Transforming Music Teacher Preparation

Traditional music education has a long history of excluding students who don't come in through the conventional door: notation literacy, instrument access, ensemble readiness. The teachers being trained to run music classrooms often don't know how to build for anyone else.

Langol has watched this play out at every level of the system. Music education programs at universities train teachers to teach what they know, typically classical or ensemble-based. The result is teachers excellent at serving a narrow slice of students and unprepared for the rest. Her challenge isn't just teaching music. It's teaching teachers to think differently about what a music classroom can hold.

Even teachers who arrive with digital tool fluency hit a concrete wall: how do I scaffold this for my students? How do I keep them engaged? The technology comfort is necessary but not sufficient. The scaffolding gap is what Langol's program is built to address.

Langol uses Soundtrap with her Berklee students, pairing it with Shed the Music's Elements curriculum to create a scaffolded, project-based experience. The structure allows for individual differentiation, something music classrooms rarely build in.

The deeper practice is getting future teachers to make music themselves, without the safety net of their instrument or their notation fluency. The vulnerability of being a beginner, of discovering that they can create something meaningful without the credentials they rely on, is the pedagogical point. Students find out things about themselves in the process. Teachers-in-training leave with a different relationship to the word "beginner."

Teachers who go through Langol's program come out more flexible. More willing to try things in their own classrooms. More capable of meeting students where they are rather than where the curriculum expects them to be.

The skills they develop, creative risk-taking, iterative thinking, empathy for the learning process, translate directly into their teaching practice. Not as theory. As lived experience.

Langol's view of what literacy means is shaped by her work outside Berklee too. She recently served on Massachusetts's media arts literacy standards committee, which framed audio production as part of a broader literacy that converges music, writing, art, and coding.

That convergence matters more in an era of AI-generated content. Having students make their own music, and understanding not only how to make music but how it makes them feel, is what AI can't replicate.