music, therapy, and me

Oh, dear. Today is one of those days where I just don't want to go to work. We are experiencing lots of unannounced changes where kids are "visiting" new classrooms to become accustomed to places that they will be going soon that directly affect music therapy. We have students assigned where there are spaces rather than where things make sense for group treatment, and I don't want to go. I like my paycheck, though, so I am going to work today. My intern has influenza, so I am the only option for music therapy this week. My flu shot has protected me so far, so I am not flu-ish, just tired and crabby. Wednesdays are my busiest group day as well, so there is lots to do. I also missed one of their sessions during my continuing education week, so I feel like I have to be around this week. One of the things that happens in a psychiatric residential treatment facility's school is that we have to be very flexible with how we provide educational enrichment services. We hav...

In the recent Tuesday posts, I have shifted my attention away from just writing therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) into exploring TME development from a different perspective. This series of posts is coming from the perspective of someone who talks to music therapy students and interns from many different areas of the world and something that seems to surprise just about everyone that I talk to... You can do more than one thing with any material/object/song. Seems like a "duh" thing to me, but then I remember back to my development as a music therapist, and I know that I was in a similar space when I was a student. I wrote a song for shaking the tambourine, so we cannot even fathom using that same song for shaking the shaker eggs. "This is my tambourine song." but there is absolutely NO reason why it can't be a shaker egg song or a rhythm stick song or a move your hands song. All it takes is a slight alteration and the song becomes something that you can use a...

Oh boy. It is that time of year again. We go back to work today in our school program for children and adolescents with developmental and psychiatric considerations after our Thanksgiving break with 18 school days until our Winter Break comes around. Our Behavioral Health Technicians (BHTs) worked over the Thanksgiving break so they are tired and missed out on family traditions because they had to be at work, caring for the kids. I am returning to a situation where some of us have had a long weekend while others of us have been working through holidays and have had no break. This is, traditionally, a difficult time of year for our students and our staff members. Many BHTs will decide that working holidays is not really worth it and will disappear - at least, that's the way things have happened before. So, what does this have to do with being an internship supervisor? If you ask ANY school teacher about this period of time in this country, they will all say the same thing - it is di...

Clinical training is something I really enjoy. I had a meaningful experience at my own internship (many, MANY decades ago), and I find being an internship director to be very good for my own clinical awareness and development. I hope that my interns learn as much from me as I do from them. All of that to say that clinical training is one of my passions in this field of music therapy. As such. I find it to be a consistent topic that I explore during my continuing education. Since this is something that I continue to be passionate about and always want to be better at, I tend to focus my time on learning more and more about this topic. Now, one of the other things that I am passionate about is competency-based education and clinical training. It is a nice situation when both of my passions come together in a smooth manner. I am currently reading Clinical supervision: A competency-based approach by Carol A. Falender and Edward P. Shafranske, published in 2009 by the American Psychologica...

There is nothing more relaxing for me than a long weekend, especially one like the one that is ending today. I have had four days of being by myself, which I need on occasion due to my way of being in this world. I am a person who needs time away from others to refresh and energize, and the past two weekends have done that for me quite nicely. I have had time to just be me in my space and do things that are good for me. The craft area is a bit less cluttered. The office is exactly the same. I did cook yesterday, so the fridge is full of food, ready to be consumed shortly. I have an entire stack of things to laminate and prepare for my students. There are many things left to do, but that's what life is all about, right? Doing things. My family seems to have a rule that laundry is only done on weekends. We're not sure why except that's the way it happened in our chore rotation. I guess Mom never really had enough of her laundry to do during the week - it would have been lots ...

On Fridays, I tend to focus on the practices that make my life a bit easier. These practices are not things that will resonate with everyone, but I write about them anyway because this system might be something that will work for you or for someone you know who is looking for a way to do things. I never know, so I just keep writing. Let's talk about templates today. I like a strong template, and I make them all the time. I make templates for my Teachers Pay Teachers offerings, my documentation, my current task box project, therapeutic music experience development, forms for my internship duties, you name it - I make a template for it!  Once the template is figured out, I can use it in many different ways to get things finished. While there is time spent developing the template, once it is established, I save lots of time. So, I do what I love to do - I go into project planning and figuring things out to get templates going. For me, the purpose of a template is to provide a foundati...