Unexpected Opportunities

Thanks so much for having me. Sure, my name is Sean Longstreet. I am an educator from Southern California. I started as an itinerant elementary band director in Beaumont Unified School District and where I was really, really involved with the community and bringing a lot of opportunities to the elementary music program at the instrumental level, but also working a lot with the middle school and high school programs to develop that through line to provide a lot of opportunities for the young students to keep developing their their musicality. 

And I just saw a post from one of my former students that I started in elementary and she’s now a band director. So it’s amazing to see how when you start at that level, they go through and they can really accomplish powerful things over a long time. So I started in elementary like I said, and during that time in Beaumont. I was really active as a composer and as a performer. I performed a lot as a jazz guitarist, and I was writing a lot doing like film scores and writing a lot for windbands, my own ensembles. I had the jazz quintet I was writing for for a while, and from there I met my wife in 2015. In 2016. I moved out to LA. It was kind of out of the blue. I’d never expected that I would move to LA, and I took another position with Los Angeles Unified School District as the itinerant elementary band director again. And about four days in, I realized that it was not going to be sustainable for me because I was driving all over LA. LA is huge, and if you’re just coming in fresh in the district, you’re taking whatever is available. So there were some schools that were pretty far for me to drive. And I sent a message to Chris Rodriguez, who was part of the arts education branch and I said “Hey really happy here but if anything opens up in the secondary level, please let me know because I’m looking to like try something else” and he said he wrote back like five minutes later and he said Funny, you should just message me now. So apparently there’s an opening at Walnut Park Middle School. They’ve got a great principal, a band room and music stands but nothing else. So you’d be walking into kind of an empty slate and I said that sounds great. 

The learning curve was steep because this was now middle school in kind of a rough area. But from there I really hit the ground running and I was. I was really passionate about articulating my vision and advocating for starting an instrumental music program and the principal was all for it and she gave me a ton of support. We raised some funds to buy instruments and start a guitar program. We got grant through VH One Save the Music Foundation like a full instrumental grant. We got grants through Little Kids Rock, now Music Will. And what was so amazing about the Save the Music Foundation grant is that on the day that we had like the unboxing ceremony when the kids got to open all the instruments, we opened it up to the entire community. Everyone from the school came like there were camera crews from the local news stations and it really picked up momentum for us as far as getting eyes on what we were doing. 

I was only at that school for two years and a tremendous amount of work happened in those two years, but it still under the direction of a really great director now and they have great relationships like I was just mentioning about the elementary, the middle school and the high school. They’re all in sync and the relationship that they have with the community and with each other is so strong now. So I started that there when I was at the school. That’s also where I was pursuing my National Board certification. I had a student nominate me for Teacher of the Year and ended up getting that with LAUSD as well. Wow, like I said, in those little two years at Walnut Park Middle School, there was a tremendous amount of fulfillment and success that was started there. 

I left to go start another music program from scratch at another middle school and then I ultimately landed at University High School with LAUSD where I took over an orchestra, jazz band, keyboard, AP Music Theory kind of a structure. But they also had this multimillion dollar grant to build a studio seven years prior, which I inherited and I used that and pivoted to more of music technology focus at the school and we started a podcast that got us connected with the community. We interviewed the superintendent and a lot of other local community members, school members, members of the school board, teachers, students. 

So yeah, that’s kind of my journey through. Starting as an elementary itinerate band director and working through the few different districts on the side, I’ve been publishing music education resources on Teachers Pay Teachers. I also spent time working as the cast coordinator for the International Baccalaureate DP program with Sanesino Unified School District. So it’s been a beautiful journey of teaching and creating and music making and moving around. 

That’s amazing and what a difference you can make as a music educator. I think sometimes, particularly in California, because of California’s history of cutting the arts and now trying to bring them back, knowing the value of them because they’ve missed them for so long, which I always find ironic that California, the hub of Hollywood and media, had had this issue. But I think what you demonstrated in your journey alone is so powerful and how the arts can connect a community to the schools. And that’s so often what we’re missing in, that’s the missing piece. Right is that connection with the community where everything is running full steam ahead. Pardon the STEAM reference there. But everything is lines and everybody knows you know what they’re trying to accomplish and they’re behind that mission and vision. And I love that you were able to capture that in a variety of situations. 

