The Global Jam Session

Real cross-cultural collaboration in education is rare. Most "international projects" are exchanges, with students presenting work to each other, not making something together. The logistical hurdles are real. Different time zones, different languages, different creative contexts.

There's also a less-talked-about challenge: creative ownership. Music is personal. Students who write something that feels like theirs are often unwilling to hand it to strangers in another country to edit. The collaboration requires vulnerability that doesn't come automatically.

The collaboration started on Twitter. Churchville, who had been recording student song projects for a decade as a working professional musician, was posting about his classes' work when van der Heijden replied. Van der Heijden was a working musician too, teaching at Titus Brandsmalyceum Oss in the Netherlands. The casual exchange turned into a question. Could their classes work on tracks together?

For Churchville, the platform was already proven. When Soundtrap entered his school as a pilot in 2015, his annual student album went from a scramble for material to over 25 songs to choose from. He knew it could carry weight. The question was whether it could carry weight across an ocean.

Both teachers agreed to keep groups small. "It's better to make it not too big," van der Heijden said. The shared project lived in Soundtrap's cloud, where students from both schools could access, listen, add to, and edit the same work without scheduling a call or emailing files.

The process was built around trust. One student was going through a significant life transition and had written a deeply personal song. The student had final say on the result. Opt-in, with veto. That scaffolding made the moment of letting go, handing the track to students across the ocean to add their perspective, possible. What came back, the song titled "No Rest for the Weary," was richer than what either student had made alone.

Teachers describe transitioning from directors to facilitators as collaboration deepened. Students stopped needing instruction and started making creative decisions independently.

Students from two countries built original music together, revised it through asynchronous back-and-forth, and ended up with work they wanted to release, not just turn in. Several students explored publishing on Spotify independently, with no teacher prompting.

The Netherlands school expanded beyond music into podcast production (Scool Radio), creating a model for how one tool anchors an entire student media program.

Other teachers around the world have used this project as a blueprint.