Hello and welcome to Band Together, a six-part series exploring how different music teachers foster positive classroom cultures in their band room. In this series, I interview six band teachers and discuss their general views on a positive culture and what strategies they use to implement it.

In this third episode, I’m talking to Rob Chrol who teaches small, rural Manitoba high school—the one that I attended as a teenager, in fact. This is an amazing conversation. I left the recording session feeling deeply nourished, not just as an educator, but as an human being. He’s done a lot thinking about leadership in a music program and specifically about servant leadership and how to live those values in a classroom. And speaking of values, Rob and his students have spent a lot of time considering the values of their program and, like servant leadership, how to live them.  Like both earlier conversations with Michael and Alexis, culture is a living, breathing thing in a classroom and it changes day to day, but that culture isn’t delivered in curriculum (though it certainly can be sometimes), it’s modelled daily in the actions of the teachers and students. Rob has some clear, thoughtful ideas about that.

The show is available at bandtogetherpodcast.com or on Apple podcasts and Google Play. Listen at your computer or on the go. The results of the research are published via two papers in Canadian Winds, a peer-reviewed journal for instrumental music educators.

You can contact me at kenley[at]kenleykristofferson[dot]com or at my website at http://www.kenleykristofferson.com. Follow me on twitter @kenley_k and on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/kenley.