Darla Hanley's Music Room
Creative Teaching for Students of Today (& Tomorrow) PK-8
Darla Hanley’s Music Room—Season 2 Begins!
Spring Into Motion
© 2026 Darla S. Hanley
Hi! I’m Darla, an experienced PK-12 music educator, college professor, and former Berklee College of Music Dean looking to connect with teachers, parents/caregivers, and others seeking to advance creative music making for today’s students—and their teachers.
Before I present the real “Spring Into Motion” text, I want to take a minute of reflection. Thanks for indulging me (lol). Last spring I started writing Darla Hanley’s Music Room to share original teaching strategies, advice, teaching tips, playlists, and more!
Over the course of a year I authored (wowza) a total of 72 posts filled with teaching strategies that outline ways for students to engage in singing, instrument play, dances, movement games, body percussion, street games, cup games, etc. I also wrote songs and chants; and designed downloadable color sheets, word-search puzzles, color cards and movement directives. What fun!
In Darla Hanley’s Music Room you will find a few advice-style columns and lots of teaching strategies that include the following elements:
Pedagogical Foundations
Step-by-Step Scripted Instructions
ProTIPS
Materials/Set Up
Links to Audio Tracks
EXTEND the Learning Ideas
Learning Targets
Learning Outcomes
Assessments
These posts are designed to give you everything you need to be able to implement the strategies—any time—including your first class on a Monday morning (lol)!
Call to Action: Check out the attached PDF for a list of post titles, grade level, and educational focus from DHMR Season 1… and share it with someone you know. Thanks for helping me spread the word!
Spring Into Motion
Okay, here we go!
The 1-year anniversary mark of creating Darla Hanley’s Music Room posts provides a natural opportunity for me to spring into motion to implement a refreshed approach toward how I frame, organize, and share teaching strategies, advice, teaching tips, and more. I’m still working on what those full changes are (lol), but I can say it’s exciting to create, make, and distribute original ideas that contribute to music education.
As I begin Season 2, I encourage you to spring into motion too! Try these 3 things:
Stop It!
Give Yourself Permission
Take Something You Love to Teach and Give It a New Look and Feel.
1. Stop It!
I know. I’m telling you to spring into motion and my first suggestion is to stop (lol)! But… In this crazy fast-paced world it sometimes feels like we are on a hamster wheel running round and round, right? Sure, we all have obligations, I know… but what would happen if we took a moment to ourselves? You know, just stopped doing chores, running errands, prepping for work, etc. for an hour—an afternoon, or a day? I posit that if we do this (without guilt) we will feel better by relaxing and recharging…and our students will benefit.
Additionally, when I think of stopping, I cannot help but consider things I do that I probably should stop (lol). I LOVE potato chips, but maybe I don’t need to eat as many… This is entirely up to me, right? No one is making me eat (delicious) chips (lol). So here I wonder what other things am I choosing that could be stopped to help me be more productive, effective, and successful?
I once attended a professional development session at Harvard where the professor was helping us identify unconscious actions we each took that resulted in us “getting in our own way”. Apparently I’m pretty good at procrastinating (lol). I should probably stop that.
Call to Action: I encourage you to think about things you do personally and/or professionally that you might stop in order to be more X, Y, or Z.
These are things like procrastination, but also could be something like engaging in a passive/aggressive manner without realizing it OR taking shortcuts. We once had a carpenter working on our house who said “put the real time in and you’ll be happy with the results — take a shortcut and your work will show it”. Wise man.
In my mind, this type of stopping requires awareness and recognition. It also requires us to give ourselves permission to change, which leads me to #2 (see how I did that—lol).
2. Give Yourself Permission
When I was younger I thought I had to wait. I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have enough experience. Those opportunities were for someone else. What?????
Okay, in some ways that line of thinking is true, but not 100%! I realized somewhere along the way, that I—should if I could. This framing gave me permission to try and do SO many things. I no longer passed on an opportunity that presented because I inserted personal (and artificial) limitations; rather I jumped in to add my original ideas to the conversation or task-at-hand.
Here’s another way to think about this type of permission:
If someone asks you if you have direct experience doing X, Y, or Z and you don’t… Honestly consider if you think you could perform what is being asked. If the answer is a confident, realistic, and authentic, “yes!”— reply that way to clearly state that you haven’t exactly done the X, Y, or Z before but you have had successful parallel experiences. This framing shows what you have done and many times allows doors to be opened to try the new thing—all while getting experience in the process. Make sense?
Call to Action: Give yourself permission to try something new or do something that may not be “mainstream” but who cares? Wear that fun hat! Take a dance lesson in a style you’ve never tried! Think about how “I should if I could” may resonate in your life. I bet you’ll be surprised by how that mindset changes the game.
3. Take something you love to teach and give it a new look and feel.
I love to teach teachers! Giving teachers new ideas—and inspiration—is meaningful to me. And in this process, I love to teach songs, ways to play instruments, educational games, dances, and more. I also love to take a familiar song, track, or artist and use it in a new manner. Here I am able to engage teachers (and then their students when they implement the activity) with music or artists they know, but in different ways.
Theoretically, this is a bigger way of looking at the EXTEND the Learning section I always include in DHRM posts (lol). By taking something familiar and making it unfamiliar we are scaffolding the learning for students and building on their prior knowledge and skills. The can connect to the familiar while simultaneously experiencing another dimension or level of learning. Further, by taking something familiar in a new direction we are setting up the “unexpected” which is a sneaky way (lol) of engaging students to try and apply in a different context.
Finally, students know when we are engaged and fully present. They can sense our investment in the educational process—or our lack thereof. I was practicing my saxophone the other day and started searching for new jazz standards to play. Wow. What I discovered was not fully new to me (lol), but when I LOVED the melody my tone was warmer, the phrases stretched and arced, and I was singing through the horn. My personal connection to a song impacted how I performed it.
We owe our students the best educational experiences we can deliver every single day, week, and school year. In my view, this means we need to bring our best teaching to school all the time. It also means, we need to recognize our personal connections to specific musical compositions and/or artists and include that music in our teaching.
Call to Action: Identify a song, ensemble piece, recording, game, or dance that you absolutely LOVE to teach. Think about music you include every year, favorite games or dances, etc. Then, set a timer and give yourself 10 minutes to write down as many things you could do with this music/music learning experience—that you haven’t done before. If it was a circle dance, make it a line dance! Start with the instrument point-and-play and make it a composition opportunity. You get the idea.
Pick 1 or 2 that jump off the page—you know, the one(s) you can’t wait to try with your students because you know they will LOVE them—and implement them in class. I bet the result will be meaningful, and musical!
Final Thoughts
Spring is a time of rebirth. It’s a special time of year when nature blooms with sights and sounds. Why not make it a special time in music to bloom with beautiful, original, and creative sights and sounds, too?
For me this spring is also a special time of reflection regarding what I have created with Season 1 of Darla Hanley’s Music Room and its 1x only opportunity to begin Season 2!
I’m glad I took time and stopped for a moment before beginning Season 2. I’m also glad I have personal permission—from me to be me—to do what I can, when I can, if I can… you get it.
I hope you find at least one new idea in DHMR Season 2 that becomes something you LOVE to teach… and then change it up a bit to make it yours! Happy Teaching!
Thanks for checking this out!
Congratulations on a year of sharing great teaching strategies! Nicely Done.