You know as a music educator. I think that’s fantastic, and because you’ve had so many different experiences as both an educator and as a musician. I would love to just start talking a little bit about. How did you transition from that teacher role to that administrator role? When you were working as the Director of Music and Music Tech, why did you decide to move in that particular direction instead of staying in the classroom. 

Well, I never left the classroom. I always stayed teaching and running my programs, but whenever I had opportunities and when I was invited to run professional developments or help make curriculum available for the entire district or help other teachers optimize our learning management system, I always jumped on those opportunities, so I was always letting my own experiences in the classroom inform myself and my colleagues on what was working well for me and to work on a grand scale. 

When I was at Walnut Park Middle School. I had one of these experiences where, like the superintendent was touring through our schools, and I think a lot of teachers have this experience where they say “Oh, we’re going to get visited by the principal today, or the superintendent is going to come by.” And quite often it’s, it’s like a photo op, you know, frequently they come in real quick, they take a couple pictures and then they leave and they can say, like, “We support the arts, here I am with the music teacher!” right, and it was so different than that. This is when Austin Butene was the superintendent and he came in with his whole team and they stayed for maybe 20 minutes, and he and I had a really in-depth personal conversation. He was interested in my journey, he was asking me what was working and why we were having success, and I was asking him about his belief about arts education, integration specifically music education and this is pretty early on in his time with LAUSD. 

Fast forward to right now, he’s authored Prop 28 and is a huge music advocate but you know we really didn’t know that yet and he was telling me about his journey in education as a musician, someone who was really shy in school. And for him, music was that avenue for him to feel successful in something, to communicate with others, to feel connected into a community and to find success. And this really resonated with me. He told me about his music experiences and how passionate he was about enabling music in our schools. And then he reached out to me and said “Hey, why don’t you come have a meeting with me and some of my other colleagues because we want to pick your brain about how to create a blueprint for how to create more music programs like what you’ve done here.” So showing that genuine interest from administrator’s point of view is a valuable experience because like I’ve heard you talk about before in your podcasts, we all want to feel seen and feel heard and to be genuinely listened to, felt very reassuring and reaffirming, that the intense passion and dedication that I was bringing to the classroom was really resonating and causing a ripple effect around me. So that opportunity to have some sort of influence beyond just my classroom is really appealing. 

Yeah, and what strikes me about what you’re sharing, Sean, is that and relating it back to the book that Sanda Rhimes wrote called The Year of Yes. I don’t know if you’ve read it, but I’ve made my entire team read this about the idea of instead of saying no all the time by default, like I’m too busy, I have so much going on and for goodness sake of a person who has a lot going on or probably be Shonda Rhimes, she decided to take a full year and just say yes, yes to any opportunity and to see where it took her. And I feel like your journey has kind of evolved based on this idea of saying yes to opportunities. Because you’ve had so many that have brought you to different prongs, I guess of your calling, which has been, it’s fascinating to see like what happens, what unfolds, when you say yes to the right things, right. 

So I’m curious, how do you decipher that like? How do you know when something comes up for you as an opportunity to either take something else on or to meet with a leader or to take on maybe a tech project that you weren’t necessarily planning on? You had other things in line, how do you decide when it’s a good time to say yes or no to an opportunity?

That’s a great question and I am, I do tend to be a yes person. I can also I get excited about everything and I tend to take on like too many projects. And if I see like, I love photography and videography and it’s easy for me to take on too much and that’s a recipe for burnout and for overextending yourself. But like you said, it does present yourself with a lot of opportunities and for me one of my guiding principles is emotions and we really need to be in touch with our feelings because that is going to help us understand the direction to head. And I’ve had some, you know, some big pivots in my career and in my life where you really just have to throw up your hands and say like I really don’t know what I should be doing right now. I think this is the right way to go. 

And I think it’s so valuable to be in touch with your feelings because that really, they will guide you in the right direction. 

Yes, absolutely, I 100 percent agree with that. Absolutely, as I’ve said on a previous episode here, that one of my words this year is “surrender”, being willing to just say I’m not quite sure if this is it, but I’m gonna let it go and see what happens. I think it’s beautiful how that can evolve right.

It can. And I think this is one of the hugest, the biggest needs in education right now is giving students the opportunity to explore their own emotions and to work through them. So for me, being a creative person, I see how powerful that is for me in, like, emotional processing, yes, and it’s such a different beast. It’s not like reading a book or acquiring new information. We all have these different states and we all have these different emotional needs. We all feel things differently, but when we’re engaged in the creative process, we find opportunities for flow state and we find that we can work through these big emotions and problems like on a physical and an emotional level. 

And without arts educations, without arts education, and without opportunities for creating and exploring these different vehicles for expression, I feel like students do not have the opportunities they need to process some of these emotionally challenging environments that that they find themselves in. So one the biggest things that I come back to, one of the biggest whys of not just music education, but arts education and arts integration into all subjects when possible, is the opportunity for self-expression, connection, collaboration. 

I love that and I think that follows a lot of the IB, the International Baccalaureate kind of background and I’d love for you to expand on that in just a second. I was just reminded though that like, s a music educator myself and as an elementary general music teacher I remember there were before SEL, social emotional learning, right before all the jargon came out. Where and not that? I’m saying social mission learning is jargon, but you know this, the alphabet soup that we have that diagnosis, what we need to be doing with our students, you know, I remember times when students would come to me and their parents were getting divorced and they all they wanted to do was write a song about it. They didn’t want to share it, they didn’t want to do necessarily anything else with it other than they didn’t want to sit through a counseling session. They didn’t want to learn more about how to go back and forth between parents. They wanted to process their emotions around it, right. And so they wanted to come in and learn, how do I write a song with these lyrics that I’ve written and how or my art teacher that was with me in that building, the amount of kids who would go to her when some when their grandparent had died or something and they needed to process, they just didn’t want to talk about it. They needed a way to move through it, and I think, know music education, arts education, it allows us to transform rather than just inform, and it’s so powerful the act of transformation right, and by cutting that out, we cut our kids off at the knees. We don’t give them those experiences. I wholeheartedly agree. 

So I want to go back to your idea around those three big topics of connection and working through self-expression and again that connects back to a lot of the IB mentality. And I get this question a lot. I’d love to hear your perspective. How do you see IB and arts integration or arts education aligning?

So what I saw from the International Baccalaureate program, the way they’re designed is that they’re always bringing students back to being self-aware and looking at the curriculum and like the requirements through the lens of what’s resonating with me, what’s my learning style, what are my needs? And I think this is especially going forward. Everyone is talking about AI right now and it’s simultaneously a little scary and uncertain, but also really inspiring and there’s a lot to be optimistic about. We have access to more information than we’ve ever had and I think it’s really important for all of us to be aware of curation for our students, you know we are. 

I think it’s so important for us to not just be providers of information, but curators of information and curators of powerful learning experiences that are really bespoke to every student. I think that’s going to be more and more possible as we have better technology and AI that understands every student’s needs and preferences, an exact place on the spectrum of achieving certain learning outcomes. So this awareness and dialogue and conversation between teachers and students, I see the IB program as facilitating that question that awareness on the student’s behalf of what am I passionate about? What drives me? What problems do I want to solve and what is stopping me? What’s between like zero to five, by zero to 100? So what do I need to get from here to there? So in my experience with IB, I was the CAS coordinator and that’s a subset of the IB program. CAS stands for Creativity, Activity and Service, and it seems like a really small part of the IB program because it’s not like the more rigorous academic part. But from my experiences and conversations with other students, they did a lot of like video testimonials. We had three interviews over the two years and these students would light up and they were so excited by what they were doing because they had the opportunity, and I think they were surprised that when they came into my workshops and with the other teachers who were joining the workshops. I think they were surprised that it wasn’t a teacher telling them “This is what we’re going to study over the next two years and this is what you’re going to do”, and it was more of “What do you love? What are you excited about? What would you like to accomplish? Can you do more?” So one finding what the students are into two, nudging them in new directions where they think they where they’ve never thought that they could go before helping them identify those things and then helping them get to those places. And I see the IB program as providing a great structure that all of education can adopt, this ability to meet the students where they are, help them identify like I like, I said what they love, what they’re passionate about, and give them the tools to help them accomplish these things. 

