Free Student Leadership Curriculum from Scott Lang and BAND

Learn about new curriculum from BAND.
Educators can now deliver customizable student leadership training from Scott Lang via the BAND mobile app.

Interested in developing leadership in your music ensemble, but don’t know where to begin? The BAND app collaborated with Scott Lang, who specializes in leadership training in music education, to launch a free online leadership curriculum that directors can make their own. The customizable content is designed for middle school and high school music students.

“Directors need to take it, and customize it, and own it and build on it in a way that’s meaningful for their situation and their group and their COVID crisis,” Lang says.

The curriculum features five weeks of material with 15 short videos on topics like “being you” and “working with others.” Each video ends by inviting students to make a positive change.

Lang attributed the program’s flexibility to the BAND app. “They have a delivery system that not only made it easier but [also made] it more customizable … for every individual director,” Lang says.

Using the app, teachers can assign videos for students to watch and monitor which students have seen the content. Students can comment below each video and interact with the content and each other directly from their phones.

“We want to enable leaders,” says Peter Hensch, BAND app growth manager.

The app is free and has more than 170,000 marching band users, Hensch says. The app also has a community for band directors, featuring a range of content.

Directors can register for the leadership program at joinsll.com.

About author

Kacie Brown

Kacie Brown was a member of the Pride of Broken Arrow from 2012 to 2016. She is now an associate instructor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she is pursuing a Master of Music degree in saxophone performance as a student of Dr. Otis Murphy. She completed a Bachelor of Music degree with a certificate in journalism at Indiana University in 2020. In 2019, she won the inaugural Elise Hall Competition for Emerging Saxophonists and has performed at the U.S. Navy Band International Saxophone Symposium, North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference, and the Society of Composers, Inc., National Student Conference.

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