Self-Care for the Music Educator: Not Just a Buzzword Webinar with Beth Duhon

Session Handout

Self-Care for the Music Educator- Not a Buzzword Note Sheet

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Session Description

Tired of feeling more like a martyr than a musician?  Is burnout a very real possibility?  Is your family and frankly yourself always getting the short end of the stick?  Duhon will help you write a MAP (My Action Plan) to help you get to the root cause of your stress and help you rediscover the joy of being a music educator.  This is not the tired advice of bubble baths and lighting candles, not that there’s anything wrong with that!  We’ll start with a self-assessment to realistically determine where you are thriving and where you are striving.  Following that, we’ll formulate your map.  From your commute to your meals to how you use your planning period, you will leave with practical steps that you can implement now to improve the quality of your music teacher life!

The secret sauce for an excellent music classroom isn’t the facilities or the repertoire.  It is the teacher!  We are the deciding factor in our classrooms.  Yet right now, teachers are feeling even more depleted than ever.  Our personal lives affect our professional lives and vice versa.  While nuts and bolts teaching tips are wonderful, teachers need real guidance on how to care for ourselves so we can be in our profession for a long time.  The session will begin with a self-assessment to determine where we are thriving and where we are striving. We will also learn the difference between self-soothing (quick fixes) and real self-care.

Following our discoveries, we will address how to turn our commute from wasted time to restorative time for breathing, reconnection, or prayer.  We will conquer how to eat for fuel and easy hacks for weekday lunches.  We will even tackle strategies to make the most of our time at school so we aren’t the last car in the parking lot, a prize no one wants to win.

Where most attempts at self-improvement fail is that the aims are too vague or there is no follow-through.  We will offer the opportunity to partner with another attendee for accountability.  Periodically throughout the clinic, attendees will be given time (with background music) to journal their next action step and book it as they would an appointment.  We will leave with hope and strategies because hope is not a strategy.

Presenter’s Biography

Beth Duhon is, to borrow Tracy King’s phrase, the K-5 “ambassador of joy” at Travis Elementary in Rosenberg, TX.  This is her fifth year teaching in Lamar Consolidated ISD.  She has received over $14,000 in classroom grants for a keyboard lab, iPads, and music manipulatives in addition to regularly receiving travel grants for music education conferences.  In 2021, she presented “Self-Care for the Music Educator: Not Just a Buzzword” for TMEA and the LCISD elementary music teacher cohort.  Previously, Ms. Duhon was a successful horn private lesson teacher, clinician, and freelance performer in the West Houston area for over a decade.  She also taught elementary music in Williamsburg, VA and middle school general music in Falls Church, VA before moving to Texas.  She was an honors recitalist, principal horn in the wind ensemble and orchestra, cum laude and an inductee of Pi Kappa Lambda from Illinois Wesleyan University where she received a B.M.E.  At the University of Houston, Ms. Duhon was a teaching assistant in the music history department, summa cum laude and a student of Roger Kaza (St. Louis Symphony) and Nancy Goodearl (Houston Symphony).  She received an M.M. in horn performance.  Ms. Duhon met her husband, Jimmy, when they were both performing as instrumentalists at Busch Gardens Williamsburg.  They have a ten-year-old son, Mark.