Yeah, for sure. And I think especially right now, I actually think the pandemic gave us a wonderful opportunity, speaking of opportunities to reframe and rethink what’s not working anymore, what does not work from an industrialized society to the society that we’re currently creating as we’re going, that’s evolving and we just didn’t take advantage of it, for a variety of reasons. And I would love for this to be the year that we turn that around, that it becomes, we’re not just complaining about a new normal. We’re not struggling with all the red tape that we’ve been working with the last three years, that we finally recognize that we can do something different. It’s okay and let’s explore that a little bit more. I think that would be so positive and I know. IB also comes with a Middle Years program and a Primary Years program, so the schools that invest in IB really do try to do that vertical approach and it’s… I’ve been in the PYP programs and NYP programs have been in there. And it is inspiring to know that this can happen at any level in a public school. No matter where you are, we just have to reframe how we think about some things right, much like arts integration itself. 

So I would love to know from your perspective, since you’ve also had a lot of entrepreneurial kind of experiences as well. Tell me a little bit about that journey, how you’ve shifted into some entrepreneurial pieces, and using EGG technology with music specifically.

Right so as I’ve been coming up with my own like bespoke learning materials for my own classes. I thought, why don’t I share these with others? So I just took them the next step to to say. Okay, I know what’s working for me… how can I make this more accessible and share them with others? So that’s what led me to publishing a lot of my materials on the Music Fox and on Teachers Pay Teachers. 

When I was working at the elementary level. I thought it was really important for me to well, really at every level, especially the arts teachers who can oftentimes be isolated  and alone. I’ve always felt it so important to connect with as many other staff members as possible and to connect to the curriculum. So for example, when I was at the elementary level. I did a lot of note naming activities and even at the like middle school level, because you still have beginning classes where they’re learning how to read music. So a lot of the materials that I was making was bespoke music note naming activities that related to something that was relevant in the curriculum that the teachers that the other teachers were studying. So I oftentimes would just pull the other have a side conversation with the teachers. What are you studying right now? I would look at the holidays coming up and I produced a lot of note naming activities. So for example. I would have a sheet, if this was for Thanksgiving, I would have a list of 20 Thanksgiving related words and every letter ABCDEFG would be missing and then the students would like write that on the staff. 

But throughout the year I would make these worksheets that were bespoke to unique lessons that the students were doing that the other teachers were doing so, just making that connection to other teachers and helping the students understand all my music class is connecting to my other classes as well thought that was really valuable, so I really focused a lot on making these resources available through Teachers Pay Teachers, like I said.

That’s great and I know that there’s a lot of talk about whether or not people are still going to be using Teachers Pay Teachers. Do you feel like that’s still a really good avenue for teachers to be exploring in terms of sharing their content? Or do you advise going somewhere else, maybe. 

I think it’s always it’s good to not only be in one lane or not to have one direction, I think. Teachers Pay Teachers provides a great structure to go for, but it doesn’t need to be the only thing. And with the help of AI right now, it’s never been easier for teacher entrepreneurs to create their own branding and their own, their own sphere of influence, of how they think the educational world can look and what value they have they can bring to other people. 

Yes, yes. I just talked about this in our last episode about the difference between purpose and a calling and that your purpose is probably still going to be there as an educator. That’s who you are at the heart of it, but your calling can look so different and it doesn’t have to just be limited into one lane. As you said it can be a lot of different places and exploring that more, I think is something that would be really valuable for a lot of educators out there.

Before we close. I would love to get your take on what you think the future of education could look like and also what you’re doing now because I know you’re not still in California right. 

So the future for education we touched on briefly. Because I see with technology improving and AI Learning Management systems becoming more robust, I see us as having a greater ability to cater and customize the learning experiences for each student and that’s really valuable, 

So I’m very optimistic about that. Obviously, things are really changing and everyone is worried about kids cheating with ChatGPT having writing their essays and the problem solving is changing. But ultimately we have to see this as an opportunity for students to continue the outside of the box thinking to become Creative problem solvers and ultimately to become emotionally intelligent. 

