music, therapy, and me

I did not sleep well last night. I apparently fell asleep before 8pm and then woke up at 9pm. I did not get back into deep sleep after that, so when my light went off at 4:19am, I was not very happy. I have since showered and am now sitting here at my computer, so things are moving in the correct direction for this work day. Unfortunately, when this type of sleep interruption happens, I tend to sink into negative thoughts and ponderings. I have been imagining all sorts of negative interactions with people - not something I usually do, but now it is happening every time I start driving to work. I have been in several imaginary confrontations this week - it is exhausting, but that's the way things go... Last week, I received a request to host a practicum student in the Spring semester. This made me laugh because the school that was requesting this placement has not treated me well, so I automatically resist being part of this program. Secondly, I really feel that I have to step away ...

It has been long enough since I have had an intern that I am seriously feeling like I have little to say on the subject. At the same time, I am currently writing Chapter 5 of my general internship handbook, so I am able to write about being an intern and what types of things to think about during this important time in our professional development. It is a strange place to be in, and it is one that is a bit challenging for me. Right now, I have had three vacant internship positions since the beginning of the calendar year. I will have a vacant position next month and that will be an entire year of rejected offers. In the past nine months, I have offered positions to three applicants who have declined. It is interesting how people complain that there aren't enough internship programs, but programs like mine are empty. I guess there aren't enough internship programs that pay large stipends (which mine cannot) out there. I get it. It is interesting to me how we have moved from an ...

I am finally accomplishing something that I have been working on for a very long time. Isn't it interesting when you finally take a gulp and do the thing that has been on your to-do list for years??  Let me explain... For years, I have been offering webinars and networking with music therapy students and interns. One of the recurring themes that has happened over the years is that interns are not well-prepared for the experience prior to applying to internships. There are some folks who are surprised by the fact that they have to do an internship. There are others who feel overwhelmed by the entire experience from application to graduation. I don't think that any music therapy student should start looking for an internship without a foundation of knowledge about the process and the experience itself. So, I am writing an internship handbook to help students understand what is going on in this process. I released the first chapter, Becoming a Music Therapy Intern: Finding Your In...

It is time for my intern to start talking about termination of services with my clients. We have to do things a bit differently around my place because we never know when clients are leaving until right before they leave, so we do not go through discussion about ending services with individual clients. We focus on the intern's graduation from the internship and moving on into their new futures. It is time. I am always a bit amused by this process with my clients and my co-workers. Some will be very sad and offer my job to the intern. Others will be happy to know that I am waiting in the wings to swoop in and take over. Still more will appear ambivalent. It always surprises me to see how people respond to the news that every intern will be leaving our facility. Other than termination, we are trying to figure out the accompaniment for our holiday sing at the end of our school session. I am still not able to bend my finger and still having to splint the finger at work (still can't...

It is always interesting to see what happens in the internship of each person who comes to do an internship at my facility. Each intern is unique, and each intern has their own quirks, challenges, and contributions to share with me while they are around. In the past 25 years and 36 interns, I have learned so much about myself and about being a supervisor because of the people who volunteered to be interns at my facility. Some of the lessons are not as easy to swallow as others. Here are some of the things I have learned about myself through my role as a National Roster Internship Director over the years... Music therapists do not share much common language. I have to be ready to let go of my clients to allow every intern to become who they will be as therapists. I have to take breaks from being "mentor" in order to be "therapist" for my clients and my own well-being. I have to be a micromanager for some interns - this is not a role that I enjoy, AT ALL, but it is so...

I have entered the season of boredom as an internship supervisor - the intern is doing their full caseload, and I am on light duty. These two things are combining to my time during every intern's time with me where I am no longer "therapist" for the group but am "lady sitting in that room, occasionally yelling things." This is not my favorite time as a music therapist, let me tell you! I am on the brink of making some decisions about my internship program. I am not sure that my program can sustain two interns at the same time anymore. We have recently lost another classroom, so we now serve our client caseload in eleven groups. This is down from fifteen groups four years ago. Since the pandemic, we have not been able to have a full census due to lack of staff members, so our school has shrunk as well. In addition, our population is not an easy one to work with, so our teachers are moving on to new jobs in other districts where there is more funding and better st...

