistakes & Better Approaches
  • 10:02 A Reimagined Recorder Unit
  • 12:14 Classroom Management Strategies
  • 17:00 Connecting & Extending Recorder Lessons
  • 19:41 One Simple Change to Try Today
  • 23:16 About Erin’s Training
  • 24:49 Takeaways

Links and Resources: 

Use coupon code PODCAST at checkout for 50% off your first month of Elementary Music EDGE™ today!


Have questions or want to share feedback? Reach out to us at hello@thatmusicteacher.com - we’d love to hear from you!

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You are listening to that music podcast with Bryson Tart, the curriculum designer and educational consultant behind that music teacher in the elementary music summit. Each week, Bryson and his guests will dive into the reality of being an elementary music teacher and how music can truly be transformative in the lives of the students you serve. Show notes and resources mentioned in this episode can be found@thatmusicteacher.com.

Bryson Tarbet:

Hello, and welcome back to this episode of That Music podcast. I am super excited to be talking about one of my all time favorite topics this entire month, which is the recorder, and I just. Excited. And you know, we had to hear from somebody else 'cause you're gonna here enough about what I think about the recorder as we go on. Uh, but I'm really excited to have Erin Elliot joining us today to share a little bit about her experience with the recorder and how you can implement it in your classroom in a way that just works. So Erin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Erin Elliott:

Well, thank you for inviting me.

Bryson Tarbet:

Alright, let's dive right in because this is quite the divisive topic. Uh, so let's be honest, a lot of music teachers really dread teaching the recorder. Uh, why do you think this instrument gets such a bad reputation and what is the biggest thing you think people get wrong about teaching it?

Erin Elliott:

I think, um. Honestly, we, we've seen the memes on Facebook. I've seen, um, magazine ads making fun of recorders. So it's not just a bad rap with teachers, but also a bad rap with parents. Um, because when a kid brings home a recorder before they know what they're doing, it's gonna sound bad no matter what. Um, so I think with recorders, they can be a powerful tool. Um. If you do not think through all of your procedures and routines and what you wanna get out of recorders, um, you could be handing your kids potentially just loud noisemakers if you're not careful. Um, so I think. A lot of teachers underestimate like how much planning beforehand goes into teaching recorders, and if they don't set themselves up for success and don't set their students up for success, it can easily dive into chaos. And I think that's where teachers get frustrated a lot.

Bryson Tarbet:

I, I cannot agree more. I just actually, actually recorded the next two episodes of the, the podcast, which are basically all about all the things you just mentioned. How can we set things up for success? How can we make sure we're not just sending them home before they know how to do any songs? And I, I think that's really the first thing people miss, is they just expect to work without any. Forethought necessarily. Mm-hmm. And that's not quite the case. Um, so I'm glad that, that we're on the same page there, so know that

Erin Elliott:

I'm sorry.

Bryson Tarbet:

Go ahead.

Erin Elliott:

You have to kind of tap into like your beginning band director days, I feel like. Um, and just kind of embrace the, the noise. You know, both of my kids started instruments this year. My daughter started oboe, which is my instrument, and you know what, it sounds a little rough right now. We'll get there and my son started cello and it's a little rough. Um, and record's gonna be the same way, but we have to have that patience to work through it all.

Bryson Tarbet:

For sure. So I know you have a, a very specific story about this from your own experience. Yeah. Uh, but a really common mistake that I see is seeing teachers focus way too heavily on testing and rote learning. Mm-hmm. Um, or honestly testing and not using any rote learning. There's usually one side or the other. How can a teacher shift away from this kind of checklist approach, um, and use something that's going to be more meaningful. And I'd love for you to kind of tell your story a little bit. Yeah. And how that connects here.