Like I mentioned previously. I think we as teachers need to be advocating for the learning experiences and creating bespoke learning experiences. All the information is out there and it’s hard to find signal. It’s hard to find the best information with what every student needs and I know there’s a lot of, there’s amazing curriculum everywhere, but what I advocate for teachers is to not check out at the door, always bring in part of yourself into the classroom and into the curriculum. We are honoring our students’ backgrounds. We’re honoring where they come from, their languages, their unique challenges. But I think we also need to meet them with honoring our own backgrounds and interests because we have to keep it interesting. We have to go back to the why of why we teach because it’s hard being in the classroom is hard, managing everyone’s emotions is hard, tracking grades, you know. I don’t need to provide the laundry list of what makes teaching so difficult. So if you are inspired by the why, it helps you get over those challenges. 

So what I want to advocate to all the other teachers is, don’t forget to infuse parts of yourself and your values and your background because students find us interesting, we all have to know about each other. We have to make connections to each other on a deep level. So is it worth taking a couple minutes to share a story about something from your own background as a teacher, to make connections with these other little humans that we’re around all the time absolutely. 

So to bring it back to the future of education. I just think we need to be optimistic about what the new tech is bringing forward and we need to be proactive about realizing a vision for what the future of education looks like. 

I love that, I love that and tell us what you’re doing now. So recently my wife and I had an opportunity to move out of LA. My wife got a talent visa in France, so we moved last August, we moved to France. We’re living in the Loire Valley right now, so I’m in the midst of a career transition. I’m pivoting from being you know, full-time classroom teacher, where I was, you know, like I said, running professional developments and designing curriculum. And now I’m moving fulltime out of the classroom, into the EdTech realm and really following through and pursuing my passion for teacher development and training so that I can continue to have a positive impact on the education world and especially with arts integration. And that’s why I’m so into what you are doing the other, with the professional development that you’re providing and advocating or integrating arts into all classes. I think there’s so many opportunities here, especially with a lot of the EdTech startups. There’s never been more startups now because the technology is moving so fast and we have AI that’s available for everyone. There’s a lot of EdTech saas companies that are small that are moving fast. So there are so many opportunities for technology to improve the education system. And one of those I see right now, one of those tech companies is called Wave AI, so they have two products, one called Melody Studio, one called Lyric Studio and I see a great opportunity for them. It’s basically a Text to Music Generator. Yeah, where you mentioned earlier that you had a student that said I want to write a song to help me work through these emotions. It’s one thing for naturally inclined young musicians to have the skill set to write a song about it. But what I’m seeing with some of these EdTech companies, especially Wave AI, is it really democratizes the music making process so it’s enabling students to express themselves and find the melody that they’re looking for, find the right words to express what they want to say, or even it’s also a great opportunity for teachers to say we’re going to be studying, for example, the Gettysburg Address. You know, here’s the Gettysburg Address. Write a piece of music that supports the emotional intensity of that, of that speech. So there are so many opportunities for arts integration and more and more companies popping up everywhere that are supporting this mission. 

Absolutely. Absolutely and that just means that we have to bring you back on at another period of time after you’ve started this and you’ve gotten into your passion project, I would love to hear more about it as well as your journey, how it’s going in France and that transition from the US over to France. That’s a whole other episode I can definitely tell, so we’ll just have to have you back on. Sean in the meantime, where can people learn more about you and stay in touch? 

Yeah, I’m really active on linkedin again and another thing that I’m advocating is for teachers to highlight all of the amazing things that they’re doing on LinkedIn. It was kind of off my radar over the past few years when I was teaching and I became active on it again in the midst of a job search and then I realized, wow, there’s so much signal on here. There’s so much inspiration, great professionals sharing insights for free. And so yeah, you can find me there – Sean Longstreet on LinkedIn. 

Awesome, we will put that in our show notes for sure, so that people can connect with you and stay in touch. Sean, thank you so much for your time today. I really found this such a valuable conversation and I look forward to when we get to speak again. 

Thank you so much, Susan, really appreciate it.