Thursday - Plans Never Go the Way You Expect...
So, I did my actual job yesterday - all of it.
One thing I noticed a long time ago was that plans NEVER go exactly like you think they will. I have always thought of session "plans" as more like "strategies" or "suggestions," and I think it baffled some of my teachers during music therapy school. I remember getting marked down for session implementation when I rearranged the session to accommodate client responses and setting events because "that's not what you wrote on the plan." I felt that it was more important to adapt to what my client needed in the moment than what I had written on my bed at home when I was typing up my assigned session plans. When I got to my internship, my predilection to moving with my client was complimented, so I figured that session planning was not as important in real life as it was in my undergraduate program. In fact, I was encouraged to and learned how to improvise within goal-based music therapy at my internship, not at my undergrad program. Those six months formed how I would view session planning from then on.
I do not write session plans.
Now, if you are in a music therapy education program right now and don't like writing plans, you are going to have to suck it up and do your assignments. Just know that you can do whatever your work or you need to do once you are out of school. Don't use this opinionated blog post to try to get out of assignments - it doesn't work like that.
I do not write session plans. I develop therapeutic music experiences that I incorporate into session strategies.
What's the difference?
Well, in my mind plans are what I wrote in school - detailed procedure sections where I was marked down if I did not do what I said I would do in the order I put them on the page. Strategies are ways of interacting or ways of doing music therapy that can be changed and adapted within the session without being too restrictive.
With my strategies, my focus becomes targeted on the therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) that I want to use with my clients. If I feel that my clients need movement within a session, I can substitute a movement TME into the session to meet what they need in the moment. If they need me to get out preferred instruments rather than the one that I have arranged, then okay. As long as we are meeting their individualized goals, then there is no reason why we can't use a piano instead of using the xylophone to engage. This is the difference to me - embracing that the client has to have a say in how their goals are met and then following through on allowing the client to direct their own treatment.
I still write detailed procedure sections in my TMEs, but I understand that things are flexible within the session, and my procedure sections have changed a bit over my years as a music therapist to demonstrate that awareness. I focus more on writing what I will do as the facilitator than what my clients will do in response. I can never really anticipate every single response that my clients will have, so why focus on that? It is better to focus on myself. I can (usually) control myself.
My concept of session strategizing comes into my brain as a flow chart. An infinite flow chart that never ends. A complicated flow chart that makes sense to me but doesn't seem to make sense to others. Once I figured out that procedure sections are just flow charts in prose, I was able to write them with ease. Before that, though, I struggled make things that were deemed correct by my supervising music therapists. That was only one of my struggles - more on those sprinkled throughout this blog!
Since plans never go as I expect, I have continued to work on my strategizing in and out of sessions. I write TMEs. I make lists of the things I would like to share with my clients, but I also spend significant time changing things around if what I thought I wanted to share is not working for me. I always have a list of time-fillers and alternates in mind when I walk into a session. I over prepare, and that is how things work the best for me.
That's really the key to a long life as a music therapist. You have to find what works for you and then do it. If things don't work for you (like writing session plans), then change how you do things. It is not wrong not to write session plans. It is not wrong to write session plans. You have to find what works.
I am heading to work now to set up my session strategy for next week. We are going to be talking about woodwind instruments, so there will be some harmonica playing next week as well as some clarinet demonstrations. I have a student who states that she knows how to play the clarinet, so I am looking for some brand new reeds to give her a chance to show me what she knows. We will see if she can actually play or not...
See you soon! Get out there and do some strategizing about how to bring music therapy to your clients!
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