Erin Elliott:

So, I mean for me personally, I had like the typical recorder experience as a kid, um, in third and fourth grade. And then like I really didn't do much with the recorders at all until I was in grad school and I was a teacher assistant and I got to ta the elementary methods course. And I really gotta see how recorder could be a powerful tool. You have to spend a lot of time teaching kids how to play it, but once they understand how to play it. And, you know, play by road and read music, it can just be an extension of what you do. But when I was in grad school, I had the chance to observe this wonderful, wonderful teacher. She had done all of her orff levels and all of her music learning theory levels, and it was so cool to see both of those, like melded together. Um, but a couple of the days that I was there, she was doing, um, recorders with her fourth graders and she had essentially created her own recorder, karate. You know, book. There were bead songs and belt songs. It was very intense, but she had her routines and procedures down pat, like kids knew what to do. They were so supportive of, of each other and everything, and it worked so well. And that's what I, that's what I saw in action versus what I saw in my methods course that I was TAing. And so when I got into my first elementary position. I tried to emulate what Jenny had done and it worked at the beginning, but the longer I taught, the more I saw the cracks in my system. Um, one I had made it too big and complicated to where the range of abilities was too great for me to really be able to reach every child where they were. Um, my, my high ability kids, they were getting frustrated because they were independent learners, but the music was getting too hard for them to, you know, really learn it by themselves. My middle of the road kids were just kind of chucking along, but my low kids were getting so burnt out and seeing their classmates with, you know, a lot more belts and beads was not gonna magically inspire them to play any better. It wasn't, um, because a lot of those kids had, um, you know, learning disabilities or, you know, or developmental delays and I was trying to meet their needs as best as I could. Um, but there just wasn't enough time when I have to do a full group lesson and then have time for them to practice and then try to listen to and assess as many kids as possible. There, there just wasn't enough time. Um, and then I have two years in a row where I had a whole bunch of new kids come in at once, um, who had not played recorder at their previous school. So now that range of abilities is even greater. Um, so I had the idea of like, okay, well if you don't wanna play for me or we run outta time, you can always send videos on Google Classroom. That's great. I was getting about a hundred videos a week that I had no time at school to assess. So now I have a hundred videos to listen to and assess at home with a toddler. So it was not becoming any easier for me or for the kids.'cause half the time they would never read the comments that I left. So it was just, it was a waste of time. Um, so when everything shut down, that was about, um. About a week before our fourth and fifth grade music performance, and we were gonna do recorder karate or my version of recorder karate after that. And we never did, 'cause we didn't go back to school. And I realized that I felt relieved. And if I, the recorder geek who plays in recorder concerts and dresses up in Renaissance clothes, if I'm relieved that I don't have the teacher recorder. Something's wrong, right? Um, and I realized I could not take the method that Jenny had created and just plop it into my setting because what I didn't say before was that the teacher that I observed taught at, at a very prestigious Catholic school in Louisville, she didn't have the same population that I did. She didn't have that huge range of abilities or kids with learning challenges. Developmental delays. And that's not to say that my kids can't do excellent things, but how I had set up my program was not meeting the needs of all my students and met her students' needs, but not mine. So I had that rest of the year and really most of that next year, because we are masked and couldn't play, um, I had the time to really sit and think if I bring recorders back. I need to do something differently. This is not sustainable anymore. Um, I think of all the things that I had done in my levels, courses that I wasn't doing anymore, because there just wasn't time. And I, I came to the conclusion that as a teacher like me who hates standardized testing as much as I, I do. That's kind of what I had turned recorders into. We were learning songs for the sake of checking it off and moving to the next thing, and that wasn't right. So that, that was really the catalyst to really change how I taught recorders. I took what worked well, my teaching process, but I wanted to move away just from learning songs and building on them.

Bryson Tarbet:

So there's so many great threads that we could pull here. One thing that I want to bring attention to the listeners. That can apply to anything which I is the fact that we often observe teachers who are very well in their career, they're great, they have great support, they're in, they're established, they've been there for a minute, and then we get dropped in, you know, early career teachers, we're still learning the students and we're like, I'm gonna do all those things. And it never works. And it always leads to failure. And I think that that's a really important thing for us to remember is that. We are different, our populations are different. We can pull from these different things, but we need to understand and give ourselves the grace when things don't work exactly the same. So, I, I just needed to bring that up because it's one of my biggest pet peeves about student teaching is that we don't talk about that part enough. So we've learned a little bit about kind of what you did pre COVID and the kind of the space that you had to sit with during COVID when you weren't able to do recorder. I'm curious, and I hope our listeners are curious too. What did you come up with? What does it look like now and what's, what's the, what's the better alternative?

Erin Elliott:

So what I decided to do was to create, um, I wanted to think more vertical than horizontal. You know, I think of my, my testing spreadsheet and my principle loved all the data that I used to be able to give her. And she could see the spreadsheet of how, you know, what songs every child passed. But instead of thinking of that horizontal spreadsheet of listing out every song. I wanted them to still learn how to read music, but I wanted, I wanted them to think deeper about each song. Okay, we learn a song now what can we do with it? Um, so I, at that point, I had already switched from starting on b, a and G to G and E. Um. So I think back to first grade when I teach Soul and Me, well, we can play a lot of those same songs and if those songs have singing games, you know what they're gonna ask? Hey, can we play that singing game? And the answer is, yeah, absolutely. Um, some of the songs, can we turn it into a composition where we create, you know, a b section and maybe we improvise on recorders, maybe we add non pitched percussion into the mix. Um, there's all these different ways we could extend the lessons. So my kids are still playing. They're still learning how to read music. We just do fewer songs and go deeper into those songs.

Bryson Tarbet:

I, I, I had a similar realization, you know, when I, when I was teaching recorder, which was, let's not just do the song for the sake of doing the songs. Let, let's do something with it. Let's use the, you know, why are we teaching so differently than how I normally teach? Just 'cause there's a recorder in their hands. And I think that is, once I, once I figure that out. That's when everything changed. Um, so let's talk a little bit about the potential elephant in the room, um, which is classroom management. Mm-hmm. Um, classroom management is tough to begin with, and then we're gonna give all of these third and four or fourth graders a wind instrument. Can you talk a little bit about strategies for classroom management and really how do you manage the chaos and also give students autonomy? Yeah,

Erin Elliott:

so I try to use similar language to what I've done in the past. So even starting in kindergarten, I always use the phrases of sleep, rest, and ready position with any non pitch percussion instrument or the mallets. So sleep, the instrument is on the floor out of her hands. Rest, I have the instrument, you know, in my hand, but it's on my lap. And ready. I'm ready to play, whether it's rhythm sticks or the mouths on the xlophone. So they're already used to me using that language. And so when I do it with recorders, it's not really a new procedure or routine with them, it's just extending it to recorders. So for me, you know, I have to think about, okay. How are students gonna get recorders out? What are they gonna do with them when they get the recorders? Are they gonna warm up on their own? Are we gonna warm up together? Um, how do they know when to play versus when not to play? And then how are they gonna put them away? And I think a lot of teachers don't think through those. It, you know, those routines until they get recorders in their hands and they. Oh crap, what do I do now? And you know, the things you come up with, you know, right at the last second when you got kids in front of you, are not always the, the best strategies. Um, so I think that helps a lot with classroom management. Um, just thinking through those procedures and routines, um, but then also having a. Having a procedure for teaching songs and that is familiar to students. So I teach songs a lot of times the same ways. We start with the rhythm and we clap the rhythm and find the patterns. Um, we read the note names and find the patterns, and then we start to put it together in a chin position, which is on our chin. We can finger through things and say the note names, um, and then we might break up. So I play part of it and they play a part of it. So it's having that consistent routine of how do we learn a song that I think really helps. Then breaking it up. I don't teach recorder for the entire 40 minute lesson. It may be 15 or 20 minutes of our 40 minute lesson, and I think that's helpful as well.

Bryson Tarbet:

I think that last point right there is the big one. You don't necessarily need to do 40 minutes of recorder. And that's okay. And I think that, that sometimes we need to give teachers that permission because they feel like, well, we're doing recorder now. We're gonna do 40 minutes of recorder. And let's be honest, sometimes 40 minutes of recorder is just too much recorder for us, for students, and for, you know, just keeping. Things moving.

Erin Elliott:

Yeah. And you know, on days where we are extending the song, like, um, you know, I might take a song like Rain, rain go away. You know, we may spend one class and we learn it in 15 minutes and then the second day we may spend more time on it 'cause we're gonna review the song and then we might create a soundscape to go with it and turn it into a mini performance. That's gonna take more time than your, your, you know, 15, 20 minutes. Um. Yeah, it don't feel like you have to do recorder the entire class or feel like recorder is the only thing that you could do. When I, before COVID, really, like I would have two months where all I did for 40 minutes twice a week was recorder, and some of the kids loved it. Some of the kids got a little burnt out.

