The end of the school year is in sight. But a whirlwind of wrapping up with final assessments, report cards, banquets, and administrative duties can easily leave you drained and depleted. Summer break offers a much-needed respite, a chance to step back from the daily teaching and administrative intensity and rekindle the passion that fuels your creativity. It’s an opportunity to recharge, reflect, and find inspiration for the year ahead.
Engaging with enriching media during the summer months can be a powerful way to nurture your personal and professional growth as a concert band director. Books, podcasts, movies, and television shows can offer fresh perspectives, spark creativity, and reignite enthusiasm for the classroom. Delving into stories of leadership, mentorship, and overcoming adversity can inspire you to become even more powerful role models and guides for your students. Exploring narratives of new beginnings can open you up to new possibilities, while stories that highlight the transformative power of music and the arts can encourage you to become even bolder in shining the spotlight on the impact your program makes on students and the larger community.
Here are ten book and media recommendations to help you refresh this coming summer:
1 – Showing Our True Colors by Mary Miscisn
What It’s About
A fun and easy guide for understanding and appreciating yourself and others. It includes a set of reference lists and a set of color character cards for easy determination of your True Colors spectrum.
What You Can Learn From It
Successful people seem to know who they are, what their True Colors are, and what their values, needs, strengths, and joys are. They know and trust themselves, and behave accordingly. By doing so, they also appreciate the needs and strengths of others, and behave more compassionately. As a band director, you deal with every kind of personality, young and old! This book provides you with a simple and straightforward method to understanding the styles behind why people behave the way they do. It’s filled with practical tips to help you immediately apply each concept in a meaningful way.
2 – The Power of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz
What It’s About
Introduces a groundbreaking concept: energy, not time, is our most valuable resource. While traditional time-management strategies emphasize accomplishing more in less time, Loehr and Schwartz advocate that effective time management lies in restoring and managing our four energy types: physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. By comprehending and optimizing these energy sources, we can boost productivity, elevate well-being, and achieve a more harmonious work-life balance.
What You Can Learn From It
As band directors, we often fall into the trap of thinking we “just need more time to do it all”. This book will help you discover that you can’t push yourself to extremes without potentially seeing a decline in your (and your students’) overall performance. Instead, start thinking more about what you can do to rejuvenate yourself to your “best self”. After reading, do a personal assessment across the four pillars and journal the small changes you can make physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually so you can meet the challenges of today’s teaching demands.
3 – American Band by Kristen Laine
What It’s About
Part documentary, part coming of age story, this story is written by a former band student about the lives of band members and their teacher at a successful high school in Indiana in the final year of his long and storied career at the school.
What You Can Learn From It
This story illustrates that the students are not just “in band.” They are people with lives who just happen to also enjoy the benefits of being in a successful band program. It is filled with great stories about how teachers, band and non-band, can influence students to be successful later in life. This book also offers a great way to see how we influence our own students, even when we do not see it happening at the current moment in time.
4 – The Longest Trip Home by John Grogan
What It’s About
Written by the author who gave us Marley and Me, this book is about growing up. John Grogan tells stories about his life as a troubled teen, his painful journey into adulthood, and his return home when his parents became ill. The memoir explores themes of faith, reconciliation, and the universal human experience of finding one’s way home, told with incredible candor and humor.
What You Can Learn From It
Like Marley and Me, it will be hard not to cry as you go deeper into the story and reach the end. You will discover a new found appreciation for the life you have been given, and the people who helped you live it.
5 – Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, M.D
What It’s About
A simple, yet powerful read on how people deal with change in their life and work. It uses a simple business parable about four characters in a maze looking for cheese to represent different ways of reacting to change. Cheese represents happiness and success. Since the cheese keeps moving, the characters must face their fears, adapt to change, and learn valuable lessons along the way.
What You Can Learn From It
The story highlights the importance of adapting to change quickly and not getting stuck in old patterns. While the content is not specific to music, it does remind us that change occurs in our artistic and teaching careers as well as our student’s lives. How we approach each change can affect the ultimate outcome.
