Digital Songwriting and Production

Every young person deserves to see themselves represented in their education. Yet the U.S. public education system rarely reflects the interests and cultures of the young people it serves. Little Kids Rock’s work bridges the cultural chasm that exists between music taught in schools and music students experience in their everyday lives.

Little Kids Rock’s “Digital Songwriting and Production” professional development series is designed to make music classrooms more diverse, inclusive, and equitable by preparing public school teachers to use digital audio workstations (DAW) to provide instruction in today’s most popular genres including hip hop, Latin, R&B, rock, and pop. Because this curriculum does not rely on the use of traditional instruments, it addresses a chronic equity issue facing many kids: the lack of instruments at home. This program will provide more students with access to student-centered education and a healthy outlet for self-expression.

Little Kids Rock addresses inequities in current music pedagogies and curricula. Top-down, didactic approaches requiring the memorization of terms, scales, and keys, that promote technical skill and rote recitation as the main objectives, and which rely almost exclusively on the repertoire of dead White men have only served to winnow down the number of children who can (or want to) participate in music. Research shows that approximately 80% of U.S. public school students will leave music education almost as soon as it becomes an elective.

Challenges to access and participation in music instruction were compounded during COVID-19 related school closures and subsequent virtual instruction. U.S. public school music teachers struggled to reach their students, only 25% of whom had access to instruments at home. In addition, more than one-third of our national teacher network expressed a need for a curriculum that supported students socially and emotionally in the wake of unprecedented disruption.

At a time when the benefits of music education—improved self-esteem, enhanced language skills, and emotional development—are better understood than ever before, Little Kids Rock aims to expand access to music-making so that all students can receive these benefits.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are foundational to our work. Our goal is to use music as a communication tool to foster fluency in the language of music. This means giving students immediate, hands-on, non-notational music-making experiences where approximation is accepted, collaboration and experimentation are encouraged, and students make the music that they know and love. By emphasizing skills like songwriting, young people begin to “communicate” their thoughts, feelings, and ideas with a profound impact on their wellbeing.

Little Kids Rock’s new, online teacher-training series “Digital Songwriting and Production” is designed to address the current needs of all music teachers who are providing virtual and/or in-person music instruction. Teachers will participate in three, live sessions to learn how to teach their students to collaboratively compose and produce songs using an online DAW, such as Soundtrap, and incorporate a Project-Based Learning unit through sequential lessons.

Exposure to current music production technology in primary and secondary school will better prepare a greater overall number of children for careers in the broader world of music. It will also positively impact the nurturing of 21st-century skills such as leadership, collaboration, and creativity as well as technology and media literacy.

Little Kids Rock currently serves 550,000 students through the efforts of 2,500 teachers across 600 U.S. school districts. Little Kids Rock also prioritizes partnerships with schools where more than 50% of the student population are eligible for free or reduced-fee lunches. Nationally, approximately 70% of the students we serve meet this distinction. When buying groceries is a challenge, obtaining an instrument or getting lessons outside of school is almost impossible, so in-school offerings are essential to providing a creative outlet to young people.

Many of our major partner districts serve student populations that are predominantly young people of color. As a result, most of the kids do not see their diverse cultural perspectives represented in traditional music programs such as orchestra or choir. By incorporating today’s most popular music genres including pop, rap, rock, hip hop, Latin, and R&B—which were largely pioneered by people of color—into classrooms, our program gives students who feel represented by these genres the means to express themselves.

Little Kids Rock reaches these students by training public school teachers in our culturally responsive and student-centered pedagogies. Throughout the 2020-2021 school year, Little Kids Rock has increased contact with our teachers through virtual town halls, social meet-ups, and teachers-only Facebook groups to learn about the challenges our teachers confront daily. “Digital Songwriting and Production” was developed in direct response to our teachers’ needs to reach their students without access to instruments. Little Kids Rock not only incorporates teachers’ feedback into our program curriculum but also into our implementation. As we have developed multi-session online courses, we have worked with participating teachers to determine the number of hours and sessions that best fit their busy schedules. 

We plan to continue this level of communication with our teachers as we prepare for the 2021-2022 school year so that we have the best possible understanding of our teachers’ circumstances and can develop training, curricula, and delivery models that meet their current needs.

Little Kids Rock supports music teachers in adapting their pedagogy to be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive by incorporating contemporary musical genres in their classrooms. Our non-notational methodology and materials make music education accessible to students who are typically left out of traditional music classrooms.

Our program empowers teachers to meet students where they are—and last year, that meant predominately online. “Digital Songwriting and Production” offers project-based learning opportunities for individuals or small groups that can be used in any learning setting. As schools return to in-person delivery, this program will continue to provide personalized instruction and technology skills.

Little Kids Rock piloted “Digital Songwriting and Production” in the Orange County Department of Education during summer 2020. During the 2020-2021 school year, we effectively rolled out this programming alongside our existing professional development workshops. To date, we have held 24 “Digital Songwriting and Production” courses, to provide 650 teachers with 3,500 professional development hours. These teachers provide digital songwriting instruction to 80,000 students. 

“Digital Songwriting and Production” was implemented in some of the U.S.’s largest public school districts including Chicago Public Schools, Dallas Independent School District, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, and Los Angeles Unified School District. We also worked in partnership with state departments of education including Georgia, Maine, and New Hampshire to offer statewide, virtual professional learning. 

After successful implementation this year, we believe this program is ready to scale nationally and internationally to bring public school music education into the 21st century.

“Digital Songwriting Production” transforms not only how music education is taught, but also the values of music education—and by extension the values of the American public education system. Rather than focusing on rote memorization and performance of a canon consisting of dead White male composers, “Digital Songwriting Production” emphasizes the creation of music. 