Bryson Tarbet:

Yeah. I mean, I think that if we, if we shift our thinking, like, all right, let's say we're doing two bonos, right? If we're doing and focusing on drumming, would we necessarily do 40 minutes of drumming? Maybe sometimes. But also like that might be too many, too much drums. So kind of thinking of it in that way. And again, what I love about this, and this is the same realization that I came to, to in my career, was when I stopped thinking of it as a unit and I started thinking of it as a focused A, a basically a another tool that we can use to do all of these musical things rather than. That was the thing. That's when everything changed. I was happier, my students were happier, and there was just so much more joy and engagement in the classroom across the board.

Erin Elliott:

Right. And I think of it this way, like in my district, um, when my fifth graders go on to middle school, um, there, last required year of music is in sixth grade. And where they have to choose from band, orchestra, choir, and then, um, or like non-con choir, a k, a general music. So they're gonna get that experience of like, here's my essential elements book and here's the song that we're gonna play today, and here's the song we're gonna play tomorrow. They're gonna get that in middle school. Let them be fun and creative and joyful as long as they can.

Bryson Tarbet:

So let's bring it back to that joy. We, you know, you mentioned earlier about if there's a game to the song where that they're playing, you can play in the game, but. Talk a little bit about first, why you think that's important and are there other opportunities to connect it to a non-recorded thing, to really bring everything together in one cohesive thing.

Erin Elliott:

Well, um, so there's different ways that I can extend lessons. Um, I and I talked about that a little bit at the Elementary music Summit. So some of the songs that we play have singing games that we've done before. So, um, I think even my fifth graders. Who thinks sometimes they're too cool. They like to play those games. They really do and bring back the memories. And in some of those singing games, you can find ways to incorporate the recorder. Maybe they sing it before and now they're gonna play it instead. And that just gives them more repetition. Um, you can create soundscapes where you're giving students the autonomy to, you know, where you may have a group playing recorders, but then you also have a group, um. Using non pitched or pitched percussion instruments, maybe movement props, and they're creating a, a rainy, you know, soundscape or like a windy soundscape. And you can turn these songs into little mini performances.'cause if you think about it, most of the songs they play on recorders are very short. They take 20 seconds to perform. And if you want them to perform at a concert or a program. Uh, playing a 22nd song is, doesn't feel quite enough. So you could find ways to extend these and have the students create their own accompaniment to it, um, which gives the students more autonomy and creativity, and it really becomes their own. Um, I even think about, um, oh, you know, improvisation. You know, finding ways that we could improvise and that that's a whole thing in its own right. Um, asking kids to, maybe you give them the rhythm and you give them the stack of notes. We call that a pitch stack in the orff world, and they can improvise their own melodies based on that. That can be a part of a performance too. Um, and then there's other things that you can use recorders for, like trans literature. So there's all these ways we can connect to different content areas like reading, performing, and I think that's really beneficial when students can see that recorders and really just music really connects to all the different content areas that they're learning in school.

Bryson Tarbet:

I love it. So let's talk about the teacher who might be sitting there absolutely overwhelmed. By either the thought of teaching recorder or the fact that they're currently in the mix of recorder. What is one small manageable change that a teacher could, that teacher could make this week to start this shift?

Erin Elliott:

Honestly, sleep, rest, and ready. Having those things.'cause I think the biggest pain point is kids playing where they're not supposed to play and being firm, but fair. So in my ff level one, um, my recorder teacher, she had this fun thing that she said, um, after one warning, it's off with your head. If they lose their mouthpiece and it, my kids find it funny, but it's funny, but like they understand like, oh, I lost my mouthpiece, but they only lose it for a few minutes, you know, and they can still use the rest of their recorder. If they're paying attention, they get it back. So I think setting up those routines, being really, you know, on top of it, like, Hey guys, our recorders are in sleep position. Okay, show me chin. Nope, keep on your chin, not your mouth, but your chin. And just being really intentional about that and getting those routines down. Once it, once it's ingrained in them, it helps so much you can get so much more teaching done because you're not always fighting everything. Um, another thing that I started doing recently, um, is adding more Velcro. To my recorder, and I don't have a, a recorder that has Velcro on it with me, but I started, um, years ago adding a Velcro to the back for their thumb rests. Um, I, one year I bought thumb rests for all the kids, and let me tell you, that was a major, major fail because they move around. So when you have fidgety kids, what do they do with that? That thumb rests, they move it around. They, so they were never in the right spot. They would fly across the room. So I started buying Velcro for their right thumb so they knew where to put their thumb so their hand wasn't on the bottom or, you know, down here. Um, but then. I started actually putting some Velcro dots for kids who needed it on the thumb. And then one, two, and three,'cause again, I started on G and E. So really I was doing G for them. And I used to do it just for the kids that I knew really needed it. So they, they had something tactile to know where to put their fingers, and then they were responsible for their peace sign for E. But then a couple years ago, I had a group of kids that. A lot of the kids were gonna need that extra support. And a lot of those kids who needed the extra support, if they saw their peers without the Velcro, they were just gonna take the Velcro off. Right? And so I did it for everyone that year. And. It was really helpful. It was a class that kind, just really struggled as a whole with everything. Um, so having the Velcro on G it was one last thing that I had to, you know, try to fix and analyze because if they sounded off, I knew it wasn't their thumb or their first finger. I knew it was their ear. Um, so that was really helpful. And then last year I had a ginormous fourth grade class. I had about 35 kids at once, and they were really good kids and really good players. But when you have that many kids. It's like playing whack-a-mole no matter how hard you try. Um, and when you're only one person, and luckily I did have a student teacher for part of it, um, but you're still trying to, you know, put out all these fires. So I put Velcro on, on thumb, 1, 2, 3, and then the thumb rests for all the kids. Now will I always do that in the future? I don't know. Um, but when I have really big classes or a lot of kids who really need the support, I think that's okay. And when we learn new notes, it's a really great day when we can peel off, you know, a piece of Velcro and hopefully makes it in the trash. Sometimes they end up on the kids' foreheads by the end, but that's okay.

Bryson Tarbet:

I love that. So we are gonna dive even deeper. You're gonna be leading a, uh, a masterclass inside Elementary Music Edge this month. Can you tell us how this masterclass is gonna help teacher teachers tackle? These pain points make them basically love recorder again. Can you basically give us a little bit of a sneak peek about what we might expect for the training?

Erin Elliott:

Yes. So, you know, a couple years ago I presented, um, about recorders and I talked about like. Before we play, how do we get kids ready for recorders? And right at the end, I kind of touched upon those first, you know, first day or two, um, lessons. And for this, um, workshop that I'm gonna do in December, I wanna talk really in depth about those first five or six lessons that we do with our kids to really get them on a good foundation. So kind of. Progressing a little bit further than what I presented on a couple years ago. How do we make a good sound at the beginning? How do we get kids excited? How do we get them feeling like real musicians, even though we're still working through some squeaks and squ?

Bryson Tarbet:

I am super excited. This is, so, this is one of those trainings that I've been looking forward to having in the membership for a while now because I love the recorder and again, I feel like it gets such a bad rap and I'm excited to help write that wrong a little bit. So if you are not a member of the Elementary Music Edge, there is an exclusive trial offer in the description. Wherever you're watching or listening, um, be sure to join us again. You can cancel at any time. And if you are a member, that'll be loading in soon and you'll get an email as. Soon as it goes live. So Erin, thank you so much, first of all, just for spreading the good word of the recorder, but also for chatting with me today and for leading our masterclass inside Elementary Music Edge. We really appreciate you and I'm so glad we got to chat today.

Erin Elliott:

Thank you

Bryson Tarbet:

for those of you that are listening, it would be in the world to us if you would leave us a review or a comment. Wherever you're watching, you're listening. It helps us understand what types of topics you want more of, less of all those things. Um, but with that, with that being said. As always, thank you so much for listening to this week's episode, and as always, thank you for making a difference in the lives of the students.

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Bryson Tarbet, M.M.Ed

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