6 – Coach Carter
What It’s About
Coach Carter is based on a true story and emphasizes discipline, academic excellence, and personal responsibility as crucial for success both on and off the basketball court. It highlights the importance of education and character development alongside athletic achievement.
What You Can Learn From It
Building a meaningful relationship with your students is never a straight line! You will encounter ups and downs, twists and turns, and plenty of setbacks before you breakthrough. It’s inspiring to watch how Coach Carter dealt with varying personalities and kept persevering with his ultimate life teaching goals in the face of so much opposition from parents and his administration. While you may not face these extreme headwinds in your job as a concert band director, you can take away valuable lessons in what it looks like to set and maintain high character and performance standards for your students, parents, and your program.
7 – The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
What It’s About
This book provides a framework for achieving personal and professional success by emphasizing proactive behaviors, goal setting, prioritization, and mutual benefit in relationships through seven habits. The first three serve your own independence, so that you may “win in private,” as Covey put it. The second three aim to shift your focus to interdependence. When you strive for cooperation instead of competition, you’ll also “win in public” and find worldly success. The last habit serves your own renewal so that you’ll never burn out or overextend yourself.
What You Can Learn From It
What the author calls “habits, feel more like fresh perspectives on everyday life. A favorite example is the “Think Win/Win” habit. That’s something that most people have an idea of what that means, but Stephen Covey goes above and beyond in explaining how we can apply that mutually beneficial approach to business, relationships, conversations, and most anything else in your life! Great books like this one are more like a conversation that you can revisit with yourself. Sometimes that conversation happens at a time when we’re willing to listen, and sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay. In other words, this one is worth reading again and again!
8 – Note Grouping by James Morgan Thurman
What It’s About
A teaching method for enhancing musical expression and style through the way notes are grouped and accented within a musical phrase. This book explores how to teach students to play or sing with expression, focusing on the movement of notes and how that movement can create musical rhythm and emotion. It covers motion and rhythm, breaking down the bar line, and provides a lot of examples to help illustrate how to put the concepts in practice.
What You Can Learn From It
This book is a bit like a condensed textbook approach to musicality. That is to say, it is short, dense, and informative. That density, however, is more than made up for in its absolutely amazing material. A mentor once told me, and I’m paraphrasing here, “the first time I read this book, I thought it was wrong. The second time, I thought it was pretty good, if a little flawed. The third time, I realized it was the most incredible book I’d ever read, and I bought a copy for everyone I knew.” When the tools in the book start to internalize in your ear, you might feel like you’re in on a secret when listening to professional recordings, and you start approaching musicality with a newfound sense of consistency and effectiveness.
What It’s About
A bimonthly show about everything band, offering insights and discussions on band pedagogy, classroom strategies, and everyday experiences. The range of topics covers beginner band, instrument-specific advice, and advanced ensemble rehearsal techniques.
What You Can Learn From It
The show hosts are very open and candid about strategies they have tried, which ones worked or did not work for them, and often provide humorous anecdotes that all teachers can relate to. It offers an opportunity to dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of teaching areas you want to refine and hear answers to questions being asked by music educators around the world.
10 – The Band Director’s Companion by Harry Haines and Garry Garner
What It’s About
A well-rounded guide that covers everything you need to know to organize and maintain a strong, successful music program.
What You Can Learn From It
This book is great for both new and experienced directors. It’s clear, practical, and focused on the real-world challenges music educators face—like setting goals, running effective rehearsals, and tackling instrument-specific issues. Just flip to the part you’re dealing with—whether it’s tuning, rehearsal planning, or discipline—and get an infusion of practical guidance and ideas.
The best part of summer break is taking the time to nourish your mind and spirit! Remember, a teacher who is continually learning and growing is better equipped to foster a lifetime love of learning and artistry in their students.
Thank you to CutTime, a Band Directors Talk Shop business partner, and Freddy Chavez, Customer Education Specialist, for providing this article.
Let CutTime help you crank up your world-class, well-oiled machine and take away the time that you spend on administrative tasks and give you back the time to focus on developing good humans and musicians! If you would like to find out more about CutTime, contact us at support@gocuttime.com or via Online Chat at GoCutTime.com
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.