I am currently in the awkward place of going through the assignments that I offer to my interns during their internships. I am having to make decisions about what to include and what to let go of right now. Now, this is something that I do to some extent after every run of interns. I always review their assignments and look at what worked and what has to be changed. Over the last three interns, as I have mentioned several times lately, no one has been able to finish assignments on their due dates. This concerns me as it indicates (to me, at least) a failure on my part to help my interns establish good time management practices during their time with me. So, I am trying to figure out all sorts of things when it comes to assignments. For this process, I start with the AMTA competencies. In case you didn't know, I strive to run an internship that is governed by the AMTA competencies - every assignment is based on the competencies and is part of the operational definitions that I have ...

Going into work yesterday morning, I had not written any of the five TMEs that I wanted to finish this week. Knowing that Friday is my day to do so much planning and preparation, I was a bit concerned that my goal would not be even approached. The day started with me doing some task box brainstorming from the floor of my clinic while my intern did documentation from the day before. Once I could get back into my office space, I was able to finish four TMEs from my Ideas for Development file. My Ideas for Development file is a folder where I keep all TMEs that I have started but not finished. So, I have TME pieces in there. I finished up the four that needed parts and pieces that I could focus on. All four had music composed already but needed things like procedures and therapeutic function of music sections completed. It took me about an hour to finish the four, move them into their alphabetical folders, and add them to the database. The point of all of this is that I was able to finish...

This is the first day of the second half of my intern's time with us. We reviewed the self-evaluation and my evaluation on Friday. We are sending it to my intern's academic director today after signatures are affixed to the documents. After all that, we will be focusing on refining the intern's skills and areas of focus for the last three months. I am glad that we have 1020 hours to work. I know that's lots of time, but it really is in the last three months that my interns become therapists. I don't have an intern on tap for this month or for January, so it looks like I will have a bit of time before I am mentor again after intern #36 graduates. I am typically a bit picky about who I accept to my internship - there has to be a good interest in my particular population rather than a "I want to be close to home and don't really care about the population" attitude. My clients deserve to have people working with them who are interested and dedicated to und...

One of the things that I often forget when I am accepting interns to work with me is that the system that we have in place offers lots of flexibility. I have the ability to adapt and change my program in ways that I have never thought of. In the past years, I have had interns who worked four days a week, interns who have worked three days a week with me and started their own programs the other two days per week. I can do part-time internships, full-time internships, hybrid live and video production internships. I can do it all as long as the intern and the academic advisor agree with the plan. If I want to offer three, two-month long internship placements, I can. The 1020 hour, six-month internship was started way back when music therapy was in its infancy. It is a relic that we have continued based on tradition and convenience. Now, I know that finding housing for seven months (how much my internship lasts) is extremely inconvenient, but could you imagine having to find housing for tw...

As you know, I am bound and determined that my internship program be competency-based as close as possible to the ideas of William G. Spady, the original author of competency-based education as a pedagogical structure. To that end, I have coordinated my evaluation, assignments, and the entirety of my internship program to the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) Professional Competencies . This is a system that I started in 2000 when the competencies were first adopted by AMTA, and I have revised it many times in the last 22 years. I am changing it now to accommodate parts of the new reality for us as music therapists - the reality that includes the possibility of telehealth as a definite part of our future as therapists. The point that I would like to make, however, is that I use the Professional Competencies to provide my interns with information that they need to know and to provide me with a more objective way to determine when they are ready to head out into the entry-level w...

Over the years that I have served as an internship director, I have had to come up with systems for various tasks. Today, I get to finish up the internship program of my 34th intern, so I thought I would share the system that I use to make sure that my intern gets all the things finished and to me and that I act in an ethical manner for the benefit of my intern. One of the things that has always bothered me (even back in the dark ages of the last decade of the last century) is that the site evaluation has to be given to the internship director in-person. I have a bit of difficulty with the assumption that an intern will feel comfortable being honest with an internship director about corrections needed to the program. I have spoken to many interns who have stated outright that they do not feel like they can be honest during that process. As a result, I try my best to make sure that my intern knows that I cannot change anything on their paperwork when they give me feedback. When I was on...