This pedagogy allows for personalized exploration of students’ interests and allows them to express themselves in a way that authentically reflects their diverse backgrounds and experiences. The music industry is inherently innovative and is a driving force in technology development—this solution provides a music education pedagogy that resembles the music industry. According to a recent study by the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry contributed $143 billion to the U.S. economy and supported—directly and indirectly—1.9 million jobs. Through “Digital Songwriting and Production,” students can explore skills that will prepare them to enter a major industry.

Music education is a microcosm of the broader American education system. If we can innovate this field to be more student-centered, diverse, equitable, and inclusive, it will serve as a model for other aspects of education.

Little Kids Rock currently serves 80,000 students through the efforts of 650 teachers trained via “Digital Songwriting Production.” 

Next year, we aim to serve over 156,000 students and 1,300 teachers.

In five years, we aim to serve 273,000 students and 2,275 teachers.

To assess the program’s impact, Little Kids Rock considers a multitude of qualitative and quantitative factors. Quantitative outputs measured include tracking the number of teachers trained, students served, training and professional development opportunities offered, among other outputs. 

To measure qualitative impact, Little Kids Rock conducts classroom site visits (as current health guidelines allow), solicits teacher feedback, and requires teachers to complete a year-end assessment survey addressing 4 key efficacy markers: Youth Development, Youth Musical Development, Teacher Development, and School Outcomes. The assessment tool—developed in collaboration with The Center for Arts Education Research at Teachers College at Columbia University—measures qualitative outputs such as key components of musical aptitude and psychosocial development.

Based on historical data, we anticipate the following outcomes in students who participate in a Little Kids Rock program: 

• 85% will feel happier and/or more confident
• 85% will want to come to school (whether virtually or in-person)
• 80% will be more likely to express themselves
• 70% will feel that they are better at using technology to make music

In addition, we anticipate the following outcomes in teachers who implement a Little Kids Rock program following their attendance at a training workshop:

• 95% will observe an increase in students’ motivation to make music
• 90% will feel that their classrooms are more student-centered
• 85% will feel more comfortable teaching genres that are culturally relevant to their students 
• 70% will feel like they are part of a professional learning community of practice

Little Kids Rock’s program team is made up of 11 full-time staff members and 3 part-time staff members who develop and implement our teacher training workshops and curricular resources, including our “Digital Songwriting and Production” project. The program team is supported by 10 administrative and 7 development staff members.

Little Kids Rock is a teacher service organization and teachers’ voices are represented in all levels of our staff and National Board; approximately one-third of our staff were first educators before joining our organization full-time, including our Senior Director of Programs and our Director of Teaching & Learning, among others. Our team brings years of experience from across the nonprofit, business, education, tech, and music industries. More information on our staff is available here. 

Little Kids Rock continues to be recognized at a national level by professional organizations in the field. For instance, our recently published Modern Band Methods book received a “Best Tools for Schools” designation at the 2021 National Association for Music Merchants show. Little Kids Rock also celebrates a continued partnership with the National Association for Music Educators, once again directing their All-National Honors Modern Band Ensemble.

Little Kids Rock recognizes that to successfully incorporate cultural competence and inclusivity into our pedagogy, our internal operations must be guided by those same principles. In addition, we believe that to best serve our diverse communities, our staff must be representative of those communities. As a result, Little Kids Rock is committed to diversity, inclusion, and equity at all levels of our organization and across all operations. 

As part of this commitment, we launched a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion internal working group in consultation with an external consultant to evaluate protocols and processes and inform future practices. The goal of this group is to reflect and make recommendations on issues of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in our workplace, and advise the company as we make decisions moving forward to best impact the people we serve and achieve our mission.

We have also created a Black Educators Focus Group, a volunteer body of Black educators, administrators, and industry professionals, who are similarly advising Little Kids Rock on externally facing DEI policies. This focus group supports our organization in overcoming implicit bias to better serve our teachers and students of color. 

Media exposure and access to Solve and MIT’s network will help us expand our reach to U.S. school districts and to begin to bring “Digital Songwriting and Production” to scale abroad. Evaluation support will also help us measure our impact and will help us continue to understand our teachers’ and students’ needs as guidelines evolve regarding school reopening; for example, will teachers be using more hybrid instruction than remote instruction during the new school year? Lastly, access to relevant in-kind resources, such a varied DAW software, would allow us to expand “Digital Songwriting and Production” to include other platforms and reach more music teachers.

While Little Kids Rock has an evaluation system in place to assess the impact of our programming as a whole, we believe that “Digital Songwriting and Production” would benefit from more specific data collection. In addition, while our programming currently focuses on Soundtrap, there are many options for DAW for school use such as BandLab, Chrome Music Lab, ProTools, and Logic. To provide additional support for teachers and expand options for districts, we would like to develop training programs in other DAW systems.

Among Solve Members, Little Kids Rock is excited to meet Education Modified. Our program’s hands-on, non-notational methodology has helped our music teachers meet the needs of their students with exceptionalities, and we believe our program could facilitate general music instruction in special education classrooms. We are also interested in learning from CENTURY Tech about developing a learning management system to promote personalized instruction. 

Little Kids Rock’s “Digital Songwriting and Production” provides professional development opportunities for public school teachers to learn how to incorporate digital audio workstations in their music instruction. After initial training, teachers provide songwriting instruction as part of their core curriculum via project-based learning units. Little Kids Rock will use The ASA Prize for Equitable Education to support training and provide free resources to teachers working in underserved school districts. In addition, we will further the career exploration component of our program by partnering with higher education institutes currently using our pedagogy to provide students with opportunities to explore post-secondary opportunities to support a career in music.