Teaching Teachers in Madrid

John and I have just returned from a two-day workshop in Madrid, where we worked with music teachers from international schools from all around Europe.

This was a big deal for us because no one has ever let us out of the country before.

Our assigned task was to teach how to write and produce a musical. So we selected a traditional Spanish folktale (The Three Golden Oranges) and we asked the group of twenty-one teachers to turn it into a short musical by the end of the second day.

This sounded quite difficult to us, and we were worried that the whole thing would turn out to be a fiasco. But the group was so talented and enthusiastic that they pulled it off.

At the end of day two they performed the show in the auditorium at International College Spain (a K-12 school built around the International Baccalaureate program.) The 30-minute show featured seven original songs as well as an extended dance sequence. We had divided the teachers into groups of twos and threes to write the songs, and each group not only wrote music and lyrics, but they then found other members of the class to sing their solos, chorus parts, and play percussion.

They were dazzling performers who improvised vocal harmonies and movements on the fly. The performance took place on Thanksgiving Day (not a holiday in Europe) and now four days later I can't get the songs out of my head.

A big thank you to the music committee of ecis.org and especially to the participants who made our time so fulfilling.