I am currently Assistant Professor of Music at Gettysburg College, where I teach courses in music theory, music history, sound studies, and video game music. Before arriving at Gettysburg, I taught music theory at Tufts University, and I served as a teaching assistant during my graduate studies at Harvard University, the University at Buffalo, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This page contains a few reflections on my teaching philosophy, and a few examples and artifacts of my collegiate teaching.

In my mind, music students—whether they are majors or minors, amateur musicians pursuing other fields of study, or students studying music formally for the first time—are defined in no small part by the sheer number of questions that they hold about music, and by the quality of those questions. These inquiries range from the very general ("where did music notation come from?"), to the very specific ("how did Mahler create that striking sound in the slow movement of his Fourth Symphony?"), to questions so startlingly perceptive and precocious (“wait, if the third of the V chord is the leading tone, can you treat the thirds of other chords like leading tones?”) that they incite, for example, deep discussions about tonicization and modulation in only the second week of Theory I. My primary goal as a teacher is to nurture this inquisitive spirit: to help my students learn to ask the right questions, and to equip them with the tools to eventually find answers for themselves—since, if I’ve done my job, they’ll continue to ask big questions long after they leave my classroom. Promoting deep intellectual engagement with music requires both a rigorous grounding in musical fundamentals and a broad exposure to advanced compositional and analytical concepts. It also requires a nuanced understanding of the history and cultural contexts that produced those concepts, and how those contexts continue to influence our applications of theory today. This unified approach, a cornerstone of my teaching, helps musical study take its place as a vital aspect of a liberal arts education.

In my classroom, I emphasize the interconnectedness of the various theoretical disciplines. I help my students develop skills in listening to, analyzing, and critiquing music in all forms, whether it is presented to them only in sound (in recordings or live performance), simultaneously in sound and notation, or only "on paper." In much the same way, I help my students produce music in a variety of forms. They use their theoretical knowledge to inform improvisation and live performance, to use notation to express their musical ideas completely and accurately on paper, and also to become comfortable with processes of recording and producing music and sound, using software like GarageBand, Audacity, Sonic Visualiser, and Logic. This focus on basic musical competencies across modalities helps me to generalize my teaching approaches across repertoires and time periods, and to flexibly engage students with varied musical and academic backgrounds.

In order to encourage these skills, I emphasize both the process and the product of musical pursuits. In my classroom, I engage my students through discussion, debate, and other active learning techniques. We stand and sing the examples we study, and work through musical problems at the chalkboard in small groups. This energetic classroom technique provides ample opportunity for collaboration, peer instruction, and individual attention as I move around the room from group to group. The time constraints of the class period, and even the physical limitations of the blackboard, can often conducive to bursts of creativity, and I've found that a playful approach to music making and composition helps students to unlock their potential. I took advantage of this, for example, in one memorable lesson that saw my students compose their own variations on a given theme, and perform and critique their classmates' compositions, within a single class period. A collaborative, open environment helps music students of all skill levels to relax and grow. 

The video below describes that experiment in model composition under a time constraint: a lesson for which I won a "Teaching Innovator" award from Harvard's ABL [Activity-Based Learning] Connect Project.

For me, one of the most rewarding aspects of teaching is mentoring student research projects, a task that I have embraced enthusiastically since arriving at Gettysburg. I have advised two senior music theory capstone projects (both students are currently pursuing graduate studies in music theory) and during the summer of 2018, I advised a project on harmony and form in the songs of Amy Beach for Gettysburg's Kolbe Fellows program. I have also helped several students develop interdisciplinary majors, combining their interest in music with topics such as music production, media studies, creative writing, and sociology.

My work with the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard has deeply affected how I view multimedia in the classroom--as a tool, or rather a set of tools, for thinking. Media assignments should not only be clear about their desired outcomes, but should be tailored to help students take advantage of the particular affordances of, for example, video, photography, or sound production. So too should the instructor's engagement with technology: we shouldn't use digital pedagogical tools simply because they're in style, but rather because we want to accomplish specific tasks and make possible particular ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. To this end, I was also involved in developing, testing, and refining techniques for the rapid production of pedagogical video, such as our overhead camera rig, demonstrated in the video below. See my full write-up of the project and its potential uses in the classroom in the 2015 issue of the online journal Engaging Students.

I have carried this spirit of adventurous and experimental pedagogy into my career as a faculty member. I am the facilitator of the Gettysburg College Faculty Working Group on Digital Project Design and Assessment, run by the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning. Some of my experiments with audio-based analysis in undergraduate theory classes were recently published in The Routledge Companion to Music Theory Pedagogy. In the summer of 2018, I taught my first online course, as part of a pilot program at Gettysburg College. In January 2019, presented a short talk entitled "Teaching With Video," which reflected on these and other experiences, at the College Music Society's Designing the Music School of the Future Summit at the University of South Carolina. 

Some other teaching videos of mine: