Three Ideas for #StuVoice in Performance Ensembles

For a long time, I taught band the same way I was taught. I picked music. I rehearsed the music. I decided on the performance format.

Most of this process is teacher driven and while it's a system that has produced some great ensembles over time, educational trends and research are continuing to show the benefits of offering more student voice. School shouldn't just be done to students; they should be making conscious choices in their daily education.  

My hope is that involving the students more in the musical processes that go into the creation of a good performance will extend their appreciation of the musical world around them.  It's not a perfect system, but here are a few ways I've attempted to incorporate more student decision making in the ensembles I work with:

• Music selection. When given the opportunity and some guidance (choosing for our strengths and instrumentation), kids actually come up with some pretty cool suggestions!  We just finished an assignment where kids posted a link to a piece from JW Pepper on a Padlet wall, submit a description to me justifying their selection, and vote on a the selections others posted on the wall.  When I've done this in the past, students definitely bought into some difficult pieces more knowing that they were part of the selection process and that the piece was suggested by a peer.
• Practicing.  I hated doing minute logs, but I still used them for quite a while because I didn't know what else to do.  Someone suggested doing practice reflections or journals on the Band Director's Facebook group and I've adapted it.  This year, students submit a short video of themselves through Google Classroom.  The video is to include a demonstration of something they've learned or mastered and the setting of a goal for the coming week.  Each follow up submission relates back to their post from the week before. It's been a work in progress but we've been learning along with our students as we help them set appropriate goals and work on strategies to achieve them. I will say though that students were pretty flummoxed by the idea that they got to choose what their goal would be rather than having one set for them.  I keep bringing it back to the fact that if they improve on anything as an individual, the group will get better too.  
• Rehearsal ideas.  Share a recording of rehearsal with students and ask for their feedback.  I asked "If you were the band director, what would you do to improve our performance?" Students gave some insightful answers.  Not only did they give great suggestions, but it got them thinking more critically about the sounds we were (and occasionally were not) producing and listening beyond their own sections.

What additions or alterations would you suggest?  How else can we get students involved and thinking critically about their music making?