music, therapy, and me

I have a little secret - something that I have kept close to myself for many years. I NEVER liked writing session plans. Wow. It's pretty nice to be able to admit that to someone other than my family members. Let me say it again. I have NEVER liked writing session plans!! Oooh, the more I say it, the easier it gets. My frustration with writing session plans started way back in my sophomore year of college when I started leading practicum sessions. My practicum supervisors would send back my plans and say things like "there needs to be more detail." I struggled with what they wanted, so it became a task that I dreaded. I finally figured out that the level of detail that my supervisors were looking for was a prose flow chart, and I was able to produce plans that satisfied their need for detail and my need for flexibility. (No one would let me draw a flow chart, though. I still had to write it out in a way that they understood. Interesting, isn't it?)  My ...

As is typical for the return after a break, I am heading into my music therapy sessions for the day without a session strategy in place. I know what I am going to do with clients next week and the week after, but I have nothing ready for today. It is time to go to session strategies and my therapeutic music experience (TME) file for some inspiration. I am someone who has enough TMEs under my belt that I can really improvise an entire session at any time, but I feel that my sessions are much more therapeutic when there is an element of purpose behind the session strategy. Therefore, I like to make general outlines for my sessions. When I am teaching music therapy students about sessions plans, I like to show them task analyses that include all transitions and every single piece of music that will be used during a session. Then, I tell them that any and all things on that session plan will change as soon as clients enter the session. I am the type of therapist who strives to make...

Today is the last official day of break. On Monday, I will be heading back into my regular music therapy routine with the addition of a music therapy intern and the changes in the schedule between the regular school day and the summer session. We go to a four-day work week during the summer, so the five-day schedule has to be squished into four days. I end up moving from having prep and planning time to having very little during the summer hours. The benefit is that I get three-day weekends during the summer because I am not working at the church. I get lots of time to myself during the summers. I was gone the last week of school due to an upper respiratory infection that came along with a fever that I could not shake. Our rule is that you cannot come back until you have been fever-free without medication for 24 hours. I went to work for about an hour and a half on Tuesday, but my boss kicked me out and made me go home. I missed the first graduation in my time at the facility. I missed...

As many of us school-based therapists are heading back to full-time music therapy schedules, I find myself thinking about planning sessions and how to go about that task in a way that is efficient, easy, and not as time-consuming as it is right now. Here are some tips that I've found to be helpful in my session planning routine. What would you add to the list?? Collect ideas in a central location. I have a list of therapeutic music experiences (TMEs) that I started way back when I was an undergraduate, and I keep on adding to that idea bank. I have ideas listed in a database on my TME jump drive. Every time I write a new TME, I put it on the central drive and update the database. When I need a new idea (or just want some inspiration for something that I haven't done 1,000,000 times in the past month, I go to the file. View session planning as strategy development - not script writing. I can plan all sorts of things for my music therapy sessions, but if the client is not ...

I had plans for myself yesterday - an afternoon without sessions where I could do some more organizing of the spaces that I have upended due to a recent ceiling leak. I had plans that were destroyed by a storm two nights ago and slick roads. My afternoon without sessions changed into business as usual - two sessions in the middle of my afternoon. The same groups will be going on their field trip today, but I will only miss one session and will only get 30 minutes of extra preparation time due to my schedule. Sniff. Sigh. Waaaaah! 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 even...

Ah, systems. I often think about this particular post series during the week as I go through my regular routine. The thoughts that go through my head include things like, "is this a system?" and "is this even interesting to anyone other than me?" If the answer to both questions is affirmative, then I figure out what to write about. Lately, I've seen queries about how people arrange their instrument storage, so I took a look at my system of organization. Here it is... Just like everything else in this series, this is just how I do this task - it is not a recommendation or requirement or even a strong suggestions. It is simply my way of doing things. These posts are meant to give you a glimpse into one way of being a music therapist - not THE way of being a music therapist. Find YOUR way and make it work for you. If things aren't working for you, then look at all the ways and find the combination that you need to do what you need to do in your space. S...

So, I started this thing almost a year ago (I think I started last September). I became part of the bullet journaling movement - sorta - kinda - well, not really. I wanted to be part of the bullet journaling movement. I was seduced into trying to make my weekly pages all cutesy and full of stickers, but it became quickly apparent to me that none of those things were me. As a result, my bullet journaling became lots less like the cute journals that are featured on Pinterest and became much more of a monthly collection of appointments and thoughts. I decided that this way of doing things is fine for me. Fast forward to early last month. I got a coupon in the mail for a free teacher planner if I spent at least $20.00 in the store. That really wasn't a problem - I needed some specific headphones to go with my listening station, so I received a new teacher planner. Now, I don't usually use planners. None of them have ever really given me what I need in order to make my sessi...

For my entire career, I have rebelled against the idea of session planning. I struggled with procedure sections in my undergrad training. I've written about this recently - how I would take the example in our practicum handbook, change the details but not the format, and would be told that it "was not right." That was all the feedback that I would get. I would ask how to make those sections "right," and no one could tell me how to do that. I had a revelation in the summer between my junior and senior years (thank all that is good in the universe), and then I was able to figure it all out, but that experience has left me a bit leery of writing session plans. One of the biggest issues that I have with session plans is that there is so much that happens in a session, and it is impossible to foresee every response. Plain old impossible! So, I don't write session plans. I haven't for my entire career because I find the practice to be busywork. Instead, I focu...

I am heading off to lead sessions today with a limited plan. It is Musician of the Month reveal week so I've got that, but there isn't anything else written on my session strategy planner for this week. This is something that I do every once in a while. I head into my sessions without a set session strategy. Instead of writing things out, I spend time engaged in improvisation with my clients. We will probably work on some of the concepts that we've addressed recently - belly breathing will make a return appearance (coping skills are important to review often with my clients). By the end of today, I will probably have more of a plan than I do right now. Maybe I won't. I've found that improvising sessions is something that keeps me paying attention to my clients. It is easy to get into a routine, but heading into a session without a plan allows me to focus on my clients in their groups. I can shape the music to the group without having a specific theme or TME to ...

Today is Friday in this part of the world, and I am getting ready to finish my therapy week. As I've stated before, this is a non-group day. I have three individual sessions and then some planning time. I also have peer supervision with a corresponding lunch out and away from my facility. Today, also, I have an appointment with the Worker's Compensation doctor to be cleared for the finger sprain I got about 10 days ago. The finger feels better, but is not at 100% yet, but the doctor will probably clear me and release me from care. I have yesterday's documentation to finish up (six groups!), and some planning to do for next week. I was thinking about some of my quirks. One of those quirks is that I like having structure. I like knowing that groups will arrive in my room at specific times. I like having my weekly foci. I like having a plan for how I will finish tasks and get things done. This was all started by making some early airline reservations for my winter break. I...

I spent most of the day sleeping. My bed was too uncomfortable for a bit, so I went into the craft room and laid on the floor there before heading back to bed for a four hour nap. I think I skipped my medications yesterday which made today a "getting back into the routine" day which means extreme exha ustion and sleeping all day. When I did get up, I felt better, ordered food, ate it while sitting on the floor (my favorite place to sit), and then finished up a revamp of tonight's webinar program. I am still exhausted, but I think I'll be able to stay awake through the webinar...I hope. We are going to talk about how I write and organize my therapeutic music experience strategies. There are so many deliberate word choices in that sentence, that I feel that I need to elaborate on why I wrote what I wrote. I have chosen to call what I do with clients in the session "Therapeutic Music Experiences." I started off calling them "applications" because my ...

Today's the day that I take over my full caseload without an intern in sight. I am looking forward to this chance to be "THE music therapist" again, I am not going to lie. I like having nothing other than my job to do. I am enjoying the fact that I get to get to work when I want to and then leave when my 8 contracted hours are up rather than spending more time in supervision mode. The change in my status from supervisor to therapist means some changes in how I am working with my sessions. I do not write full out session plans. I have not written many session plans since I stopped being a practicum student way back. My university program focused on writing session plans, and I had one supervisor who would check off my procedures when I was running the plan. If I didn't do things in the order I had written them, she would challenge my clinical decisions. I don't know if she was testing me to see if I could justify the changes or if she honestly thought that a 3-year...

It's time for a Bullet Journal update - Music Therapy style! If you've been following this particular thread on my blog, then you know that I am doing something sorta, kinda like bullet journaling for my session strategy development. It's not pretty, but it is turning out to very functional for me and my strategizing practice. So, I have this elementary school teacher planner that I got for free with purchase at Lakeshore (an educational supply store - by the way, I get absolutely no financial benefit from the things and stores that I talk about on my blog - if I mention something, it is because I use it and find it helpful). It isn't exactly perfect for music therapy planning, but it is much more functional than the planners that my school provides - those are designed for high school teachers, not for therapists. Since I am not a teacher, but a therapist, I change the planner a bit to make it functional for me. Someday I may make my own planner, but, for the mom...

Happy Monday, all. One of the best things about being a school music therapist is the opportunity to have scheduled breaks set in the calendar a year at a time so I can plan on doing specific things at specific times of the year. For example, I know that I can go visiting California during the winter break, and the last summer break before the fall semester can be used for at-home things. This tends to be the break where I make new things for my music therapy clinic. This break, only four days old, is no exception. I am experimenting with a new bullet journal format at work. This started with a free teacher planner (I can't resist something that I get for free). I got the planner, intending on keeping it for a future, as of yet unknown intern, but the more I looked at it, the more I started thinking about my session planning and my bullet journal experimentation of this year. So, I took the free planner (it doesn't have a grade book, which is good for me - I don't k...