There is so much more to competency-based education (CBE) than having a list of professional competencies as a small part of our educational programming. Just so you know, this is something that I am passionate about as we move into newer ways of educating and training future music therapists. This has been the topic of research projects of mine in the past (submitted for publication and loved by one reviewer and bitterly hated by the other reviewer - how can you ever hope to make it to publication when reviewers are that far apart in views?), and it continues to be something that I want to talk to music therapists about, so I do! My expertise, of course, is in using the American Music Therapy Association Professional Competencies in pre-internship and internship clinical training. I have developed a competency-based evaluation that I use in my internship program, and I developed the same thing for my educational program during my time as a graduate student. I find the AMTA competencie...

I am in a bit of a self-judgy mood at the moment, so please bear with me as I indulge in a bit of self-criticism and reflection. This happens on a regular basis, but it is time to do a bit of this type of thought. Last week , I posted about how I wish my interns knew more about the board certification process and the things that have to happen when you are a board certified music therapist. This week, it is time to turn the focus back on myself. I have been an internship supervisor since 1998. I am currently working with my 34th and 35th interns, and I talk to music therapy students, interns, and professionals often about things that happen in internship programs. I have spent lots of time and energy volunteering for AMTA over a span of about ten years (that ended a bit ago). I write about being an internship supervisor every Monday (well, not EVERY Monday, but as many as I can) on this blog. I have definite opinions about how interns should be trained in their internships, and I share...

It is Friday, and this is a late post because I FINALLY GOT SOME SLEEP! I fell asleep around 7:30 last night and slept until 3am, got up and used the bathroom, watched some videos until 5 and then flipped over and slept again until 7:45. I have a little less than an hour to get ready for an eye examination and blog and all that. I am still exhausted, but at least I was able to sleep for an extended amount of time. Having the occasional night where I do not get much sleep is not completely unusual for me, but two nights in a row is VERY unusual. I blame my depression (appears that I do this every summer with high temperatures and soggy air) and my current emotional state for all of this. Yesterday, I had a couple of wins. I was able to change a system where I really was getting screwed over as well as acknowledgement of a service delivery system that I organized for our new vocational program. I'm not sure that anyone other than the two of us who discussed this know that it is my sy...

I think we have started a new tradition at my facility - YouTube Friday afternoons! We spent the last hour of our music therapy day watching 80's music videos (with some videos from other times - we HAD to finish up with the Muppets and Bohemian Rhapsody, of course!). It came about in a silly way, but an organic way, so I hope that we will continue this type of interaction and music sharing beyond these two interns. I love having two interns at the same time, and I really love having interns overlap with two different interns during their time with me. We have had many intern traditions over the years. There were the pens bought by senior interns for their junior interns. There have been chair upgrade ceremonies. We still have the anointing of the senior intern, but this has become my tradition rather than one that my interns share with one another. I had an intern wisdom notebook a long time ago, but that tradition died off - it was my fault completely. I may ask my next intern to...

I am a bit overly medicated at the moment, so I have to delay my commute for another hour. I am not accustomed to being late to work, but I do have a dispensation from my principal due to my current medical issues, so I am going to take advantage of that dispensation and not leave until the sun has risen completely. I am hoping that my side effects will be gone by that time so I can drive myself the hour to work safely. We shall see... I am tired today, but I am ready to get the last month of school for the 21-22 school year going. We have 32 days left (including weekends) until we have two weeks - TWO WEEKS - off for our first summer break. My facility has an extended school year, so we will work four days a week for most of the month of June and then the same schedule for three weeks of July before our last summer break. The 22-23 school year starts up in August, and my school calendar is finally starting to mirror the school district calendar. We will have less 12-hour days and more...